It was the last Friday of January, and the air in the library felt thick and still. Mrs. Chen, our librarian, had asked for volunteers to help reorganise the fiction section before the new term started. I raised my hand because I wanted to avoid another afternoon of nothing, and because I genuinely liked the quiet of the library. She handed me a stack of sticky notes and a list of authors whose books needed to be moved to the 'Popular Reads' shelf. It seemed simple enough: find the books, stick a note on each, and carry them across the room. I figured I'd be done in an hour.
But an hour passed, and I had only finished two rows. The problem was that I kept stopping to read the blurbs on the backs of books I'd never noticed before. There was a sci-fi novel about a girl who could time travel by eating certain fruits, and a mystery set in a boarding school where the main suspect was a ghost. Each time I picked up a book, I told myself I'd just glance at the first page, but then I'd get pulled into the opening scene. By the time I looked up, the afternoon sun had shifted across the floor, and my list was still half untouched.
Other volunteers finished their jobs quickly. Mia, who was sorting the non-fiction section, had already moved all the geography books and was helping someone else. Tom, who was labelling new arrivals, had finished his entire cart and was now scrolling through his phone. I felt a familiar knot in my stomach—the feeling of being the slowest person in the room. I tried to speed up, but my eyes kept drifting to the colourful spines. I told myself to focus, but the library was so quiet that every rustle of paper seemed to remind me how far behind I was.
There was a sci-fi novel about a girl who could time travel by eating certain fruits, and a mystery set in a boarding school where the main suspect was a ghost.
By the time Mrs. Chen came to check on me, it was nearly five o'clock. The library would close in thirty minutes. She looked at my half-finished shelf and then at the pile of books I'd set aside because I thought they looked interesting. 'You got distracted,' she said, but it wasn't a question. I nodded, embarrassed. She smiled and said, 'That's okay. Sometimes the best discoveries happen when you're supposed to be doing something else.' She helped me finish the last two rows, and we worked together in comfortable silence.
Walking home that evening, I thought about what Mrs. Chen had said. I had always seen my tendency to get sidetracked as a weakness—something that made me late to class or the last one to finish a test. But maybe it wasn't always a bad thing. The books I'd found by accident were ones I never would have chosen on purpose. I had added three of them to my reading list for the term. Being slow had let me notice things that the faster workers had missed.
Looking back, that afternoon taught me something about patience and attention. I still finish last sometimes—in group projects, in races, in conversations where I take too long to find the right words. But I've started to see that finishing last doesn't always mean losing. Sometimes it means you took the time to look closer, to wonder, to let yourself be curious. And that kind of job, even if it's the last one done, might be the one that stays with you longest.