#iberry jaerb

[mappingthemoon]

furious that my library director used tough love on me and it's working >:|

[mappingthemoon]

finally got to use the line "ma'am. i am a manager librarian" because this one lady got big mad and demanded to speak to a librarian after i explained for the third time that we may not have the document her ai told her we had and would she please submit a reference request form so that someone could search the archive and get back to her. sigh.

[mappingthemoon]

my library is migrating to a new and terrible ils this summer and i am, ugh, finally coming to terms with the fact that i am really truly going to have to find a new job because i simply cannot deal.

without getting too much into the technical details: i am a cataloger, which is essentially data entry work, and when your job involves "touching computer all day for money," you just don't want to be fucking around with an interface that requires a lot of mouse-clicking and -scrolling. there are a lot of other issues, such as a god-awfully un-accessible layout that is somehow both too much extraneous crap crammed onto the screen and too much white space, a total inability to do the kind of analytics we regularly do in our current system, the loss of a lot of our historical metadata that can't be mapped into the new system, having to redo metadata cleanup that we've already done from our last migration 8 years ago (!!!), and just, like, not being able to do basic catalog maintenance tasks like moving an item from one holding to another or properly shelf-listing non-LC call numbers. people who sit wayyy up at the tippity-top of our institutional hierarchy and know nothing about library work made this decision years ago because they thought it would save us money and the end result is going to be the enshittification of our catalog (bad for users) and our daily workflows (bad for employees).

so now i'm in this dumb and precarious position of trying to figure out what the fuck to do with my ~career~ as an overeducated 40-something woman lol. certainly this is not the worst problem in the world to have rn, but also, from my personal perspective, it is like, basically a giant cosmic turd laid upon whatever it is i've been working to build up for myself over the past ~20 years of "trying to get my life back on track." i've been at the same library for over 10 years and the job i have now is the job i had been slowly (SLOWLY) but steadily advancing towards since day one... and now i'm barely two years into the position, finally feeling a bit comfortable in my role, and this fucking software is going to make my 9-5 life absolute hell. like, i genuinely enjoy the work of cataloging, it's kind of incredible to me that they have designed a way to make it so very terrible. i'm trying not to be a total baby about this but jfc no one wants to go to work everyday and deal with a garbage-ass machine that adds 10 extra steps to your procedures and/or doesn't even do the basic things you need to do for your job, you know?

anyway, idk. i have my eye out for job postings but it all feels so overwhelming. if i want to stay in special collections, or even if i want to stay in libraries at all (precarious itself in the current political climate, har har), i would most likely have to move, and while i never expected to stay in this town as long as i have, i don't have any strong feelings about where else i might want to live, other than i'm pretty sure i don't want to live in a place with actual winter, which limits my selection because most of the special collections cataloger jobs i see are in new england or at least the northern us. (and yet! i always keep a lil window of consideration open to returning to pittsburgh because my parents are getting older and i don't know my nieces & nephews as much as i'd like to, i feel the distance more and more every year and it might be time for me to stop being so prodigal, ugh, so all there's all that thrown into the mix as well.) i remember when library school felt like an impossible goal but i did it and now i almost feel like i painted myself into a corner by specializing in the thing i wanted to do. it is slim pickins out there already, i can't afford to take a pay cut with all the debt i'm carrying, i don't know what else to do at this "stage of life" and i hate that it feels almost like a sinful luxury to even want to have a job that i don't despise & won't destroy my mental & physical health for the next ~30 years of my working life. i know that i am resilient af and i will always do what i have to do, even if that means going back to washing dishes for minimum wage again in order to survive but like, BIG SIGH, goddamn. please give a bitch a break :(

[mappingthemoon]

person i supervise asks ai to do certain cataloging tasks then asks me to confirm whether it's correct. i am ready 2 die

[mappingthemoon]

sitting in the meeting not paying attn bc i am liveblogging shit-talk into my dept's slack channel

[mappingthemoon]

guy who called the ref desk: so i was brainstorming with my ai and it told me i should contact a library for help with my project

[mappingthemoon]

i used to get so pissed off about office small talk because people would always be discussing different restaurants and brands of food they liked and favorite flavors of seltzer water and i just thought this was the most asinine mind-numbing conversational topic…. Realizing after 12 years and more salary that i was simply butthurt about not being able to afford FOOD haha

[mappingthemoon]

SUMMER IS OVER & WE ARE NOT YET SAVED

exceptionally shitty email behavior this week. first thing monday morning, HR announces health insurance changes for next year: premium increasing from $97 to $105/mo for essentially unusable insurance ($3200 deductible, $5500 out-of-pocket max, wow such freedoms) + HSA match reduced from $375 to $325/year. but you can optionally sign up to do bullshit "challenges" and share some of your health info with a corporate third party and you'll get a taxable "bonus" of $100 at end of year! then, first thing SATURDAY (today) morning, student loans (the u.s. govt) emails me to say i'm getting kicked off the income-based repayment plan since they've determined i am no longer experiencing a financial hardship, har-dee-har-harr. oh also discovered that they've raised the price of vending machine cokes at my work from $2.25 to $2.50/bottle so there goes my little friday treat. right now i'm currently (procrastinating on) compiling a dossier of my work "accomplishments" over the past 2.5 years in order to justify my petition to be promoted from librarian I to II, which, if approved, will result in a salary increase of a measly $2000 which won't take effect until next july anyway and honestly that would barely cover the recent increase in fucking grocery/household essentials i already struggle to afford. what the fuck. and i have to take care of this shit on the fucking weekend because my brain is fried and i'm interrupted five thousand times a day at the office and they cancelled telework and why would my institution actually hire enough people to do the amount of work we need to do when they could just hire the bare minimum and leverage vocational awe + lack of real job choices in the region and then guilt someone else into the position whenever i inevitably have a fucking nervous breakdown and rage-quit (one can only hope!!!). these motherfuckers hired a whole-ass consulting firm to do a bunch of surveys and focus groups and shit and then report back that uhh, well, we're some of the lowest-paid employees of our type in the entire region & maybe, just maybe, improving employee salaries, benefits, and work/life balance can totally reduce turnover and boost productivity and morale but like. what if we just hired a bunch more middle managers with made-up jobs and did yet another organizational restructure and changed all the underlings' job titles/levels instead.....

anyway sorry to come on here and do nothing but complain i am just so burnt out and so sick of precarity and i guess i really do need to find a new job before i explode... :/ UGH!