For many years my library has been understaffed. There is so much complexity in that statement that I despair of conveying it in all its nuance and meaninglessness. So let us simplify:
1. We were increasingly understaffed in the sense of losing staff hours, that is, losing hours of people working in library circulation, and not replacing them.
But...
2. We were mildly understaffed in terms of people not working all that hard to be occasionally almost caught up and usually a little behind in a non-problematic way.
And in those years of being either severely understaffed by five or so employees, or mildly understaffed merely by our need to complain to each other instead of working, the quality of our staff got... pretty good?
As good as it has ever been?
But like in those fantasy books that always faintly annoy me, where the sage wizard talks about how good and evil are always in balance, and if something good comes along in the great scheme of things, so must something bad come along too, our small, but mildly competent staff, that was slightly too small, has suddenly been engulfed in a flood of new hires. Positions that have been open for half a decade have been filled along with ones that have been open for a couple months. And every other position in-between.
It is a lot of new people!
Is this the good thing, or the bad thing?
Though there are different skill levels so far among these four or five new hires, they sadly range from the tragic level of the worst person I have ever worked with, whose like I mistakenly thought I would never see again, to...
A little better than that?
And yet, it is a lot of people to throw at any problem. If the shelving backs up, it doesn't stay that way for long when there are always four people to send off to the stacks.
And if when I am off to shelve all I really do the whole time is fix terrifyingly shocking mistakes, ah well, the wizards all say:
Something good is coming my way soon.