Some hints for aspiring choir librarians (and choir members)

  1. If you provide 22 copies of music for 17 choir members, you will be three copies short.
  2. Publishers will be slow, the copier will break down, and the conductor will forget to tell you about a programme change.
  3. Realise that you live on a different plane of existence from the other choir members. They are actually only able to see you if there is something wrong with their music.
  4. If they are allowed to take the music home, several choir members will accidentally leave their copies “on the piano”. Some appear to own six or more pianos.
  5. There is no good way to file Christmas carols.
  6. As soon as you have finished putting everything away, and not a moment earlier, a complete set of the service music will appear on the windowsill in the choir room.
  7. Upon entering the church, choir members lose the ability to put numbered sheets in the correct order (this appears to be related to their loss of the ability to count, a sad fact mostly appreciated by conductors).
  8. Large amounts of sheet music warp space and time in such a manner that filing something in a certain place does not actually guarantee one will find it there later. Where “later” is any amount of time larger than thirty seconds.
  9. If there are multiple possible ways of filing a piece, all roughly equally logical, it will be filed according to the rule/name you are not thinking of.

There is actually no such thing as hell. It just happens that heaven has a lot of low-ceilinged, cobwebbed little attics and crypts in which reside the Choir Celestial’s libraries, cared for by the heavenly guild of choir librarians. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and also papercuts. Be good to your librarian or you might end up as one. For eternity.

4 thoughts on “Some hints for aspiring choir librarians (and choir members)”

  1. Re: 8: I find it odd that Terry Pratchett never realized the fatal consequences to filing systems of the effects that libraries have on space-time. I am impressed by your further development of mister Pratchett’s ground-breaking publications on this subject. Of course, mister Pratchett is purely a man devoted to the theory of L-space, while you are a woman devoted to experimentation. Although I could imagine said experimentation might very well involve choristers in small cages.

  2. I think he did, implicitly – note the effect prolonged exposure to L-space, of the sort only librarians suffer, has on a, er, creature. One warps right along with the filing system, so to speak.

  3. This does offer an opening for remarks about a hypothetical amber sheen to you mane.
    However, I will let that pass, since I would prefer to point out that the librarian of Unseen University turning into an orangutang was a side effect of a massive reality-changing spell cast by the Octavo (a spellbook, formerly the property of the Creator) to prevent one of its spells from falling off the Disc.
    Enamoured as I am with the library of X, I don’t believe it contains books that are quite so powerful.

  4. I wasn’t referring to the orangutang change, as he already was a librarian before that. And I don’t know of any other ape librarians. I am, however, quite intimately familiar with twisted librarians.

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