ALA store, Dressing yourself with the

Try to fight the urge to wear clothes from the American Library Association's online store. If you worry that you might go unnoticed as a librarian while outside the library, never fear! Your inability to make eye contact, offer a firm handshake, and carry on a conversation without mentioning how threatened you are by Google should clue people in.

Celebrity READ posters, Decorating with

A cheaply framed celebrity READ poster has no place in your home, so get rid of it.

References, Giving bad people good

Occasionally you will be called upon to provide a reference for a bad library employee or coworker. Giving a truthful response and illuminating the candidate's shortcomings means that you will continue working with this person indefinitely. No one will every hire them if they know the truth. Fudging a little and making the person sound better than they actually are allows you to pass the loser off to someone else. Always consider your own happiness and opt for the latter strategy.

And on a related note: never trust a reference from a current employer.

Business cards, Practical uses for

Librarians rarely have occasion to use professional business cards. Once you've given one of your cards to each member of your family and to your friends, the initial "Hey, I just got new business cards!" excitement may begin to fade. Now you find yourself with a dusty box tucked away in the bottom drawer of your desk.

Below, you will find a list of practical uses for librarians who find themselves trying to unload some business cards:

• making short grocery lists on the back
  
• entering "free entree" drawings at your favorite fast food joint
• makeshift bookmarks
• luggage tags
  

Graffiti, Being creative with restroom

Racist and homophobic epithets are so passé when it comes to restroom stall graffiti. Declarations about the size of one's own sexual organs are also overused and, frankly, often untrue. Greek letters representing fraternities are tired. And despite the convincing note, you may determine after repeated calls that this Mandy person may NOT want "to have a good time" after all.

So what's a restroom author to do?

Spice things up a bit with a creative use of space, language, and drawings. A recent example: Near the top of the stall door, in small cursive, far above the cluster of notes written in arm's reach of the toilet, was a note that read: My arms are longer than yours.

Technologies, Co-opting new

Keep up to date with new technologies that you can co-opt for library use. So what if no one will ever listen to the pod casts of your bibliographic instruction lectures, subscribe to the RSS feeds from your library's blog, send your reference librarian instant messages, or view your library's profile on facebook.com? At least you did your part to make all these cool technologies a little bit lamer.