A longtime co-worker of mine, who I have always liked quite well enough, has gone up to shelve some fiction before me. I follow in her wake. Not only does it turn out that I am shelving twice as fast as her (which I try not to put too much store in, as my own shelving speed ranges from "My god you are freakishly productive" all the way down to "You know, you have to actually put the books on the shelf for them to be "shelved""), but, more importantly, I am finding that she is completely ignoring and bypassing all the plentiful books that have been looked at and abandoned messily in the stacks, and is just leaving a mess for me. She is not re-shelving or cleaning up anything that needs to be taken care of.
I really don't want to know this about her.
I don't want to see my amiable, pleasant, friendly colleagues, who every once in awhile I must rely on, and who are part of the mosaic of work and place we all at the library make in tandem, I don't want to see them being pointlessly obstructionist or misleading to a patron, I don't want to see them bumping up a full bin so someone else will have to replace it two minutes after they're gone, and I don't want to see them ignoring the simplest of responsibilities that are right before them merely because they're a tiny bit more irritating than their other responsibilities. Furthermore, while we're at it, I don't want to see my pleasant co-worker's Republican bumper sticker, or their crappy parenting, or find out in the break room that their lunch is a shredded human flesh sandwich.
"Oh," They say. "You didn't know I was a cannibal?"
I mumble something awkwardly in response and wander off, urgently willing myself to believe I misheard them. "Yes." I mutter to myself. "What they asked is if I didn't know that they're Catalan, not cannibal. I must have misheard "human flesh" for "Spanish goat dish"."
I find for the most part that I like who I like among my co-workers, and that includes most of them. And the fact is, though I occasionally try to, I have never been much good at looking away or at glossing over. For all I might think I look away, I can give you a pretty shocking detailing of all my co-workers' professional weaknesses, along with a good many of all their other ones as well.
Actually, I can do the same for myself.
In the end the truth outs.
I suppose I can take it if you can.
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