No it is not just an impression. People who have work want you dead. Gotta reduce the surplus population as it will make them more valuable.

We are not asking any of the boomers to step down before they are ready. However, you can stop making such a big point of how you all have so much experience and the lazy dumb asses like us don’t (all because we can’t get hired anywhere). Your stupid degree does not exactly make you Einstein. Everything learned in library school could have been learned in two weeks on the job. Insistence on experience is a bunch of nonsense. However, we were all told that the MLS is sort of like a “union card” i.e. something you must have to get a job.

Therefore, what people hate about all of you Boomers is your insistence that you are so much better than everyone because you just happened to be born at the right time.

I love library work. I love patrons, reading, making information accessible, and treating all information-seekers fairly. I give my all in my library assistant position, but hate that it seems I won’t be able to recover the $35,000 I spent to earn the MLS because I loved library work so much. I’m not even getting interviews, except for one telephone interview. I’m competing against graduates of 2008, 2009, and 2010, and also against those who didn’t leave their jobs in 2009 for job security concerns but now feel confident enough to seek a better position.

From those boomers who do bother to acknowledge that they received the application materials you spent the time to craft, you hear that they were swamped with applications.

I hate the current climate of nepotism and privilege that is sneaking into the library job hiring world. I see a lot of self-aggrandizement in this competitive climate, including among the established boomers making 80,000+ a year, and not much furthering of the library profession itself. If boomers were concerned about building the library world instead of their own salaries, they’d be mentoring more, and pushing for more MLS positions, and outsourcing less.

I’ve taken on as many professional duties as my library will allow for a library assistant. I’ve volunteered, but don’t have time to volunteer any more. My family and my son needs me to be home sometimes, and I work full-time and it’s a full-time job to craft each cover letter, resume, and–horrors–the city or academic applications, each of which has some unique requirement. When I read professional salaried librarians gripe about how they might have received an application with a typo, or one in which the applicant accidentally left in the name of a different institution from a rewritten cover letter, I think about the nights I’ve stayed up past 2 a.m. to try to meet an application deadline after working all day, making dinner, doing homework with my son, and getting him to bed. I care about every job I apply for. I look at the area, at the library’s website; I read the mission statement, I think about what it would be like to work there, in the position that’s advertised and in the climate that’s represented by the website. Because I had a typo, or made some glaring error like leaving in a different library’s name in the closing, doesn’t mean I just sent you a form letter or that I didn’t care about your library and the opening there.

If the boomers aren’t going to retire, they should at least try to mentor, and try putting themselves in the newer graduates’ shoes instead of gloating about how much they make and how they’re gonna hang on until their teeth fall out. Good for you. I’m sure your library and patrons will benefit tremendously. In the meantime, the ones who take over after you finally do retire will be less prepared, because you held on to all the responsibility and micromanaging control you possibly could with your every last ounce of strength.