She ain't dead, she's only sleeping

The worst of all my librarian co-workers has been with us for decades. The litany of 35 years of casual, bumbling, and oblivious malfeasance is far too vast to properly catalog here. From my early days at the library handling her obsessive family's relentless phone calls, through an enormously committed laziness, all the way to an end point of being unable to do anything herself, she has been forcing irritating extra work out of every single one of her co-workers, whether they know it or not, for as long as she has been employed by my library system.

But the end game is now in play. She is completely falling apart before our eyes. I hate to say this, but she gives every appearance of dying slowly in front of us. The extremity of this has elicited some sympathy among my co-workers and I, but it is happening with such a burdensome slowness, and with such a consistency with all that came before, that nearly all of that humanity has been betrayed and burned out of us.

Recently this terrible and tragic librarian has been causing a stir by falling asleep at the main reference desk of our library. Some of my co-workers say this reflects rather poorly on the rest of us. On the one hand I can't say they don't have a point there. A local newspaper recently did a feature article on what an incredibly busy library ours is. Oddly, the accompanying pictures of our branch were nearly devoid of people, but it was hard not to reflect on what it would have been like if instead of that they showed a picture of our morbidly sick and disabled senior citizen librarian completely conked out at our totally unvisited reference desk.

But I did say that on the one hand I can see that her sleeping at the reference desk is a serious problem. There is, however, the other hand. 

On the other hand, sleeping, she has never, in thirty-some years, been nearly as good a librarian, nor one quite so pleasant to work with.