Six years ago this month, I got fired from the greatest teaching job I ever held for taking a stand. I was put on paid suspension then had a hearing before the School Board and when all was said and done, I was out of a job and mighty nearly out of a career. I worked odd jobs and lived on student loans for two years trying to support Budge in college and keep a roof over our heads. We lost pretty much everything but our home and one car. Bankruptcy and a rock bottom credit rating still haunt us today. Suffice it to say that this little grey duck isn’t worried one whit about the current financial meltdown . . . blood and turnips, you know.

The details of my stand aren’t important, but it basically involved me taking a tack counter to my supervisor’s. I thought I was right and in possession of the moral high ground. She thought I was wrong and in possession of an insubordinant attitude. The board agreed with her.

So, I tell you all that to ask you this: How far are you willing to go for what you believe in as a librarian and an educator? For example, we just celebrated Banned Books Week across the country. Had a lot of traffic on the listserv about displays and thoughts about intellectual freedom in general. People told war stories and gave their two cents about this challenge or that censorship attempt. Still, no one mentioned the unmentionable — what do you do when the challenge goes farther than you intended?

Let me cut to the chase. Are you willing to LOSE YOUR JOB because of a stance you take on intellectual freedom? Is the First Amendment so dear to your soul that you would risk unemployment for it? Think hard before you answer. This is the education field we’re talking about here. Say what you want, but for most of us, it’s not what you know, but who you know that gets you the interview that gets you the job. If that wasn’t true, the best qualified candidate would always get the position, not a nephew of a niece’s son’s best friend. You get fired, even if they don’t go after your certificate, it’s a long road back to another school. Principals talk just like we do. Administration has its listservs just like us librarians. They will know about you.

Do you want to be labeled a “boat rocker” for fighting the removal of Annie on my Mind from your library shelves? To get another librarian job after getting fired, you’ll have to have references. Where are they going to come from? “Um, Mr. X, I know you just had me fired and all, but is there any way you could write me a good recommendation for another job?” Oh yeah, and before you trot out that tired old horse about “They can’t blackball anyone . . . it’s illegal,” just remember this old fact . . . there’s the recommendation that the supervisor writes down in a nice neat paper trail and then there’s the recommendation the same supervisor gives over the phone when his buddy two districts over calls him about this librarian who worked at his school and now wants a job.

How exactly do you plan to hide that gap in your resume’? Mine looks funny. “English Teacher — 1994 to October 2002” followed by “Local Delivery Truck Driver — ”

Here’s how this thing looks. This is the dirty story; not the nice pretty version ALA wants to put out of their Office of Intellectual Freedom. You take your stand against censorship as you see it. You go to ALA for help because the board is threatening you for causing such a fuss. (For the two of you on the back row who didn’t know, small town Southern school boards DO NOT like a fuss) ALA sends legal help. Legal help your former friendly colleagues view as “outside agitators.” You and your ALA lawyer put up a good fight, but in the end, you lose and you get fired. You go home without a job and the ALA lawyer goes back home with his pay from ALA.

You lose your income. You lose your insurance. Single moms? I know a lot of you in education — how are you going to pay for that sixth grader’s constant ear infections? Lots of doctors won’t even talk to you on the phone if you don’t have insurance. Sure, you could do COBRA, but I think anyone who can afford COBRA premiums doesn’t really need to work anyway. Ever lost your house? I did when I was a kid and my dad left me and Mama. Foreclosure is ugly when it leaves the nightly news and camps out in your former living room. Explain to your children why they are losing their individual rooms and their nice back yard to go live with Nana and Papa and you all have to share your old bedroom with the bubble gum pink canopy bed. You know, the one you swore after college you’d never sleep in again?

Guys out there? Think you’ll have it any better? Sure, you could get a construction job easier than the ladies could . . . if any construction firms were hiring. Oh, and those jobs don’t have insurance either. You ready to live off your wife’s check? Ready to face the in-laws who probably don’t like you much anyway?

I don’t want to be pessimistic or alarmist. I value intellectual freedom — to a point. I also value a roof over my head and a decent car to drive. ALA may be great at providing advice, but they are lousy at paying your utility bills.

It’s easy to sit back and play love seat lawyer when it’s not your bacon in the fire. What happens though when your principal walks in tomorrow and hands you a book that “someone in the community” wants off your shelves? By all means, follow your procedures and policies. Have all the forms ready that you want.

But what if he says, “The school doesn’t need this publicity. Take the book off now.”

You going to fight? How hard? Sure, you may not get fired outright, but principals have ways of getting rid of “boat rockers.” You ready to see your budget slashed? Ready to move from a flex to a fixed schedule again? Ready to have new duties? There are a hundred ways for an administrator to make your life so miserable that you’ll leave. But where are you going to go? You willing to drive two hours one way burning $4.00 gallon gas to get to a district that needs you bad enough to overlook the baggage?

Say what you want to, but don’t say it can’t happen. If push comes to shove, how firm is your stand?

My late and extremely beloved Papa John was a “Pentecostal, full gospel, fire-baptised, Holiness” preacher. By way of explanation of what a “Pentecostal, full gospel, fire-baptised, Holiness” church is, let me just say this — if you know what one is, good. Email me and we’ll swap stories; I’ve got some great ones. If you don’t know what one is, no amount of explanation on my part is going to suffice for you to truly grasp the experience so I won’t sully the memory of the church or insult your intelligence by trying.

I spent my formative years under his ministry in a tee-tiny three room white church of knotty pine pews and funeral home fans. We had a congregation that ranged from six to one hundred, depending on if the crops were in, if the cotton mill was running overtime, or if various members of the family were up in arms against some of the others. Papa had taken over the pastorate after my great-uncle Pastor Robert had passed and if anyone of the few of you who know me personally can believe it, I was supposed to assume the pulpit after Papa John went to Glory. Sometimes things don’t turn out quite like we’ve always known they were going to.

In any event, as Papa’s heir-apparent, I often accompanied him on his visits to parishoners and, on very rare occasions, to meetings with groups of pastors of churches similar to ours. Later, when I broke my mother’s heart by excusing myself from the line of pastoral succession, I became a deacon in a church of a more liberal denomination. In such a capacity, I often accompanied my pastor and fellow deacons to pastoral councils across the state. Both with Papa John and my other former pastor, I heard the same comment from the mouths of many of these devout men of God.

“Brethren, my church is about two, maybe three funerals away from some real change (or growth, or new direction, or progress, etc).”

What they meant by that seemingly callous statement is that once they had the pleasure honor of performing the funeral for old batty gossip Sister Mattie Grace or crochety curmudgeon Brother Smith or some other long-reigning pillar(s) of the church, the way would finally be cleared to do what they (and often a great part of the congregation) had been wanting to do for a long time, be it change service times, Sunday School literature, or (Heaven forbid) music style (since it has been theologically proven that when Lucifer was cast out of Glory, he fell headlong into the choir loft and orchestra pit of most evangelical churches). These aforementioned sainted members had, by use of their demeanor, voting bloc, family ties, or other political influence, managed to keep the demonic specter of change and innovation out of the church. They were not titularly in charge, but their presence ensured the safety and often enshrinement of the status quo.

As in Heaven, so also it often is on earth . . . or at least in education.

It may be bad form, almost certainly politically incorrect, and definitely tactless to say this, but many of our schools today are just like those beleaguered pastors’ churches. They are two or three key retirements (or deaths — accidents do happen) away from some real changes in the school’s direction and climate.

Think now. How many of you are picturing someone or another right now? You all know the one. He or she sits in righteous enthronement dead center at every faculty meeting.

Pity the poor freshly appointed principal eager to offer her new educational vision for the school only to be met with a spoken (or at least subliminal) “I was here to see that come through by another name ‘x’ years ago. It failed then and it’ll fail now.” They are not just negative, they are toxic.

Pity the poor first year teacher who blunders into their lair at the back of the teachers’ lounge as they regale the “youngsters” with stories of the “good old days” when all students were angels, discipline was swift for those who were not, and everyone was a lot smarter.

Pity the poor freshly minted librarian who approaches on of these grizzled veterans with an offer of collaboration or display of some new technology. If the librarian survives at all, he or she is liable to be scarred for the rest of a career by the snarling reply of “I’ve got too much to do as it is,” or “what can you teach that I can’t.” Sure, the words might not be exactly so brutal (but I’ve seen them exactly so) but the sentiment is there. That kind of coldness can freeze a librarian into his library for the rest of the year.

It only takes one or two of this type of educator on a faculty to bring any hope of innovation to a crawl and to spread a generally negative miasma over everything in the building. The smaller the school the more pronounced the effect.

Sadly, not all of these human roadblocks to progress are old and grey. Some are young and in the wrong profession while some are middle-aged and burned out. They all share a common component though — they fear change right to the very quivering soul of their beings. Many of them were once as idealistic and gung ho as the colleagues and supervisors they now regularly shoot down. They had hopes and dreams of great lessons and lovely children. Lots of them probably had fond, loving memories of school days.

Now though, everything has changed and they are frustrated, insecure, and often bitter. Usually the realization that things have changed and they hate doing this comes too late. They have too many years in the system to quit or, worse, they don’t know what else they could do if they weren’t in education. As much as their attitudes frustrate me to no end, I can’t help but feel pity for them. I know fully the deep rooted misery that comes with dragging oneself out of bed every morning to go to a “job” rather than bouncing up to get to the latest day in a “career.” It’s just a bad situation all around.

So what can we do against such soul-numbing, embittered and negative obstructionist people? Not much, really. Try to go around them if you can. Work towards building strong relationships with more positive faculty members who want to innovate and grow. If enough of you can get together, you can begin to push back the negative cloud. Keep on reaching out to the crusty ones, though. Sure, you’ll fail with them more than succeed, but who knows? Daddy always said even a blind hog’ll find an acorn every now and then. Most importantly, keep your own positiveness about you. I know it’s hard to be Annie-full-of-Sunshine when it’s not really your personality, but keep trying.

Finally, if all else fails, get on your school’s version of the Special Occasions Committee and make sure every retirement or transfer at the end of the year is a HUGE blowout party. That way, maybe you’ll entice some of the dead wood to leave the forest earlier that they otherwise would have and, like Papa John and some of his friends always said, “The right funeral can solve a lot of problems,” so keep your black dress or suit cleaned and pressed. You never know . . .

We just finished MAP testing (NWEA anyone?) today and at supper tonight, Budge brought up a painful, but now side-splittingly hilarious story centering around my second year as a librarian and my first year as school MAP testing head person in charge. I thought I would regale you with this so the next time you feel you’ve done something foolish . . . well, let’s just say you probably don’t have a section in your district’s policy manual named after you.

I do. Here’s why, and this story is not only true, but is verifiable and documented.

Now I’m not crazy about MAP because it keeps my library tied up for four weeks out of the year, but the district says we have to give it and I like living in a house and driving a car, so I find it behooves me to do what the district says do. Anyway, it was two years ago and we’d just finished the math portion of MAP for the day. My buddy, David, stopped by my office and was mentioning how one of his honors seventh graders had just blown the top out of the math test. Then he asked the question that started the whole saga.

As an aside, I’d like for you to notice the first sign of danger. Here are two MEN discussing something. What is about to happen next would NEVER have happened if two women or even a woman and a man had been discussing the same thing we were discussing, the practical, intelligent side of the woman would have prevented the chaos that occured next. Think of boys and girls playing. Boys just grab the vine and swing on it. Girls ponder if the vine is attached to something stable, if the landing site is clear, etc. That’s why you don’t see NEARLY as many girls wearing casts in the lower grades as you do boys. Boys are afflicted by the SLAGIATT syndrome. That’s short for “Seemed like a good idea at the time.” Sadly, many boys never grow out of the SLAGIATT stage and so leave the world with the time-honored catchphrase “Hey, y’all, watch this.”

In any event, David, as I said, was remarking on the student’s exceptional score when he turned to me and said, “Is there any way you could put me in the MAP system so I could take the test? I’d like to see how I’d do.”  I said, “Sure thing,” and I proceeded to use my credentials as the MAP TAA person to create a seventh grade version of David complete with a schedule, birthday, and G/T placement.

As you are reading this, please understand . . . no planning was involved AT ALL. David just asked me a question and I was rather curious about the same thing and since I had the ability to do what he asked, I did it. After all, it wasn’t PACT (our state’s NCLB qualifier) or CTBS or Iowa or something like that. Sonia, our guidance counselor, didn’t lock the codes to MAP up in her office and threaten everyone within an inch of their lives if her door was disturbed. Shoot, we didn’t even have to sign anything before administering MAP . . . well, we didn’t until all this happened anyway. Remember that section in the District Operation Manual?

So, little seventh grade Davy sat down at a nearby terminal and proceeded to rack up a tremendous string of correct questions. At one point, I even noticed sweat on his brow and about halfway through the test he called for scratch paper. I sat at his side, thrilled at his obvious skill in math (though why anyone with such awesome skill in math would teach instead of making a mint in engineering or something is beyond me) and absorbing every detail of his classic struggle of man vs. machine. Along about question 38 though, Apollo stumbled and the screen went from second level differential equations down to addition. David got one wrong. In the end though, he scored twenty point higher than his genius student had and we both went back to our work with a warm and satisfied feeling of accomplishment and didn’t think another thing about our little experiment.

Then, a full four weeks later, I got a call on my office intercom / phone. Our principal wanted to see me in her office. No biggie. I told the secretary I’d be right there, saved what I was doing on the computer and sauntered on up to the front. I should have panicked when David came out of her office looking like Death on a stick with buttercream frosting. He looked at me and shook his head. I had no idea what was going on so like a little lamb to the slaughter, I went into the principal’s office.

Folks, it’s never good to get called to the principal’s office. Even if you’re 35 and have been teaching for years. Nothing good is going to come of that summons.

So I walked in and sat down in one of the nice burgundy faux leather chairs across from my boss-lady and that’s when I noticed the other chair in the room was occupied by Ms. C, our District Testing Director. She is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met with a bone dry wit and a perfectly no nonsense attitude. I smiled at her. She nodded. The gazelle still did not sense the cheetah crouching in the savannah grasses.

Ms. C asked, “Mr. Wham, did you put David into the MAP system so that he could take the MAP test?” Not thinking anything was seriously wrong enough to justify even an attempt at a lie, I confidently smiled and said, “Yes, ma’am, and he did great on the test.” I guess it should have been a bad sign when both women dropped their heads into their hands and rubbed their temples.

When my principal looked up, she asked me, “Why did you do that?” I replied, perfectly without malice since I STILL didn’t see anything bad up ahead, “Well, he wanted to take the test and it seemed perfectly logical to me for him to try.” Mrs. M, my principal, said, “Explain what happened, in detail.” So I launched into a thirty minute explanation of what David and I had done with the math MAP.Two heads back into four hands again. More temple rubbing.

It was then that Ms. C fixed me with a withering stare and educated me at length about the ramifications and repercussions of what I had done. Seems that I, in cahoots with David, had corrupted the district’s data gathering, thrown off several tracking initiatives, violated district policy, flushed a grant opportunity down the drain and apparently very nearly caused the polar ice caps to melt and the Apocolypse to begin. I sat and looked at her slack-jawed, which I’m very good at in the presence of powerful women, having been raised solely by my mama. It was only when she finished that the light dawned on me and I realized just what chin deep doo-doo David and I were in. The two women looked at each other and just shook their heads.

I found out later that Mrs. H, our AP had appeared at David’s door and told him Mrs. M wanted to see him in the office. He told me he’d said, “Okay, I’ll go up there during my planning next period.” That’s when Mrs. H said, “Um, no. She wants to see you NOW. I’m here to watch your class.”

In the end, what saved David and I was the utter innocence and lack of any trace of intentional wrongdoing in our explanations. Our stories of what had happened had been almost verbatim the same and it was blatantly obvious to both Mrs. M and Ms. C that we were being honest when we said we had no idea we couldn’t do what we did. We both ended up with mild letters of reprimand in our files and a strict admonishment to NEVER DO THIS AGAIN, which we’ve both taken to heart ever since. Then, of course, there’s the section in the District Manual that gets read at every MAP training session . . . The WHAM RULE . . . “No teacher is to enter anyone not a student into the system, nor is any teacher to take the MAP test under his / her or any other name.”

It’s funny now. It wasn’t then. The worst part though is David never got to take the test in the spring so we’ll never know if he made his growth goal.

Pointing fingers and calling out our profession isn’t something I do well or often, but sometimes I figure it needs doing whether anyone pays any attention or not.

That said, we do have a problem and it’s a pretty serious one at that.

By “we” I mean librarians, media specialists, information technologist, or whatever other dolled-up title someone wants to put on a name tag that doesn’t get one dime more in salary for the trouble.

By “problem”, I mean an image problem. Did you know that it seems the average teachers don’t like us very much? I’ve heard the term Book Nazi, Copyright Nazi, Video Nazi, and several other “blank” Nazis. My papa spent four years in Europe fighting the real Nazis. One of his brothers nearly died in a POW stalag.

I don’t like being associated with Nazi anything.

Maybe I’m crazy . . . no, scratch that, I’ve got papers to prove I’m crazy. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but if I don’t, I doubt anyone else will — the Nazi name callers may have a point. Boom, I said it.

It’s simple really. I see post after post on my state association’s listserv discussing the problems inherent in being a librarian or media specialist or whatever name makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside today. I see posts questioning every little detail of copyright. I mean, does anyone out there really think that RIAA is going to come SHUT YOUR SCHOOL DOWN because you demurred and let the band director get away with playing more than 30 seconds worth of popular music at a pep rally? Nope. It’s not going to happen, but I’ve seen more than one librarian (henceforth, that is the only term I’ll be using. Don’t like it? Oh well. It’s my bloggy and I’ll call myself what I want to ooooo) create a tandem axle dump truck load of ill-will from faculty members by drumming on the same old copyright drum over and over.

I had a teacher who moved to my school from a district farther up in the state, near the border of our neighboring state, seems the district had a 2 in the name. Anyway, this teacher came in to the library and needed a book RIGHT THEN for a lesson that had come to her in the car on the way to work. She looked like she was going to the firing squad when she asked me. I walked over to the shelf, pulled the book down and handed it to her, and told her good luck on her lesson. She looked stunned and said, “You mean I don’t have to check this out?” I told her, “No, just drop it in the slot at the end of the day.”

Her planning period was last period and she came into my office where I was working on a book order and sat down. She told me that she’d never been able to grab a book at her old school. She said EVERYTHING that went out the door had to be scanned and the librarian or her aide would come around at the end of the day to pick up all the equipment that had been loaned out but not returned before 3:15. As she went on, she talked about how it took an act of God to get a DVD player from the library and it finally got so bad that most teachers quit bothering with it and just bought a cheap DVD player and hooked up to the TV on the wall. It wasn’t the best picture quality, but it beat having to face the “library lady.”

I’ve had kids come to me from other schools, some in my district and some not, who would stand in nearly open mouthed disbelief when I told them they could check out three books at a time. They’d never heard of such. My wife is a teacher in elementary school and she wrote a check to her librarian for $13.75 so one of her students could check out a book again because the little lad had lost a book the previous year and the librarian refused to let him even look at books in the library until the debt was paid.

I’m not making this crap up, folks.

I listen at conferences at the way some librarians talk about students and teachers and administrators. If some of the conversations I overhear are to be believed, we know everything and if librarians could just take over the school and run it, test scores would skyrocket, discipline would improve to Utopian standards, and the Golden Age of Education would be ushered in. Right.

We want “collaboration” but if a teacher needs something that doesn’t fall under our beloved Policy and Procedures for the Media Center Program Manual, we’ll, he or she is just S.O.L in too many of our schools. I’ve got a news flash for all the self-righteous librarians out there who think that Information Power is Scripture and Keith Curry Lance is right under the Trinity in importance: “GET OVER YOURSELVES”. If your teachers can’t stand to be around you because you are one big rule after another, if they basically refuse to talk to you any more than absolutely necessary because you always look put out when they ask you for something . . . well, they aren’t going to collaborate with you. In fact, they are going to stay as far away from you and the library as possible.

If kids see the library as a place to get yelled at, they won’t come in. If they see computers they can’t touch unless they are doing something “academic” with their class, they won’t come in. Guess what? The Sun will still come up tomorrow if a child surfs the Internet on one of your precious library computers and doesn’t complete some sacred “project” in “Web 2.0”

As the preacher said, I’m winding down now, but we gripe and wring our hands because of funds being cut from libraries. Well, who makes those decisions? Politicians who in all likelihood had one or more experiences like Dr. Scott McCleod write about in an entry of his blog Dangerously Irrelevant.

If too many politicians recall traumatic experiences from the libraries of their past — regardless of how long ago and currently outmoded that past may be — they aren’t going to be swayed by our pleas, presentations, and spreadsheets. Furthermore, are we inculcating those same traumatic experiences into a new generation of future politicians and in the process, making things hard for our future colleagues?

So, take a look at your rules, your personality, and your general approach to the business of being a librarian. As yourself, does it have to be this way? We talk about stress, but how much of our stress is self-inflicted? Finally, I’ve heard lots of librarians pitch a fit over the librarian action figure with sensible shoes, spectacles, and a bun, but I say if the stereotype fits . . .

Our school was broken into TWICE this passed weekend.

Folks, as educators, we often don’t realize how much our schools are truly like our second homes until something like this happens. When I checked my email and saw our principal’s message that we’d be burglarized, I immediately started worrying about the library. I got there early this morning and two of my favorite teachers met me before I got in the door good. See, I have a bit of a reputation as being, shall we say, wrapped tighter than a banjo string most of the time. The two ladies told me to take a deep breath and go on in, but not to take my shoes off. (See, grocery store feet! It’s the best)

Well, I have to be honest and say it wasn’t as bad as I’d set myself up for. The copier / coffee / lounge / workroom was an absolute wreck and it was the worst spot that I was responsible for. The brand new, huge Pepsi machine was pushed over, broken and defeated lying on the floor. Glass from the machine front covered the floor, the counter, the laminator, and just about every other flat surface. The poor vendor lay there wounded looking for all the world like a forlorn, dead, and putrefying whale carcass on a forgotten beach. Strangely enough, for all their exertions, the felons never managed to breach the money box of the machine. I’m sure the old girl felt a measure of pride that even though she was broken, bloodied, and battered, she had held on to her entrusted charge . . . or change as the case may be.

The snack machine wasn’t so lucky. The front was smashed out, adding to the glass piled around. This poor soldier’s fortress had been breached and his change box lay bent and twisted on the floor, empty. Strangely, all the malefactors seemed to be chocolate freaks. No snacks were taken from the machine if they did not have chocolate in them. Filthy buggers must have had a sweet tooth.

One area of small levity in the midst of the mayhem lay in the disposition of the laminator. Our venerable but hale old 25″ laminator had run out of film almost at the end of the day the preceding Friday. Since I had snatched one too many blisters on my fingers and hands trying to thread the grand old lady while her heat was up, I’ve since made it my practice to let the heat shoes cool completely before rethreading. Well, I’d taken the rolls off and set them to the side in anticipation of rethreading the machine this morning first thing. Apparently, the investigating officers mistook my preparations for vandalism because the entire machine was COATED with fingerprint graphite. The old cardboard tubes were black as those delinquents’ hearts. It took some elbow grease, but I’m happy to say my lovely lady is back running smoothly . . . still streaking some sheets with graphite, but running smoothly.

I went to my office and thought everything was fine there until I scratched the blood out of my hand on my door handle. The cretins had used a hammer to strike the door handle at an angle so it broke the lock pins. I was certain a scene of devastation awaited me inside.

Well, it didn’t. What did great me was a floor full of Cheetos crumbs. I keep a box of crackers and chips and other wonderfully healthy snacks on the bottom shelf of one of my bookshelves in case I forget my lunch. The bastards had eaten all my Cheetos! ALL FOUR BAGS! I was indignant. I mean a Pepsi machine is one thing, but some things ought to be sacred in the world and a man’s Cheetos stash happens to be high on that list.

My office was in relatively good order other than the crumbs all over the floor. They had gone through my desk and taken four of my brand new permanent markers . . . the good kind from the multicolored pack. The bastards took my PURPLE SCRIPTO!! These boys had no shame. Of course, I was thankful for two things: 1) that I’d left my desk unlocked so they didn’t feel the need to tear my desk apart like the did some others and 2) that I didn’t have any money in the office. I have to confess that a cold chill snaked down my spine when I thought about the fact that I start my fall book fair this coming Thursday and had the break-in occured next Saturday, they little heathens could have made off with a lot more than my Cheetos . . . as if that wasn’t enough.

Of course I had to take a quick inventory and I discovered that everything was where it was supposed to be with just a few exceptions. They had taken my tool bag with all my tools, including the diagnostic meters I use to work on network cables, and they had taken my two 4GB thumb drives off my desk. The bastards took MY THUMB DRIVES. There was a $3000 Sony HD video camera sitting on the desk NEXT to the thumb drives and the thumb drives were sitting atop a BRAND NEW STATE OF THE ART LAPTOP. They passed up an EASY $5K to take my thumb drives, my bag of tools, and, lest we forget, my whole bloody stash of Cheetos.

In another somewhat lighthearted moment, the goobers had actually taken the time to stop by our A/V room and pull up the PowerPoint presentation that runs our announcements and a clock on the building distribution system. They had actually typed messages — rather foul messages at that — on the announcements and started up the slide show to run through the building. So they were heathens and miscreants, but they were computer literate heathens and miscreants.

The rest of the building was in similar trim. Glass shattered, desks riffled, food taken and eaten, but nothing major missing. It was almost as if they were more intent on vandalism and general mischief than really stealing stuff. Looking back, I can’t help but think we as a school were lucky and I as a librarian was unbelievably blessed and lucky that my area wasn’t in much worse shape.

Had those boys been so inclined, it would have been the work of a slight few minutes at most to take the same hammer they used on the Pepsi machine and smash every one of the 54 computer monitors in the library and lab. They could have pulled every book off the shelf and left them in heaps on the floor. All of the equipment I’m responsible for is still intact and in the building. Truthfully, I can’t say why. Were I their age and angry as they obviously were, I can’t see not taking small and expensive things and leaving a little more glass on the floor.

So the rest of the day was eerie. I didn’t feel quite right in my office. I told Sonia, our most excellent guidance counselor about it and she said it was because we’d been violated. Someone strange had run their hands through our stuff without our permission and now everything was tainted in some way. It’s a sickening feeling and one I hope no one reading this ever has to endure.

In closing, I found out towards the end of the day that the local constabulary had four suspects in custody.  I called our SRO and told him to look for one with orange fingers; if he found one, please bring him to me.

I want to talk to him concerning a certain purple marker.

My beloved Budge and I were on the way to supper tonight and we passed Mary walking down the side of the road. All of you have seen Mary or one of her sisters or cousins or brothers. Mary is probably not her real name, but the locals at the stores all call her Mary . . . Meth-head Mary.

Mary is anorexically thin. She has bleach blond hair that is inevitably tousled, but surprisingly clean most of the time. As a matter of fact, Mary seldom looks disgustingly dirty or greasy as some of her ilk manage to do. She wears shorts and t-shirts or halter-tops nine months out of the year. It has to be ungodly cold . . . down to around forty here in the South . . . to force Mary into long pants. In the three years since she showed up, I’ve never once seen it cold or wet enough for her to wear shoes or long sleeves.

Lest you think I am being stereotypical or “judging a book by its cover,” please let me assure you I’m not. I’ve been around enough drug addicts . . . and even had some hard spells myself, I’m ashamed to say . . . to know the look. On the two occasions I’ve managed to start a conversation with her, she couldn’t focus her eyes. She cannot stand still. If she’s not moving, she’s moving. Nervous energy and the hunger for the next fix eats her constantly. However, it’s the gait that gives the gig away completely. None of her four limbs are ever in the same plane at the same time. She looks like the broken marionette of a sadistic puppeteer as she walks. Always walking. I’ve seen her at spots from a hundred yards to ten miles from our neighborhood.

So what in the name of Dr. S. R. Ranganathan is Mary the Meth-head doing in a blog ostensibly about libraries? Specifically school libraries.

How about EVERYTHING?

See, I’m willing to bet a tandem axle dumptruck load of Mickey Mantle #511 1952 Topps rookie cards that Mary never put down on an interest survey back in middle school “I want to be a meth head when I grow up.” I’m willing to double that truckload of Americana to cover my bet that she never wrote in “prostitute” or “small time thief” or even “wanderer” when she filled out one of those career assessments we are so proud of in our schools today.

Students don’t get up in the morning and say, “Gee, I think I’ll become a crack addict today.”

It sneaks up on them. It comes in the form of escapism or pain killer or thrill ride. Then, it’s too late or even if it’s not too late, sometimes they don’t know where to turn to. We can help stop it.

I’m not talking about a well stocked 362.29 section on our shelves either, but that helps. No, I’m talking about noticing who’s in your library. The “weird” loner girl who always comes in at lunch and doodles in the one of the study carrels? Need a way to get away for awhile, Mary. The prom queen type who is super popular but sometimes has rank breath because of the vomiting from her bulimia? Hey, Mary, beauty has a price. Mary. The star volleyball player who gets kidded too often because at her age being an athlete or a tomboy “probably” means she’s “one of those”? Have to improve your performance any way you can, Mary. The saludatorian who is oh-so-close to getting that number one spot and all the money in scholarships that go with it? Have to stay up late to study, Mary.

It can easily be boys as well, but I have Mary, not Mike, in my neighborhood so that’s what I’m writing about and it’s my blog.

Look around your library. Look around your halls. Quit Twittering long enough to eat your sandwich out in the stacks with a kid or two who will nearly faint that an adult would take an interest in them but will never admit it because it’d be tres uncool. Don’t worry so much about Web 2.0 that you ignore Student ’08. They are people who need our attention as much as they need our knowledge. Plus, once they know you’ll listen to them, they’ll be a lot more likely to listen to you.

Look at them; think about Mary.

When I was little, I remember Mama always talking about remembering exactly where she was when she heard that President Kennedy had be shot. She was in gym class for the last period of the day and their principal came over the intercom to announce the news. She said everyone went into a daze.

I remember Granny Wham talking about coming home from church on Sunday, December 7th, 1941 and listening to the radio announcements that were just coming in from the west coast about the attack on Pearl Harbor that launched us into World War II.

I know that I’m not unique with these experiences. I just thought that my “where were you” tragedy had already come and gone when I was a freshman in high school. It was January 28, 1986 and some of us had skipped lunch to watch the Space Shuttle Challenger take a teacher named Christa McAuliffe into space. I still can see the Y-shaped smoke trail on the TV and hear Dr. King, our honors English teacher, gasping, “Oh my God!”

I figured that was my moment I’d tell my children about right up to the minute Ms. Pat Harvey knocked on my classroom door a little before 10AM on September 11, 2001. She told me two planes had just flown into the World Trade Center. Of course, at that early stage lots of us thought it was some kind of horrible aviation accident. Then the reports started coming in of fighter jets being scrambled and every plane in America except military aircraft and Air Force One being grounded.

Our principal at the time was a former military man and he liked to keep news like this downplayed as much as possible to avoid panic and chaos so we taught on and kept as quiet as we could. Then the intercom started going off every thirty seconds as another parent picked his child up. By noon, the school was a ghost town. Over three-fourths of our students had been released early. Attendance was spotty the rest of the week and all our district schools rescheduled their Friday night football games. I remember going home and being glued to CNN from 3:30 PM to after 10 PM that night. Sleep was a long time coming.

Remember how it was then? Seven years ago today? Congress sang “God Bless America” on the steps of the Capitol Building, a Capitol Building that was still standing intact because of the heroics of a group of terrified men and women aboard United Flight 93 . . . a group of men and women now strewn all across the bottom of an abandoned, non-reclaimed coal strip mine.

Flags started sprouting on cars. People of all political leanings and stripes were calling for blood. Remember all those JPEG files that started circulating around the ‘Net? There was one of Liberty Enlightening the World holding a baby in one arm and a Dirty Harry styled handgun in the opposite hand. I liked the one with the eagle sitting with his legs crossed sharpening his talons. Country music singers wrote songs; some were contemplative and touching; some were rabble rousing. Other celebrities organized benefits and rallys to help support families of the thousands of victims. Pat Tillman left the Arizona Cardinals and a pile of money to join the thousands of young men and women who went to their local recruiters and joined up to fight the threat of terrorism. What came to be called The War on Terror was on.

So it’s seven years later. I’m in a different school and the war is still going on. It’s a much different war now because it became more about politics and less about “justice.” Osama Bin-Laden is still out there somewhere. The towers are still down and lots of monuments have been built to honor the dead.

I don’t usually take sides and I don’t want to be political, but we can’t win this war . . . ever. To win a war like the War on Terror, we would have to abandon the principles and tenets that make us America. Oh, make no mistake, we could win the war. We could easily kill Bin-Laden, put his head on a spike, and display it atop the Brooklyn Bridge. But we wouldn’t be America anymore. What makes us great is what makes us hated and what some think makes us weak. We are America and we try to play by the rules.

We try not to torture to gain information. We try not to destroy whole villages and we try not to kill innocent men, women, and children even when they harbor those we have branded as our enemies. Had an attack like 9/11/01 been perpetrated on a country ruled like ancient Rome or Sparta that possessed modern weapons, Bin-Laden would be dead now. “Justice” would have been served. And most of what we call Pakistan, Afghanistan, and several other countries would be smoldering wastelands under an iron fist. Fields sown with salt, or worse.

But we are America. We are not weak. We are not perfect, we delight in pointing out our own faults to each other, but we are not weak. We may not stand forever as a nation . . . no nation has ever lasted forever, but we will always be remembered. We consistently strive to do the best we can as a country and many time in the process, we disagree with each other and we fuss and fight and carry on like a bunch of sore tailed cats.

But we are America. We are envied and hated . . . sometimes by our own citizens, but we are America so they have that freedom and right. We could win the War on Terror by using the full spectrum of devastating means at our disposal, but in doing so, we would lose ourselves, prove our enemies correct in their assessment of us, and in the end, see our victory become our downfall.

So remember the fallen. Remember the heroes. Remember to vote your heart or your head or both come November but most of all remember this . . . regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, regardless of who occupies the seats of Congress, and regardless of who sits in a cave making movies calling us the Great Satan, the great and noble experiment in democracy begun over 200 years ago continues.

We are still America; we are still standing; we are still free.

Gaylord Brothers does not sell double bottoms to their metal shelving separately. That particular fact becomes important later.

For the present, suffice it to say I had an interesting summer. For the first five weeks of the break, I fulfilled the “in sickness” portion of my marriage vows tending the needs of my beloved wife who had Achilles tendon reconstruction the day after school let out for summer. I cleaned house, cooked, grocery shopped, and did anything else she pointed to from her invalid’s bed in the recliner.

After seeing Budge safely down recovery road, I journeyed down to my school to check out the damage. Our district closed our sixth grade center at the end of last school year. The stated cause was insurmountable maintenance issues but in actuality, such things are not discussed with those of my pay grade. All I needed to know in the matter was I would have nine more teachers to love and spoil as well as over a hundred more students.

I was so naive.

My trusted assistant and general right hand Chris had already been by the school. He knew I had written grant on top of grant to update the collection and, if I must say, three years of hard work and weeding had paid off in a tight, up to date (2003 on Follett’s Titlewave) and mighty goodlooking collection. He told me to double my “happy pill” dosage for a few days before coming down . . . just to be safe. I was filled with trepidation as I entered the library, and I was not disappointed.

In the center of the library floor, from wall to wall to wall to wall, was a solid cube of cardboard Walmart layaway boxes in various states of disrepair stacked three high. Some had labels like “Fiction A-Be.” Some didn’t. I looked the situation over, assessed it carefully, then sat down in the floor and wept like a baby.

After voicing my misery, I asked Chris to meet me the next morning and at eight o’clock A.M., fortified with Diet Pepsi and sausage biscuits, he and I set to the task of pouring the proverbial ten gallons of liquid into the proverbial five gallon bucket.

It’s germane to note our library was originally an auditorium with floor to ceiling southward facing windows. To save money, our district administration had decreed in May no air conditioning would be turned on during the summer  . . . 120 degrees and 90+% relative humidity. Dante’s Sixth Circle of Hell.

We finished half the first stack and realized that, as much as we loved the airy feeling of using just the middle three shelves, we weren’t going to have enough room. So we stripped the shelves and started over using four shelves. We finished the entire first stack and realized we still wouldn’t room. So we stripped the shelves again and began using all five shelves and turning our light airy stacks into ponderous enclosing walls.

We put the hardcovers on the shelves we had started with, but the paperbacks, picture books, and Spanish language sections remained. Journeying to the former sixth grade center, we found an older set of wooden shelves to house our Spanish books and picture books. We’ll eventually paint the shelves to match the half-wall they abut so they will look more like a natural outgrowth of the wall — a tumor-like, bulbous growth — but an outgrowth nonetheless.

All that remained was the paperbacks. That’s when I had an epiphany. We had two empty single shelves in the back room. They were meant to be wall-mounted, but, I thought, could easily be converted to double-sided freestanding stacks. They were essentially the same design, we just needed a double bottom in place of the supplied single bottom so we could put shelves on both sides. Problem solved. Full of renewed confidence, I called Gaylord Brothers only to be told that they did not sell double bottoms separately from the shelving units. Our simple, elegant solution was shot full of more holes than the Bonnie and Clyde death car.

Now I was no longer sad. I was no longer aggravated. I was hot and miserable, with rivulets of sweat pouring out of every pore to trickle down and pool in unmentionable places. I would have my double bottom come Hell or high water.

I had opposable thumbs and power tools.

I ripped the two bottoms from the single units, grabbed the five pound engineers’ hammer we keep in the library, and began bending metal with a cacophonic combination of blows and curses. Then, I got my drill and found a pack of self-tapping sheet metal screws.

I LOVE self-tapping sheet metal screws.

An hour, one bruised thumb, and lots of loud noises later, I had the double bottom Gaylord Brothers won’t sell. Our paperback section is handsomely displayed on our new, if somewhat Frankensteinian, shelves and the tic I developed on first seeing the mountain o’ books has all but subsided, proving once again very few problems cannot be solved in some way by the judicious application of a big enough hammer and self tapping sheet metal screws.

I have this great Excel spreadsheet on my computer at work. It has all the equipment numbers and IP addresses of every piece of equipment in the school along with the teacher(s) assigned to the stuff, room numbers, copier codes, phone extensions. You know the file. It’s my one-stop lifeline for tech support and troubleshooting. It’s also taken me three years to build and modify. This thing is pretty big and it’s really my baby.

I deleted it today by accident.

Yep. I was cleaning off my Desktop and I just threw the deleting lasso around a bevy of spreadsheets I’d been using to make barcodes for different classes during orientation and dumped them into the Recycle Bin. Then, like the good anal retentive freak of nature that I am, I emptied the Bin. It was only then that I realized that “Staff Database v08-09” had been in the middle of that group of files now smoldering on the cyber-incinerator. Gone. Like a freight train. Gone. Like a ’59 Cadillac.

I panicked.

I swung into action and popped open the two undelete and file recovery programs I keep on a thumb drive for just such an occasion. Both files turned up the same result — they brought the file back, but as a text.tmp file that would not respond to any tool I tried to use on it. Excel would open it into an unreadable jumble of Cyrillic letters and alien characters. Wordpad just produced a bunch of boxes. I Googled and looked for fixes and tried everything I found suggested. I even tried a System Restore. All of my efforts proved to be as futile as an egg-pan under a rooster.

I became physically ill.

As bile rose in my throat and threatened to spew all over my nice LCD monitor, I felt hot tears pooling up behind my eyes. I didn’t know if I should cry or cuss; in the end, I couldn’t decide so I did both.

Now I know everyone is thinking, “What’s the big deal? Just go from your backup. You DO have a backup, don’t you?” Well . . . funny how that goes. I cannot count the times since becoming a librarian and IT support person that I’ve held the hand of a student or felt the tears soaking into my shoulder from a colleague who had just lost HOURS of work to a power surge or corrupted floppy disc. I can even recall from a warm and sunny spring morning during my college days the sight of a beautiful Tri-Delta coed literally picking one of the old style “all in one” Macs up and hurling it out the window of the computer lab . . . the third story computer lab . . . as the lab monitor looked on in abject horror. Seems the machine had eaten all the editing and additions to the term paper she’d worked on for three hours the night before, but that wasn’t what had made her go Office Space on the computer. No, apparently, she’d sat down and started back to work rebuilding the paper when some sort of error message popped up after she did spell-check and when she cleared the message, her paper, five weeks of work, and half her grade in that particular class were gone-gone bye-bye. She left her dorm room address and number with the lab monitor and told him to put it on her next tuition bill. The last I saw of her, she was walking unsteadily across the green commons field towards the beckoning bars of downtown.

But I digress.

Actually, in point of fact, I did not have a backup. I don’t know why. I’m the one who tells everyone else to back up his or her work. I’m the one who backs up all the computers in the school . . . except mine. It’s the IT world equivalent of a plumber who has a runny toilet and leaking pipes. No backup. File is now gone.

I cried some more.

Then, I remembered throw my haze of tears that I’d accidentally sent that entire file out to the faculty last week when I’d only meant to send part of it. I went to our secretary’s computer and asked if she had that email. I knew that even though I’d retracted and deleted the email almost immediately, she had her email client set to automatically open anything from me, thus saving the attachment.

The file was still on her computer!

I sent it back to myself.

I made sixteen copies including two on the server, one on CD, one on every network drive in the school, and one on both of my thumb drives.

I’m so happy now.

Please backup your files.