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We hired more than we need, to provide us with slack, knowing that some will just not show up some days and that they are cheap and we need not subject ourselves to unnecessary stress.
It's a nice little library, really, how hard should it be?
The job itself is a series of small simple jobs. Put all together they can seem quite overwhelming so I don't put them together I talk them through the actions, routines and rules one at a time, as they occur.
I try to explain what is necessary in the most easy and understandable way. Sometimes I think I am explaining things too fully, with too much detail and I start to bore myself. I had this feeling with Nic a few times but he is a difficult character to judge. When I told him the way to the restroom he looked at me as if I was outlining some new ideas I'd had about the workings of the second law of thermodynamics.
'It's OK,' I thought, 'first days on a new job can be difficult.'
A half hour before closing time I ran through the closing procedure.
"You flash the lights from the master switch on the wall there, that tells the Anthropology students hunkering down in the back with their ipods that the Time is getting on. Then you go to the microphone and press the switch and read the first notice that is taped to the base of the microphone, as you can see it's a simple sentence, 'the library is closing in thirty minutes and the circulation desk is closing in fifteen minutes if you have any items to check out, please do so at this time - Thank-you...', Ok?"
Nic stared at me as if I was talking thermodynamics again.
"Do you understand?"
"Yes," he said.
"OK, why don't you give it a go?"
He moved towards the microphone.
"No, ahem, flick the lights first to alert people who are listening to music..."
He didn't move. I went to the light switch and flicked it on and off twice. "It doesn't matter, I've done it now but you do that first... now make the announcement..."
Nic grabbed the microphone with sudden animation, as if pulling a drowning child from the sea.
"THE LIBRARY IS NOW CLOSED," he shouted nervously.
His timing was impecable. The delivery, strangled and desperate and wholly commited.
He is either very stupid or a comic genius. But he's a student at a top university with a great grade average...
I laughed. He didn't join in and in a fraction of a second I conned myself into thinking my reaction was 'cruel'.
"OK Nic, what part of everything I said, didn't you understand?"
He looked at me in his way. 
"Great job Nic, now I want you to go around to everyone and wrestle the books out of their hands like Mr Bean and then use them to build some kind animal feeding trough which I want you to pretend to drive like a little car..." 
He continued to stare at me. 
['You're saying that the tendancy to entropy means that evolution is but a bonding process of a system of energy driven by desperate animal survival instincts...']
We've hired Latka Gravas.