All that

All That You Can't Leave Behind / U2









Sometimes, it’s not the job that makes an impression or the people, but the place. It was one of those interviews that I knew, as soon as I had entered the building; I was not going to get the job. I didn’t fit in the place. A few hours later when I arrived home, I couldn’t remember what was talked about, who had interviewed me or how it went, but years later and I still remember the place.



It was a position in a small college library, located in the heart of a small city. I arrived, parking in the public parking and making my way up the marble steps expecting to enter something collegiate. However, stepping inside the building was like stepping back in time to my grade school library.


Like many poor academic institutions, the space was old, and badly in need of remolding. The indoor /outdoor, blue/green carpeting was thread bare. The social space, dotted with areas for patrons to sit, wait, and read had no two chairs or tables that matched. The metal stacks were scratched, as if they had once served in a zoo, not a college library. But the unique and striking aspect of the room was that all surfaces available for paint had been painted in differing primary colors. It was as if the library truck and the circus truck had collided and landed there.


I entered and was asked to wait. I sat on a red chair, next to a yellow table and watched students ask for assistance at a green information desk. The colors so loud, they over shadowed the various ‘cute’ posters that spotted the walls and book case ends.


“Hang in there!” A cat hanging by nails on the tree limb announced to me and I thought, ‘am I the only one to think this is strange?’


I remember sitting for a very, very long time. Long enough for me to count the colors in the room and consider just walking away, before some non descript person invited me in to the back. The back areas were not as colorful as the front, but just as makeshift. Drab, institutional grey desks, chairs, file cabinets and people.


The interview process itself took far less time than I had sat in the main library, watching its comings and goings and counting colors. Perhaps this is why I remember the place so and so little about the conversation. What I do recall of the spoken word, was during the final five minutes of my interview as I was given the obligatory tour. I remember commenting about ‘how colorful’ the main, public part of the library was, as I tried to be polite and make conversation. It was met with a puzzled look, just before I was thanked for coming in and summarily dismissed.