There are some mysteries I will never solve.
One that I have discussed here in the past involves the replacement of staff at my library. One would think, with all the billions of different, aye, unique, people in the world, that when some strange, idiosyncratic person leaves my library, a completely different sort of person would replace them.
But no.
It's like a specific space is vacated when a person leaves, and somehow an eerily similar person fills that void. They may even be a wildly different person in some general way, even personally, but as a co-worker, when it comes to their assets, foibles, and social place, they are weirdly the same. Oh, it may not be the direct replacement hour for hour, but in some short amount of time someone will come along and unerringly fill those shoes with a disturbing amount of precision.
A case in point: The worst person I ever worked with, who I wrote about many times here as "the worst of us", a person who could take 45 minutes to write a single sentence note on a patron record, or warp time around her to send all meaningful work to her colleagues, or quietly create errors that would filter out into agonizing time consuming clogs all over the library, finally retired after a couple of decades. And it was an unbelievable relief. Everything felt just a little bit lighter, like floating, for months to come.
But today I worked with a substitute, who was a serious problem when we were training them in. This person was never really up to the job, but got passed along anyway, as we regularly do, and now seems to be showing up for more and more shifts. I was out at the front desk with this person. The day was busy. And I couldn't help notice it taking her 15 minutes to help every library visitor with absurdly simple two-minute things. I couldn't help see her thrown wildly by every tiny problem. I couldn't not see that frozen, birdlike stare on her face, knowing that she would always make the wrong choice, but only a long period of profound frozen befuddlement.
"She's back." I thought, with dread.
Ah well.
Everything changes now that I know I will be retiring from the library in just eight or nine months. No matter how bad it turns out, I won't have to live with it or with her for very long. This kind of unnerving, demoralizing, mystifying replacement is no longer what freaks me out so much.
I now leave that horror to this thought:
Who will be replacing me?
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