Experience of working

This week we've got a work experience girl with us. She's 15 years old and until today has been as quiet as a mouse. Today though she came to join our team. Of course we are the coolest team and therefore must be the ones who will make her feel most at home. From the time she joined us at 9am she literally hasn't stopped talking all day, this loooooong stream of 15 year old conscious. I had the pleasure of her company twice - first up we were doing journals and later this afty we were packing up books for our new campus.

I decided earlier in the week that the best way to approach it would be to actually let her do the work. I'm sure she's been talked at a lot over this past week and I know how much that puts me to sleep. And so we did the journals thing, we opened the post, we checked them in, she got to stamp the stamp on people's heads and put the security strips in; the excitement at being able to take the trolley up in the lift was just too much. Oh and then enjoying a bit of banter with one of the upstairs peeps, he flicked the v's at me as he was walking away in front of her!!! I went over and said you can't do that she's only 15!! Think he felt pretty bad - she loved it!

This afternoon, being much more at home with me, we talked about all sorts from which ipod was coolest to how brillo Blackberry chat is compared to texting (so last year). There was lots of fun stuff to play with as we RFID tagged the books, and ripped out old date labels and glued new ones in, spotted spine labels and did more stamping. As the time was drawing near, she actually did the barf face when I told her that it was time to go for her next appointment and she did the whiney "can I stay with you?" I managed to get her another 5 minutes so she could finish tagging the shelf but that was it. Onwards she had to go. She gave me some chocolate as we'd been talking about it and went her unhappy way. Later on the person responsible for the work experience peeps came over to me and told me that she had said how I'm "the best". It made me feel nice and I hope it helps her to get a positive image of work.

Of course all this being 15 and on work experience made me reminisce back to my own version. For some reason I believed that I wanted to be a nursery nurse and so I was dispatched to a local council run nursery school in a very bad part of town where I basically wiped up children's snot for a week. It worked really well in that it utterly convinced me that there was no way on earth I wanted to be a nursery nurse. I can't really remember whether any of the people were nice, I think they just seemed really old to me. They were probably the same sort of age as I am now!

I wonder if she'll decide that libraryland is where she wants to be as a working person? Or will it put her off the idea completely? Who can know. Maybe she'll talk about it tomorrow in another looooong stream of 15 year old conscious :D