I applied for a Power Card at PowerBooks last Saturday and I was made to fill up a form. The Power Card would entitle me to points, rebates, and discounts. There was an entry for Occupation on the form so I wrote "Librarian". The Customer Service Assistant encoded my data into their database and I was pleasantly surprised when she informed me that "Librarian" was not in their list of occupation in the drop down menu. She then told me that she'll choose the "Not Given" option as if I had any other choice .
If I were going to be technical about it, I would have refused the "Not Given" option because I specified my occupation. It's all a matter of terminology, really, and the term "Others" would have been more appropriate. It's the systems analyst fault, if you ask me. I then kidded her why of all occupations did they forget "Librarians"? Of course she didn't give me any answer but I knew she got embarassed by it.
Anyway, there could be a lot of reasons why "Librarian" was not on the list but I'd like a few good guesses. One, librarians work around books day in and day out and therefore would shun bookstores as it reminds them of work. Two, librarians can borrow all the books in their library, even borrow from other libraries through ILL which leads to the next reason. Librarians purchase books for their libraries so they don't have to buy for their own personal reading pleasure. Fourth, librarians are poorly paid they can't afford to buy books for their personal collection. Fifth, the systems designer simply forgot to put "Librarian" in the drop down list because the bookstore and the library have nothing in common plus the fact that he/she doesn't know that Librarianship is a profession. Of course I'm just being cynical but sometimes there's some truth in cynicism.
BTW, there really is no librarian working at the Powerbooks branch I frequent dispelling the wrong assumption Adrian Cristobal made in the now infamous column of his, the "105 Useless Librarians".
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