Day in the Life of an Idiot

I college, I worked in the school's library. Sometimes in cataloging, sometimes with Archives. Cataloging was busy but not seriously demanding physically - at the time I was there we still had a card catalog with actual drawers and actual cards. Archives was a different beast, requiring lifting, cleaning, and sometimes bugs, mud, and other horrors. One year, there were unusually heavy torrential rains, and water began leaking through an ancient window in one of the archive rooms. "Leaking" is an understatement, and doesn't begin to really describe the three-foot wide waterfall that was pouring over a bookcase and soaking every single volume in it. There were several weeks of recovery, much of which involved sticking paper towels in between pages and using hair dryers to try to dry paper. A lot of books had to be sent out for rebinding, but happily, every one was salvaged.