Shit I Have Heard At Work

[shitihaveheardatwork]

new gig

howdy tumblerinos!

boy i sure went quiet for a few months there. the long and short of it is I got a new NEW library job with better hours. but better hours means... less life hours. so I haven't indulged myself in winghing on the internet about my job.

good news though! my boss is still a weirdo and there's no shortage of things to say about him!

in fact, the circumstances of my week are what inspired me to come crawling back like not-quite-dead roadkill to my angry little blog! so let's get into it

my boss the director (we'll call him Ronan) is a bit of a moody fussy guy. he micromanages, he takes things personally, and seems to fixate on minor things that don't really matter. I'd been warned about his attitude by all of my co-workers, but I didn't actually have to deal with it first-hand for about three months.

in addition to Ronan (who, for context, has his office right by the circulation desk: ie right behind me), there is also Luigi, my work husband. we hit it off almost immediately. we discuss movies and leftist politics all day. love Luigi. we do a reasonable amount of what could be called goofing off, but not to the detriment of our work. goofin is for when there's no work left. you get it, I'm sure it's the same at your workplace.

Luigi and I discovered that we could chat over gmail's IM function, and were discussing Luigi's applications to other jobs. He wants a different job, because even though he's worked steadily at the library for a decade, he wants to get away desperately (as does everyone here) from Ronan. Naturally, this is a good conversation to have digitally and not out loud, in front of Ronan's office.

but then Ronan walks by, and sees the chat window blinking over my shoulder. my new-hire honeymoon period with him is over, and he is officially in full tizzy mode. "You're at work!" he declares, before storming off to his office.

As he does whenever something upsets him, we can hear him hammering out a magnum opus of pissbaby nonsense into his computer. A minute later Luigi and I both have an email from him (cced to the trustees, no less) about how our behavior is unacceptable and that if it continues, we'll be reported to HR. Ronan then speaks with one of the trustees on the phone, expressing his concern that Luigi is having a "bad influence" on me. Like we're on a fucking playdate and not in a work space, working. We can't confirm but we're pretty sure the trustee he was speaking with told him to calm his tits, because we didn't hear about it again and he gave us the silent treatment the rest of the day.

BUT WAIT, THAT'S NOT ALL!

I have wednesday, the following day, off. fine by me. I was getting a tummyache just thinking about going back to work. I spend my wednesday doing some spring cleaning (fall cleaning), but around lunch I check my email to discover a fascinating message, which I'll just quote from here.

"Any in person questions, other than basic directional inquiries and Circulation related questions including topics such as: readers advisory, electronic resources, local history, genealogy, specific reference questions need to be referred to a senior staff member. Priority would be to myself.

This is not optional.

The same applies to telephone inquiries if at all possible."

Wow, I say to myself, that's wild. What's up with that?

Naturally, I shoot Luigi an email requesting an explanation. Apparently, in front of god and everybody, Ronan got all hot and bothered by a patron asking where the non-fiction is. The scene plays out as follows.

A patron comes in, asking to be directed to the non-fiction section. Luigi, being a librarian with a decade of experience in this library, knows the answer and gives it: "downstairs, on the left-hand side."

"Thanks," says the patron. They leave the desk area to go to the non-fiction area. But then, Ronan strikes! He comes out of his office on a tear.

"Hold on! It's not just "on the left-hand side"" he corrects. He then proceeds to handhold the patron to the basement and select a book for them. To be clear, they were here for browsing and not an explicit title.

This is already weird and stupid, but then it also results in the office-wide email copied above.

On thursday when I came in, many other employees also noted to me that I explicitly wasn't mentioned in the email, even though I'm the only other person in the building (besides the children's librarian) with an MLS, and therefore qualified to tell people that non-fiction is in the basement on the left-hand side. I hadn't perceived the slight in my original reading, but people who've worked with Ronan longer suggest that it's probably deliberate.

That said I'm not going anywhere. My boss may be a pathetic control freak, but he also has no sense of drive or follow-through, and has managed to foster a culture that's almost openly insubordinate to him. Beyond the adrenaline surge that results from being yelled at by an older man, I'm not scared of him. His moody outbursts seem to be the result, or at least a symptom of, an administrative and authoritative impotence. He only has the power I give him.

Also the town is putting a reference position together with the same hours but like... twice my current pay. So, fuck him, I'm hanging on for that if nothing else.

Anyway, Monday should be fun. That's the next day Luigi and Ronan will be in the building at the same time. Luigi also might have reply-alled that email and said that if Ronan enforced his dumbass reference policy, Luigi was gonna file a complaint. In the break room this morning they were joking that they didn't know whether to hire a referee or call the cops for the fight.

[shitihaveheardatwork]

Getting Oriented (3 Months In)

I never like to be called over by my boss. Feels universally like something terrible is about to happen. So when I got called over to the commandeered chunk of reading room Wallace calls his office, I smile and try not to look anxious.

“So, here’s some stuff I should have given you when you started here,” he tells me, handing me a big packet of paperwork. “Read it over when you have time.”

All I have his time, so ok. Nothing too interesting, but all definitely useful. An org chart, collections policies, list of acronyms, a directory for all the branches. He just forgot about it for three months. I’ve asked him questions covered by stuff in these materials.

Later, in a Zoom meeting with the main branch, Wallace seemed like he was actively attempting to be unpleasant.

“It’s so good to see you,” my boss’s boss says.

“Yeah well we see each other all the time,” my boss says, in a tone that says this is all very well and good but I really wish I weren’t here right now.

He also kept interrupting Shelly, a lady he’s told me several times to be very polite to if I wanted her to help me with anything. He must not need her help with anything.

[shitihaveheardatwork]

It’s Better Without The Boss

I haven’t updated for a little bit and there’s a very simple reason for that:

This blog is called Shit I Have Heard At Work, and if I don’t hear shit at work, I don’t post about it.

My boss Wallace, who as you may remember is the manager of three branches in our system, has decided that he can spend less time at mine. This is a result of the hiring of a new circulations librarian, meaning that me and her can double-team whatever needs double-teaming around the tiny branch. He’s been giving us projects over email and just not showing up, and it’s...

well it’s amazing

There’s only a few things to really go over as far as work nonsense, and none of them really merit a wild campfire yarn, so I’ll just list them off here.

---I took what was called “Good Coworker” training, a mandatory virtual seminar which basically boiled down to trying to not be a bigoted asshole to coworkers. Seems straightforward enough. The presenter used a clip from The Office (US) to demonstrate how not to behave, but then also suddenly cut off the clip before Michael could finish his “5 dollar lady of the evening” joke. Considering how many dozens of do-not-do moments there are in the office, it’s funny that she picked one that she had to suddenly pause before causing a potential work incident...

---Which she kind of ended up doing anyway by capping off the whole seminar with a sexist comic. This one specifically.

Outstanding work. I tried to look up Sunny Street Comics and Max Garcia, but all I could find was about a decade of supremely unfunny boring comics. What’s important though is that about ten people at the meeting all raised their virtual hands to ask what the fuck this comic was trying to tell us, how it was supposed to cap off a 2 hour long seminar on not being a dick in the workplace. The presenter was at a loss. Oops.

---One project we got going on is taking all the New stickers off of “new” items. Some of them are as old as 2018. Me and the new hire (we’ll call her Emerald) had an assembly line going where I’d take off the sticker and she’d scan it to remove its “new” status in the system. Wallace, who was in his usual spot, doing who-knows-what on his ipad, suddenly makes an announcement. “I’m bored, I’ll help you guys.” He helps me peel stickers, giving unwanted advice as we go. ---In a similar vein, this week when we came in Wallace announced that he wasn’t actually sure where he should be spending his time. A weird thing for the guy in charge to say. He continued that, since he wasn’t sure where he needed to be right now, that he’d hang out with us, because it’s better than being home and off the clock. This did not stop him from, an hour before closing, announcing, “Ok I’m bored, I’m going home,” and promptly leaving. Overall though work’s good. I look forward to seeing him less.

[shitihaveheardatwork]

Efficiency

So I found this on my boss’s desk.

It’s fine. I don’t begrudge any man for coloring.

It just feels incongruous with everything that comes out of his mouth.

“that’s not really a priority right now”

“this place needs to be more efficient”

I couldn’t give a single shit if he was coloring to unwind from all the stress he’s under. But unless I take the initiative, we can just sit there for hours doing, evidently, nothing.

I tested this. I spent three hours writing fanfic and listening to Tim Rogers talk about video games, while my boss did... whatever it is he does on his tablet.

Maybe he’s doing some earthshattering work. Sending some emails that are gonna ripple out and cause some big changes. Maybe he’s drafting a cool new program that he’s keeping secret for some reason. I doubt it though.

When I came in Monday, he opened with a congratulations.

“Why, what happened?”

He explained that the [redacted] library system was teaming up with the city Senior Center and the Council on Aging to help book vaccination appointments for seniors. Every branch except ours.

“We’re off the hook! You’re lucky you work at this branch.”

This is, evidently, a joyous occasion: an excuse, as a public servant, to skip out on serving the public in the middle of a historic catastrophe. I wonder for the upteenth time why this man works in the librarian field.

I get a few calls from seniors, and I have to redirect them to other branches. It feels bad, but I don’t have all the forms and other crap the other branches have. I couldn’t even go rogue and sign them up if I wanted to.

Almost immediately after the workday begins, Wallace is on the phone gossiping. I don’t know who his connection in the branch system is that likes to chatter with him so much. I don’t know if they’ve got a spiritual connection as two selfish conservatives locked into a system that’s supposed to help people, or if they’re just too polite to tell him to bug somebody else. Either way, the call is placed, and pretty much everyone and everything the library does is challenged.

Wallace seems unimpressed by the seniors vaccination program, even though he does not actually have to do any work for it. He has vague concerns about being legally liable. Getting sued seems to be a constant preoccupation of his.

At one point, the call ends and he comes up to me.

“Listen, I gotta deal with some work drama. I didn’t want to, but I got sucked into it, and I’m gonna go deal with it in the other room.”

He then seals himself in our computer room, and I don’t see him for another hour. It’s just about time to close up shop when he finally reemerges. Apparently the person he was waiting for a call from never called him. I wonder what he spent the hour doing.

As we close up, he picks up a hold from the cart. It’s a hold for a patron who checks out a lot of queer material, mostly comic books. I always like assembling his holds.

The book my boss picks up is The Gay Agenda. The cover looks like this:

He scoffs audibly. “Oh god,” he says, dismissively chucking it back on the cart.

At this point, the man is too much of a joke to me for me to even be offended. I smile under my mask. I’ve applied and interviewed for other positions, and if I get an offer from anywhere else, this is all getting reported to his superiors on my way out.

“Ready to go?” he asks me, as he flicks off the lights. I say yes.

“Cool beans,” he says, and off we go.

[shitihaveheardatwork]

The Quest For A PS5 Continues

You’ll notice I didn’t update for like 2 weeks. That’s because the two weeks I spent in quarantine, working remotely, were highly uneventful. I took a lot of boring webinars, got a little certificate from the ALA for watching said webinars, and mostly just got good at color-coding spreadsheets logging my work hours.

Still, I was nervous to return to work on Friday. I’d been spoiled by bosslessness. How would I deal with returning to the physical office and, more importantly, my superior?

These thoughts occupy my brain on the drive to work. On the highway, I see a truck with a large decal.

“LOOKING FOR KIDNEY DONOR, TYPE A BLOOD”, followed by a phone number. I contemplated that I had type-A blood, wondered what it would be like to give an organ to a stranger, and was vaguely bummed out that this is the world capitalism wants us to live in. Billboard begging to stay alive from the back of your car.

We got off on different exits from the highway, but somehow the truck passed me again miles later, just as I was about to pull into the library parking lot. Was that a sign? Did I spit on the hands of fate by not calling that number? Who can say.

Time to face the boss.

I dreaded hearing about the inauguration or recent 1/6-related arrests, but it was all for naught. Turns out my boss had something bigger than politics on his mind:

Finally scoring a PS5.

You may remember from previous posts that acquiring a PS5 has been a stated goal for my boss since my first day. Apparently his battle with Sony’s artificial scarcity tactics is continuing to rage.

He did not speak to me much when I came in.

“What did I miss?” I ask.

“Not a single thing. Welcome back to the suck,” he answers.

Welcome To The Suck is a marine saying, iirc. Did he get it from the movie Jarhead, starring Jake Gyllenhaal? Is he a veteran? I don’t know, and I didn’t ask. Like previous attempts of mine to be friendly, he does not ask any questions of his own, like how my time in quarantine was.

He announces very casually that he’s trying once again to buy a PS5. He spends the first 3 hours of my shift in the reading area on his iPad, feverishly navigating from website to website, trying to score his $500 prize.

I know this is what he was doing because I got the blow-by-blow.

“Kohl’s has one! I-oh damn, it’s gone.”

“Ungh! Best Buy just messed me up! They wanted an authentication code, and by the time it got delivered to my email it was already gone!”

Updates like this land on me periodically. Meanwhile I reshelve. The cart is very full. I don’t think he bothered to reshelve anything while I was gone. There’s some books and DVDs on the cart I’m interested in, and I quietly check them out to myself and put them in my bag.

It’s about ten minutes past three when my boss announces that he’s late for a meeting. He calls in, staying at his reading room location. He for all intents and purposes looks exactly like he did when he was e-shopping.

“I had issues of various natures stacked up on one another,” is the reason he gives for being late. I love that phrase. I’m going to use it as an excuse for everything.

I’m not privy to the other side of the meeting, but just based on my bosses side, I can say pretty confidently that he’s a killjoy. From his responses and other context clues, I can tell they’re having a meeting about the planned “Book a Librarian” program. It’s what it sounds like on the tin: you book time with a librarian. They help you with research questions or some other technical issue you’re having.

Boss Wallace was having none of this.

“What if someone sues us? We need policies in place,” is more or less what he keeps repeating. He tells an anecdotal story about a library he used to work at, where they were almost sued after helping a patron with a job application. The patron did not get the job, and decided it was the library’s fault, and decided to sue. I couldn’t confirm or deny this story with some cursory googling. Considering everything though, considering his pattern of behavior, I’d believe he made it up just to have less work to do.

The meeting ends, and he immediately gets on the phone. With a coworker confidant on the line, he complains about the incompetence of management, their unwillingness to deal with “certain realities.”

By the time the PS5 shopping, the meeting, and the phone call is over, there’s only 30 minutes left until it’s time to go home.

“So, do you read much?” he asks.

It’s out of nowhere, and it’s pleasant. I think this is the first time in my month of employment he’s shown much interest in me beyond as a soundboard.

“I just finished the 4th Dune book,” I say.

“Well, now you’re in my wheelhouse!” he replies.

We chat about sci-fi for the rest of the shift as we shut things down and lock up.

“See you Monday,” I say outside, as I remove my key from the door.

“I won’t be in Monday. See you Wednesday,” he says, getting into his car.

This brief interaction was pleasant enough, but I’m relieved that I’ll get to go so long without seeing him.

Little does he know, little does anyone in the [redacted] City library system know, that I’ve got a job interview on Tuesday, somewhere else.

I’m nervous for it, but excited too. It’s a job I’d be happy taking, and I don’t think I’d miss much here. I have friends at the institution I’m applying to, who I know run a tight ship with a strong mission. It’ll be interesting, if the interview goes well, to see if anyone in the office will note my high spirits on Wednesday.

[shitihaveheardatwork]

Work: Quarantine Edition

I gotta say, I was not exactly ecstatic to tell my boss, who I will remind you quipped “we’ve had diseases like this before” on my first day, that I had had a firsthand CovID exposure and would need to begin quarantining.

He didn’t ask me to come in sick or anything though, so once that hurdle was jumped my concerns were allayed significantly. I was struck though, and could not help laughing out loud, when he texted me my instructions. They led off with “you are not to come to work tomorrow,” which just tickles me. Tell me you can’t hear “you are not to” in a power-trippy middle manager’s voice.

As an aside, he’s texting me in response to a work email. I work-emailed him like a good work-boy and he texted me from his personal phone. He’s just that kind of guy, and it’s a kind of guy I don’t care for.

My phone lives in my pants. Don’t be in my pants boss. Be on my computer, where you belong.

I got my test, I went home, and my new normal for the next few weeks began as I experimented with working remotely.

Since I can’t exactly reshelve anything remotely, my instructions were to develop myself professionally. Attend webinars, read and survey current professional literature, develop programming concepts, etc.

Actually on that note, and I can’t believe I forgot to mention it last time: we are waiting on a new clerk in order to get the branch into full swing. Upon their arrival, I’m supposed to brainstorm with them about a “passive program” display for the library window for black history month.

Needless to say, I’ve already started brainstorming ahead of the new hire’s arrival, and at the moment am leaning towards Audre Lorde or Malcolm X for my window display. My boss suggested the text from “I Have A Dream,” and I knew immediately that we had to do something better. The city of [redacted]’s population is 1/5th black. This branch is being run by two white guys. We have to do something more meaningful and less trite than the white-people version of MLK. More on my window display as it develops.

So I’m at home. I’m developing professionally. I start an orgy of spreadsheets and calendaring. I’ve got cells to space out my work time to the minute. I’ve got another spreadsheet full of webinars and other resources. I’ve got a folder of semi-illicit PDFs including the works of Derrida and Foucault.

Those PDFs hurt my head after about 10 minutes though, so I watch some webinars.

It’s nothing brain-shattering. I learn from a publisher about upcoming YA releases. I watch a toothless lecture on “efficiency” simply because my boss has used that word about 12,000 times since I started working under him and it’ll sound good. I peruse upcoming virtual events I could potentially attend.

My boss’s boss called. I don’t think I’ve mentioned her before. We’ll call her Denise. She interviewed me for the job and she seems cool. She’s calling to follow up an email I sent asking how the reimbursement process works if I go to events that cost money.

It’s a pretty straightforward conversation, but I off-handedly say something along the lines of “I’m still figuring out the chain of command.”

This triggers something, the consequences of which I’ll find out some other time. She says “Oh. Wallace should have explained that to you. That’s part of your orientation.”

Ok so wow, if Wallace was trying to speedrun my training that first day, he definitely wasn’t making a 100% completion run.

She said she’d follow up with him to make sure he gave me all that information. I make a Jim-from-the-office-looking-into-the-camera face to myself. I choose to put this out of my mind because if I think about it, something inside me will explode.

It’s 5PM. My work day over, I save a PDF of my webinar attendance certificate, kick off my work pants, and boot up Fallout New Vegas.

[shitihaveheardatwork]

it’s like I’m not even here

Aww yis, day 2 alone with the big cheese himself, the branch supervisor.

Today I wore a lovely rose-floral button up shirt and plain khakis with my favorite belt. I’m never going to tell my boss I’m queer as fuck because, well, he’s a phobe and I don’t want him to know. But on top of that (and I’m definitely not just intellectualizing and compartmentalizing), he doesn’t get to know anything about me. He lost that privilege the second he said “first amendment” in response to Charlottesville.

But anyway my beautiful button-up. It’s the loudest way I could think to say “queer as in fuck you” without having to actually say anything.

And within the first ten minutes of my shift, I realized that it had been all for naught, because I think I’m as close as I can be to completely invisible while still being an underling capable of receiving orders.

It happened like this.

I’d been stressing my balls, tits, and ass off all week, worrying about what sort of noxious nonsense I’d have to smile and nod through today. You don’t start digging into a gold mine like a kilt-wearing, pro-market, nazi-defending gamer and only come out with a few sparse nuggets. That lode’s got a lot more just waiting in there, and I was nervous as fuck to find out how much more was in there. So I’d prepared some gentle chit-chat.

“How was your new years?” I asked innocuously as he settled into his desk. A simple enough opener. I’m being sociable and (probably) not starting a conversation that will barrel us down any rabbit holes.

“Oh, it was great!” he says, earnestly and enthusiastically.

And then nothing. There was no “how about you?” or anything of the sort. To be fair, I didn’t follow up asking what he did or anything, but something about the lack of a formal reply threw me off balance. I’d spent so much time anticipating him saying “good, how about yours,” so much time practicing in my head “good, uneventful. I just played Fallout and went to bed.” Then maybe we could talk about Fallout or video gaming generally, and work on building a rapport that would make him disgust me less.

But here we were with nothing.

So I continued with my shift tasks. There was a little more to do today, but I still had all my opening tasks done within the first two hours, leaving a long silent four remaining to be in close proximity with my supervisor. During a bathroom break, I learned that fascists had stormed the capitol building, and quietly hoped it would miss my boss’s attention.

About an hour later, he discovered it, announcing it suddenly while sitting at his work computer.

“This is just what the radical media has been waiting for. They’re gonna say all republicans are crazy.”

I say nothing, continuing my current task (cleaning up an abandoned summer program that’s been sitting in our reading room for something like 9 months), and testing my theory that he’s not actually talking to me and is in fact, just talking.

I seem to be largely correct, there’s no follow-up. A tension I’d been holding slides off me ever-so-gently as I realize that I will not have to engage with most of the bullshit that passes my ears as long as I’m in the middle of something.

He whinges a little bit about the “social justice” vibe of this year’s ALA conference, and takes a call. I don’t know who he’s on the phone with, but I’m assuming it’s a colleague, considering how he complains about management, throwing in commentary on the in-progress siege while he’s at it.

“We’re just cleaning up some old projects,” he says to whomever he’s talking to, as if he did not let this abandoned program’s materials sit here for the entirety of his supervisorship. As if I hadn’t started dismantling, organizing, and storing its components to have something to do besides talking to my superior. He gets off the call.

“What’s the heaviest unpopular book in here, you think?” I ask. “I want to weigh down and flatten these paper bags so they’ll store better.”

“That’s... not really a priority,” he explains.

What our priorities actually are, he never explained.

He turns out all the lights as soon as the clock strikes six. I find my jacket in the dark and go home.

[shitihaveheardatwork]

See You In Hell, Bratz Passion 4 Fashion: Diamondz!

Contrary to the opinions of many of my peers, I think weeding is awesome and I love it. There’s little I find more satisfying than an item of obviously low quality with no demand whatsoever coming into my attention and having the privilege of removing it from circulation.

Just to be entirely clear, we’re not talking about “extreme” or “controversial” content. I’ve had that conversation done to death a thousand classroom-polarizing times before. We’re talking about cheap. We’re talking about cash-grab. We’re talking about no artistic, cultural, spiritual, or even material value.

We’re talking about Bratz Passion 4 Fashion; Diamondz.

Some personal history first: I’m old enough that my last big toy phase before I reached the special level of adolescence where you have to openly condemn everything you once held dear as a child was Bionicles. I had the black bionicle from every generation up until that point, as well as a complete set of those little rolly-polly guys with the stretchy necks. I don’t know what they were called and I couldn’t be bothered to look it up for this lil micro-essay here.

What’s important is that they were cool. They did action-y stuff, I felt smart putting them together.

Waaaay Cooler, Smarter, Action-y, and REAL than my sister’s interests! Polly Pocket? Dumb! Pre-bronification MLP? Barf! Bratz? How fake can you get? Those were just shallow pieces of plastic made by toy companies. Not like my precious bionicles. So cool. So adult. So smart.

Then I watched the first Bionicle movie when it was on TV and realized I too was a cog in an elaborate toy commercial scheme. Something clicked in my horny mushy pre-teen brain, and I put away all my old favorite toys forever. It was now time to be shitty and elitist about intangible concepts instead, a hobby I’d keep until my early 20′s. But in addition to a change in hobbies, I also started to be a little bit less shit to my sister about her toys.

This confession out of the way, I don’t think my sister would have stopped me from throwing this DVD directly into the trash. My sister didn’t become a high-fallutin’ working-class intelligentsia asshole like her big brother, and we have nothing comparable in terms of media taste, but I think she would support me 100% if I told her I sent this DVD straight to hell. In fact I might call her later just to confirm. This disk was bad, is the moral of my story.

It took six paragraphs, but let’s talk about Day 3 on the job!

It was just me and Lisa today. I’ve upgraded from liking Lisa to absolutely loving working with Lisa. We talked everything from how her kids are doing to politics (she brought up Tr#mps latest satire-destroying phone call) to video-gaming to the history of animation. I genuinely like talking to her and it’s a shame she’s just filling in. If a job opens up at her branch, I’d apply for it, no question.

My boss Wallace, “Yer dad”-level queerphobe and Ron Swanson-esque libertarian, was putting out a metaphorical fire at another branch and I didn’t have to deal with him at all.

I did my opening routine. Checking the drop box, collecting the pull list, putting together holds, refiling returned materials, preparing ILL material, checking my work email, and the like. I was done with it all in about 90 minutes, with 4 hours left to go on my shift.

Wallace had told me to fill the time with anything I can qualify as “professional development” the week before, so I spent some time reading articles on the ALA website and googling “anarcho-librarianism” just to see what would happen. I found an abandoned blog and a twitter.

Then I remembered oh shit. I have to make a twitter don’t I

I don’t like twitter. I’ve tried to use it. I don’t get it. I’m too old to learn a new app. It’s impossible.

And yet I must. That’s where The Discourse is happening. That’s where the minds in my field are saying things. If I’m taking my career seriously, if I want to get a grip on the currents in my profession, I have to bite that checkmarked bullet. Stand by for updates on my professional twitter.

I got bored of being on the ALA site and ran out of productive things to google, and decided to look around the building for abandoned projects and mysteries to solve. It didn’t take long to find one, when I found a cart in the work room with a pile of DVDs in paper sleeves.

“Scratched” a post-it note on top said.

I asked Lisa if she knew how long these had been here, and she confirmed that they were in fact a hold-over from the previous staff that had left in a mass exodus some months before.

Well cool, I thought. I’ll see if these are too fucked up to play.

Commence with an hour of consuming children’s media, a few seconds of a minute at a time. I was fortunate that the work computers both had CD drives AND VLC media player! Thank you, past cool supervisor who put VLC on the work machines! Good call!

So I “watched” a few Dora The Explorers, a Care Bears film, that Trolls movie, Hotel Transylvania, and a Barbie horse adventure film, watching a few seconds before skipping a minute ahead to see if it would choke and skip.

See here’s the thing about scratched CDs. They’re weird. You can have a CD that’s fucked up completely (looking at you, my copy of Rollercoaster Tycoon 1) that still somehow plays fine like it just came out of the box. Sometimes scratches will seem totally superficial but goof up just enough microscopic binary that no machine will touch it. All these DVDs were ugly as sin, but that didn’t mean they were broken did it?

And it turns out a lot of them worked fine. That’s how I ended up watching Bratz Passion 4 Fashion: Diamondz which, unfortunately, played fine.

As I put the disk into the drive I remembered my sister’s participation in the Bratz toy craze. As an adult, a real one not the one I told myself I was at 13, I told myself that I might have a bias against this content, to just check the disk and not get judgy about what might be a kids favorite movie.

I uh... I failed to do that. BUT IT’S OK BECAUSE MY BIAS IS TOTALLY JUSTIFIED AND MY JUSTIFICATION IS RIGHT HERE

If you didn’t or don’t want to click the link, it’s a scene where the Bratz Diamonds are about to head out on some sort of fashion trucking marathon/race. Like any proper racer, the blonde at the wheel has a white-knuckle grip on the wheel, has just put their rig in gear, and in proper high-octane fashion, puts on a knowing smirk.

Except the smirk is, well... the animators just stretched the lips across the face further. I can’t do it justice, you just have to watch it, but I’ve done better animating just by pan-and-scanning around Windows Movie Maker.

This... isn’t content anybody needs. But I’m a librarian. I’m sworn to access. So the question becomes, does anyone want it?

I had to know, I had to know, how much circulation has this gotten? When was the last time this disk was in the hands of anybody at all besides me?

I popped it into Evergreen and behold: 15 check-outs since 2006 when it was released. No checkouts in the last 2 years.

I asked Lisa the proper procedure for removing something from the catalog, and in only a moment the deed was done. The case was repurposed, the disk trashed, the DVD cover recycled. It was time to go. I’d spent my remaining hours quasi-consuming children’s media.

I placed most of what I’d watched in a new pile, which I labeled “SCRATCHED BUT WORK FINE.” I placed one lone Barbie horse movie in a different pile labeled “SCRATCHED AND DOES NOT WORK.”

I felt like I’d accomplished something. I turned off the lights and I went home.

[shitihaveheardatwork]

Nvm, always trust your gut lads

Second day on the job was a trip and then some.

First day just me and the new boss, and without the buffer of Lisa, Director Wallace has some new colors to show off to me, his fellow white male.

I’ll just itemize the gold here:

   -”The thing about Charlottesville though, those guys had permits. You think it would have gotten that much attention if there wasn’t all that unauthorized counter-protesting? Here’s what you do, right? You go through the proper channels, throw a bigger and better rally. Have Michael Jackson or someone play the thing, everyone has a lot of fun. That’s a better message, isn’t it? Besides, we have a little thing called the first amendment”

   -”This branch shouldn’t even exist. It’s all politics. We are at the mercy of the mayor’s office”

   -”I hear a lot of talk about internet as a utility, but think about it. Only the market can provide better internet, because you have the ability to buy a better connection.”

   -”Social media is probably the worst thing to ever happen to society. Say what you will about Trump but if he’d gotten reelected, some of these tech companies would be getting torn apart. The democratic party, tech is their top donors. I don’t think it’s gonna happen.”

   -”The LGBTQ et cetera et cetera et cetera, they’ve been taking refuge in libraries. Now, I’m cool. I have a cousin. He was Jeff and now he’s Henrietta, do whatever you want, fine by me. Just don’t shove a flag in my face, you know?”

   -”I liked Green Day’s early stuff, but once they got political, ugh.”

This list isn’t exhaustive. There’s definitely some stuff that I didn’t get a chance to scribble down in my little book before it got shunted out of my brain hole.

It seems though that I seem to be working for gamer Ron Swanson in a kilt.

Something about me, I’m the last one of the 4 F’s. Out of Fight, Flight, Freeze, Faun, I’m faun. I’m not proud of it, it’s just part of how I’m wired. I’ll minimize situations by being nice and agreeable. I’ve never been happier to have a face mask in my whole life, because all I had to do was just nod and not do anything weird with my eyes.

Every once in awhile he’d say something like “if I say something you want to hear, just tell me and I’ll shut up.” And sure, I’d love to take him up on it but like... I need this job, man. I gotta come back here every day. I don’t have the guts to tell him how profoundly asinine his worldview is, and if I did I don’t know if I’d have the guts to come back to the office after explaining it. 

On the plus side, he’s pretty agreeable as long as you aren’t talking about like... anything that effects society in any way at all. He seems like a genuinely well-meaning and nice guy as far as two white men talking goes, because he seemed ready to put me on a rocket to Planet Success.

I don’t know if he does this with new hires or what, but I also got about a full hour of schpiel about career advancement. He told me point blank that my job was a starter job and if I found something better to take it at once. He asked me questions about my interests and my career plan, and seemed genuinely invested in me getting where I wanted to go.

That said, one of his recommendations was also to check LinkedIn and Indeed every day. The advice was kind of all over the place, but I wrote down some webinars and stuff he said to check out.

Like I said a few paragraphs ago, I need this job. I’m definitely gonna be applying to other things, checking the listings, but I’ll make peace some way or another with the situation.

Wallace manages a few branches, and told me straight up that I’m basically the branch supervisor in all but name and that I’m gonna have the place to myself a lot, which is good for several reasons, the foremost being that the cherrybomb that is my bi anarchist heart doesn’t light and explode all over my boss.

It’s also good because he’s made it very clear he doesn’t really give two fucks about the place. “I don’t care” and “that’s really not necessary” were the phrases I heard the most.

For example: The juvenile chapter books are on a window-facing shelf, and the spines are all bleached almost beyond readability. He said that the books are elsewhere in the system so these ones don’t really matter, and the process to requisition funds to put UV film on the windows is to byzantine to maneuver.

On the lighter side of things, he seemed eager to show off his little bluetooth speakers. He put one on either side of the room and said “what bands do you like?”

I froze, frantically pounding down the list of music I’d been listening to, trying to get to something even a little bit acceptable for a work environment.

I choked and blurted out “Black Flag.”

This fucking city is run by pigs. They take rights away from all the kids.

Outstanding.

“So this is like, some kind of grunge music, right?” he asks me.

“Kurt Cobain would have owned this record, yeah.” I say.

[shitihaveheardatwork]

Hello, and welcome back to librarianship (Part 2)

The drive over to work is uneventful. I’m blasting Coffins’ Beyond the Circular Demise. It’s not related to librarianship at all, it’s just what’s in the CD player. Google has decided that the most direct route involves zig-zagging through neighborhoods, and New England seems to abhor qualitative street signage, so I have to pull a few legally dubious u-turns, but ultimately I pull into the lot just as the clock in my car strikes the top of the hour.

The director, my new boss, is waiting by the door, antsy to let me in. We’ll call him Wallace, for no better reason than that he had a kilt on and Wallace is a good Scottish name. He is very pleasant, but also very hurried.

He also seems to be trying to achieve some sort of new employee speedrun, because within the first minute a ring of keys is in my hand and a nametag is on my chest. He gives me a tour of the building and what keys go where, before setting me at a computer terminal to set up my employee email.

Along the way, he only slows down to sigh and regret the state of libraries during COVID. “This room is where we... (sigh) under normal conditions this is the room where we would,” and so on in that fashion. He also mentioned that as long as I’m six feet away from other employees, my mask was optional. Uh...

He seems to have a bit of a cavalier attitude about the epidemic. “Efficiency versus paranoia,” was a phrase that came up at one point. So was “we’ve had diseases like this before.” I find it off-putting and a bit of a yellow flag, but I also don’t know how many thousands of COVID meetings with city employees he’s been in, or what sort of bureaucratic hassles he’s been through. I’ll keep an eye on that though.

He asks if I’m familiar with the Evergreen software, I say yes, and he says “well that was pretty much the rest of the training I had so you’re good to go.” And then he’s out the door, to go help another branch he’s also in charge of. [redacted] resources must be thin if they’re making a director run multiple locations.

So at that point it’s just me and Lisa. She’s normally a supervisor at a different branch and is only here to help out with odds and ends. It’s only by coincidence that she’s here on my first day.

She’s nice enough. We have the same degrees (history and MLS), and she’s got all the hot poop on the town going back decades. She’s also got a few fun stories about her own adventures in librarianship. I like her, I hope she doesn’t say or do something fucked up at some point.

My only tasks today are reshelving and answering the phones. Lisa doesn’t get up from her desk and therefore is quickest on the phone draw, so I’m able to reshelve at my leisure. There’s only a single cart of books, but it’s got a mix of everything on it so I get to familiarize myself with all the sections.

There’s the usual stuff; fiction, non-fiction, large print, DVDs, board books, chapter books, young adult fiction, and even a graphic novels section. There’s also some stuff I’ve never seen before like an “urban fiction” section. It’s entirely by black authors about black characters in an urban environment. Some of it is romance, a lot of it is gangster crime fiction.

My feelings on this are mixed, so I decide to get more information and ask Lisa about the history of the section.

She’s got no idea, and neither does anybody else. Everyone, including the director, is new.

It turns out that in the previous year, the entire branch staff quit simultaneously. It was something relating to COVID, but Lisa either didn’t have the details or didn’t want to share them. As a result, there’s a huge knowledge gap about a lot of features of the library.

Why are there color-coded stickers on certain books all over the library? Who knows. 

What’s this one cart full of DVDs doing in the back? Who knows.

Why is there a gospel music section and a christian music section? Who knows. There’s also about 40 “Now That’s What I Call Music” CDs. I’ll have to see if anyone actually borrows those because if not they’re going straight to hell.

It doesn’t look like there’s been much weeding under the (relatively) new leadership. It also doesn’t look like anyone’s checked where stuff is getting shelved either. Some Harry Potter is in young adult, some is in juvenile/childrens fiction. Problems like that.

As I reshelved the cart contents, I caught myself looking out the window and wistfully thinking “is this really what I did all that school for? This is what I want to do with my life?”

And then I checked my phone and realized I’d been shelving for three fast meditative hours.

It totally is. I fucking love this shit.

While reshelving I totally familiarized myself with the DVD and CD racks, alphabetized most of the graphic novels, began making notes for recommendations, and found a Moomin book which I quietly checked out without Lisa noticing. And I had a blast the whole time.

Incidentally, that Moomin book isn’t even ours! It’s got a different library’s name stamped on the frontispiece. How did this even get here? Why was I able to check it out?? Did this place have a different name not too long ago?

Guess I’ll find out. I go back in Wednesday.

[shitihaveheardatwork]

Hello, and welcome back to librarianship (pt. 1)

It was officially my first day as an employee for the city of [redacted], at a small branch on the far side of town. Before I could get my badge and my gun though, I had to complete... employee orientation.

I’m plenty happy with my orientation as it is, but rules are rules so onto the early morning Zoom call I go.

The host is someone I have not spoken to at any point previously in the employment process, and I have a sneaking suspicion I won’t be seeing her again. I’m on the call along with several other new hires, all full time, none in libraries.

Our host, who I’ll call Reece, asks the room if we can see the slideshow she’s sharing. We can. She asks us to confirm that we cannot see her notes. An entire Zoom call lies to Reece and says that we cannot see her notes when they are very clearly on the screen, along with a preview of the upcoming slide. I suspect my fellows in the new hire pool merely all, unanimously and simultaneously, misunderstood the question, but I kept my amusement to myself.

The usual boilerplate is discussed, along with specifics about work insurance, who to report to what with, that sort of thing. I’ve included some highlights

   -In addition to buildings, employees can not smoke in cars owned by the city

   -nobody gets fired. Unsatisfactory work merely results in “separation from employment”

   -we are forbidden from making social media posts on city property. We’ll see about that one lads

   -not spoken aloud, but buried in Reece’s notes is that the [redacted] police department is in charge of confirming your residency. You have to be a resident in [city] to be a city employee. Don’t like that.

   -during the sexual harassment portion of orientation, the following image, from The Simpsons, is displayed in the slide.

The image is not in any way acknowledged by anyone.

   -During the portion about disability accommodation, it was stated that the city will not accommodate any employee whose condition will cause the city “undue hardship.” On the plus side, the city offers paid time off for cancer screenings.

About 45 minutes into orientation, Reece singled me out to inform me that she was about to discuss the benefits portion of the presentation and that, since I was only a part-time employee, I could now leave the Zoom call. I don’t think she meant this as a burn but dang, that’s brutal. I disconnected.

My orientation PDF, included with my Zoom link, had an embedded link to my Ethics and Conflict of Interest course, which is also required of city employees. I am redirected to a very Web 1.0 site which contains a fully narrated instructive course.

The narrator has a Boston accent. Amazing. I smiled every time he said “department,” pronounced depahtmen.

I cue up the first video and am greeted with this gem...

followed by this amazing green screen

Rest assured he sounds exactly like he looks. This video was made in 2009.

About halfway through my course, there was this amazing combination of images

...but other than that the rest of the Ethics and Conflict of Interest training was largely uninteresting. Enjoy some choice quotes from the narration below.

   -”Your municipal employer is entitled to your undivided loyalty.”

   -”Here is an example of misuse of government resources. Consider a coworker. She is writing a novel on company time and making her subordinates proofread it.”

Then after that, it was time to put on shoes and actually go to my brick and mortar new place of employment.

[shitihaveheardatwork]

The Physical

12/22/2020 My new job in the city of [redacted] requires me to get a physical before I can begin working. The HR lady at city hall was nice enough to schedule an appointment for me. I don’t trust the GPS on my phone, having had it fail me several times, and so, like your mom, I printed out the directions and clung to them in my hand, pinning my instructions to the steering wheel for easy reference. The harrowing final chapters of my audiobook stopped on a cliffhanger as I reached my destination and parked in a warehousey side of town. If not for the big green + sign on the building, you could forgive me for thinking this was an auto repair shop or a self-storage facility. Walking in, I passed a truck with not one but two tr^mp stickers on the rear windows parked near me, and I regretted not having a potato for his tailpipe.

You know what I don’t care for in the middle of a plague? A full waiting room. I’d arrived 15 minutes early to do paperwork, and paperwork I did surrounded by about a dozen people, there for various reasons. I tried to ignore them and breathe shallowly.

I read and closed some wikipedia tabs I’d had open for awhile on my phone, and made a meme, but eventually I ran out of productive things to do and just began doomscrolling, hoping no one could see the barrage of pornography and polemics that constitutes my tumblr feed reflected in my glasses like an advertisement of my minds preoccupations. 

An hour passed, and I jumped when I was called. 

The nurse has me read the eye chart, stand on the scale, stand in front of the height stick, takes my heart rate. You know, all the good stuff. She says to take off my shirt and put on a hospital gown, and that the doctor will show up soon.

So there I am thinking about every time the phrase “hospital gown” appears in Mountain Goats songs (it’s once). Time goes by more slowly without my Furpocalypse 2019 commemorative t-shirt. I’m doomscrolling again.

A knock at the door, another jump from me.

“Hello Mr. Herrick.”

It’s never not going to be weird to hear “Mr.”, like I’m supposed to be a respectable figure of any measure. But I digress.

“What am I doing today, doc?” I ask, eager to be helpful so I can go home. I’ve got cookies to decorate.

“Not. a. whole. lot.” he says, like a man who’s got too much to do and is bored of all of it.

“This physical is really just a formality,” he explains, going for the stethoscope and listening to my lungs. I wonder what secrets they tell him.

“You know, my wife was a librarian before we had our first child,” he offers, unprompted. “Weird stuff happens. Homeless people, stuff like that.”

“Well, that’ll happen when a library is one of the few non-monetized places in society,” I offer diplomatically.

“That man was loose for hours in the library before they caught him and got him out. Running this way and that. Crazy guy. This was in Connecticut though,” he says, as if this explains anything.

While he does this, with the same stethoscope that had just uncovered the buried truths of my lungs, he taps my knees. I kick softly, reflexively.

“Well, that’s about it. Congratulations,” he says. And he’s out of the door before I can look up from my involuntarily-kicking leg.

I put my shirt back on and walk out into the hallway back towards the lobby. The doctor is at the water cooler and has an air that suggests he’s never seen me before in his life. I walk past him thanklessly, go out through the waiting room, and return to my car.

I go home by following my instructions backward and before I know it am returned to my hearth and sweetheart. I disinfect myself and my clothes. I sit at the kitchen table and slather white icing on a penis-shaped cookie. It is a good day.

[shitihaveheardatwork]

new posts

as per the suggestions of a friend, I’m going to keep a work diary now that I’m officially employed as a librarian by the city of [redacted]. I’ll post entries from that diary here, now that I have a job again that’s likely to get me some stories.

[shitihaveheardatwork]

gimme that yellow lighter

You know, yellow really turns me on. I come by something yellow, especially unexpectedly, *customer gyrates* oooh mama!

[shitihaveheardatwork]

so my new manager is this betabro neckbeard with tiny glasses man and boy is he a disappointing man.

first day highlights include

-every electronic device being referred to as 'the bitch' during training.

-"Would Hillary really have done any better"

-"why didn't Obama just copy the Massachusetts health system? That works great." (fun fact he did)

-always having something unique and creepy to say about various female regulars

--"that girl is sooo close to wife material"

--"I swear I will marry that girl one day" (she just buys cigarettes while he talks at her)

--"she's almost perfect, but she just isn't there. girls like her are why I want to stay single. don't wanna get tied down"

he has worked at this gas station for ten years

he is the best employee, because he's never stolen stuff. the other employees either steal, hide from the customers, or refusing to train new employees. no one has ever been fired

TLDR love the new job

[shitihaveheardatwork]

“Perhaps signing your time sheet has made you feel off the hook. That was not the deal. That was crime. I am now dressing to buy food at store. Gotta make my cash last. Gotta eat. What could be in your head and heart?”

[shitihaveheardatwork]

Oh awesome it's just like the band!

the woman who checked into room 303