Wow did I have a lot of co-workers today!
I don't know why. All I can say is that sometimes I'm basically alone in my giant library, taking care of everything, and sometimes there are 15 other people around all ostensibly doing my exact same job.
Mysteriously the same amount of work gets done in either situation. I call that "The law of institutional averages". The larger the institution the more impervious it is to change. In a library the size of mine, this means that on a given day whether one person is working, or sixteen, it doesn't make much of a difference. It would take several days for everything to really begin falling apart.
The real impact, short term, of all these co-workers everywhere is that it is exhausting! There are so many people to talk to! And if those people want to talk to me, that is exhausting! And if those people don't want to talk to me, that is exhausting too!
So I go upstairs to the fiction section to shelve, but there are like six co-workers up there. What are they all doing? They're not shelving. But surely they're doing something important. Maybe they've simply spread there, like water in a flood. There are so many library workers today that we are just naturally spreading out to fill out every bit of unused space in the building.
It's hard to breathe.
But I've been here before. This is temporary. Soon this fecundity of co-workers will be gone and it will be quiet and understaffed in my library once again. We will see only the marks of the receded library workers, two shelves up on the library stacks upstairs, where all the books are in order up to a level, and then a mess above that.
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