On Library Work and Library Workers

At the library we did very little work. There were some fifty of us doing what fifteen could have easily done. My particular job, shared with fifteen or twenty colleagues, was classifying and cataloging the library's holdings, which until that time were uncatalogued. The collection, however, was so small that we knew where to find the books without the system, so the system, though laboriously carried out, was never needed or used. The first day, I worked honestly. On the next, some of my fellows took me aside to say that I couldn't do this sort of thing because it showed them up. "Besides," they argued, "as the cataloguing has been planned to give us some semblance of work, you'll put us out of our jobs." I told them I had classified four hundred titles instead of their one hundred. "Well, if you keep it up," they said, "the boss will be angry and won't know what to do with us." For the sake of realism, I was told that from then on I should do eighty-three books one day, ninety another, and one hundred and four the third.

Jorge Luis Borges, "An Autobiographial Essay," in The Aleph and other Stories, together with Commentaries and an Autobiographical Essay (New York: Bantam, 1971), p. 169.