It has all the worst aspects of retail, and all the worst aspects of a dead-end government department. It's like working for Wal-Mart, if Wal-Mart was a directorate of a large bureaucratic city.

Tied with that is a permanent sense of impending obsolescence. You hear constant exhortations to 'do more with less,' to be 'resilient,' to 'put customers first,' to be selfless in adapting to new demands, in the face of budget cuts, austerity, lying managers, broken equipment, and brutish customers.

To top it off, it's a female-dominated field, so expect lots of scheming, lying, mobbing, homophobia and able-ism - not to mention a rigid standard of properly feminine behaviour. I firmly believe you can only progress by becoming as great a liar as the bosses.

And when you complain, it's, "Oh, but libraries are such a sweet old-fashioned gentle occupation, surely you don't need trauma counselling, how can you?" Meanwhile your bosses brush robberies, attempted murders, and rapes under the carpet...

There's a slow backlash growing, people finally talking about how deeply harmful things like 'vocational awe,' workplace mobbing and the austerity mentality actually are.

Like someone wrote in a library blog, martyrdom is not a career.