one

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

I may never see Dan again as long as I live. Which is fine, except, I like Dan.

Dan is one of the most annoying co-workers I worked with over the years, or at least so I thought for the first half dozen years I worked with him. Once I worked it all out though, the next 12 years with him were a joy; his absurd complaints, bizarre ideas of how things should be done, and highly emotional reactions to his work environment were like an entertaining unhinged cartoon version of my own. I've written about him plenty here in clerkmanifesto and once made a dramatic comedy film about him as an alcoholic with a dinosaur problem, so we're not going to go into all that again. But I will say that a couple of weeks ago, knowing that I was weeks from retirement, he confided, in the strictest confidence, that he would be taking a couple of months off for... something.

If someone takes you into the strictest confidence, and makes you swear to tell absolutely no one, the least they can do is actually tell you something that would, theoretically, be of interest to anyone, absolutely anyone at all! But no, Dan's confidential information, that he hadn't told anyone yet, was that he was going to be off for unspecified reasons.

"It isn't anything bad." He assured me.

Fascinating.

Every few years Dan has one of these 'absences'. Our general theory is that some kinds of medical procedures are going on. And as his closest work friend he has privately confided in me that... oh, wait, no. He hasn't confided anything to me. Well no, that's not right either. He has taken me into his strictest confidence to tell me...

nothing.

But at least it was only me he told.

I'm honored.

I guess it was a warning that one day he would stop being at the library until well after I was gone. And so... goodbye?

Unless he's at work today.

Time will tell, but it won't say much.

test to remove probably

Dan Dan Dan

I'll admit this might not be the most appropriate video project, nor one for me to have taken so seriously. But my co-worker Dan is something of a bizarre muse to me, amusing in stories, funny in a series of "Mini Dans in the library" pictures where he is so tiny he can hold up towering books like a human bookend, and now he is appealingly reproducible in AI video with his distinctive features and expressive... qualities. So the lark of putting him drunk in alleys with dinosaurs just sort of ran away with itself, leaving me with something approaching a two minute movie. Yes, twenty seconds might have been a more appropriate length for all of this, but there's simply so much irresistible Dan in this movie! Well, irresistible to me, and it even has the suggestion of a storyline! Although as to that, you'll have to supply a fair portion of it for yourself. 

I wrote a whole thing here about how to watch this now on clerkmanifesto and then found my video is simply too fat to show here, so we're back to directing you to YouTube, for today at least. Click on the picture to watch the (possibly painfully long- depends on how much of a Dan fan you are) video. 

It has meticulously crafted (only sort of fake) music, so turn up your stereo system.

The fun-pak

 

Today is a medium-sized fun-pak of entertainment on Clerkmanifesto.

First we start with a pretty good Library Promo, featuring a buffalo, which, as one of my co-workers so nicely informed me an hour ago, is the national animal of the United States of America.

At least until they change it into, I don't know, an angry dog barking in someone's yard.

Sorry, things are getting a bit dark here in the USA.

And this is supposed to be a fun-pak!

So maybe to get back on the fun trak start with a click through on the buffalo below. There is a good song with it too:

And, as if that wasn't enough, next is a trip back in time to exactly eight years ago to the day, and a post called "Dear Library Director".

I pick the year for these ahead of time on these throwbacks, predetermined, so they really are luck of the draw, and not in any way a best of, and...

...at first I was like, uncanny, I have hit gold.

But as I read on I was like...

Hmm, I don't know.

And then I was like...

Well, why don't you make up your own mind here. It's one of the things I like best about you.

So here is "Dear library director", from January 23, 2017.

Dear Library Director,



I'm just so tired.

I have been working here, if you can call it that, and I think you can, for over twenty-two years. Twenty-two years! Do you know how long that is? 

It's twenty-two years and then some, as I previously stated. I don't understand why there would be any confusion. 

I realize it is not so much the labors of my job that exhaust me. I have learned a great deal about how to mitigate those with a kind of "work on demand" approach. No, it is the pretense that exhausts me. Everyday I have to pretend. I frequently have to pretend I'm working. I have to pretend I have bosses who are in charge of me. I have to pretend I am a cog in a highly structured library machine. I have to pretend I am part of a reasonably run, hierarchical structure. I have to pretend that I am a library worker, a clerk.

I am not any of these.

I realize this may come as a surprise to you.

Allow me to outline my actual job:

I am a wild card. 


I am the trickster of the library, Coyote, the court jester. I am both its good fairy and the touch of acid to keep it honest. I am the library's blogger and its mascot. I am here to enjoy myself. I am the clutch hitter, the keeper of secrets that I will tell to anyone who deserves to know. And everyone who wants to know deserves to know. I am the visionary ignored, the history keeper, the bon vivant, and the teller of tales. I am he who makes our library into a living room, the bartender, the loose cannon, the flaneur watching soccer games in the teen room. I am the one who makes the whole library into a theatrical production of community theater. I am the hail mary pass, the giver of gifts, and the dreamer of library dreams. I am every cartoon ever drawn about books and libraries. I am a satire of bureaucracy, the wilderness at the heart of the library, the burning fusion mysteriously powering it forever, and that which must not be named.

And I am good at this job.

I was made for this job and have made this job mine.

But I am not nearly as good as I could be. I am held back by the false expectations that I should shelve when I'm supposed to shelve, that I should appear busy, that I am beholden to people who are allowed to tell me what to do. I am held back by the urgings of normalcy, industry, and conventionality. This is a painful fiction that serves no one. It merely frustrates my managers. It irritates the more confused of my co-workers, and it dampens my full exposure to the greater library.

It is a foolish consistency, the hobgoblin of little minds, it is Derwood to Samantha, and it is a trim for Samson's unwieldy hair. It is employing dementors to watch over the grounds of the library.

Free me.

Make me Clown Prince of the library. Trust danger. If there is no way around our entrenched structures then have me report to you, with the understanding that I report only to the mad little gods of the forest and to the books on our shelves. There is work to be done. Dark times are upon us. Now is not the time for us to cower in the shadows, now is the time for us to reach for the stars.


No, I am not the one who reaches for the stars. I am the one who creates the beautiful accidents that hurl us there.




In deep camaraderie and library devotion,







Feldenstein Calypso
Clown Prince of the library (provisional)
















And finally in our fun-pak, there are these test clips to see if I can upload video once again directly to clerkmanifesto. They are just short pieces of Dr. Seuss at the library, and one is "Dan with a dinosaur". They are designed so that if they don't work you won't have missed much, but if they do work...

Fun for the fun-pak!

(Update: They seem to work if you click on them a second time!)

Me, Dan, and the stormy night

 

On a night where the dire thunderstorms were rolling in it was just me and Dan for the evening. This is traditionally considered an emergency level of staffing. But fortunately it was busy, wait, no, back that up. It was unfortunate that it was busy. Also Dan likes to take breaks, and he is very committed to them.

So there I was at the front desk and with no one in the back room and, well,  with no one anywhere. A line had formed and I was also answering phones. The young people I work with don't understand that this is how things always used to be around here, back in the 90's and early aughts. Now it was just... nostalgic. I mean, I was putting people on hold. I was helping multiple people at a time. It was all happening!

I even picked up the phone while everyone was needing help and there was a deaf person on the phone!

It was okay though. They had an interpreter cause I can't use my sign language over the phone speaker.

Also I don't know sign language.

After what felt like hours of weather alarms, when the storm finally started, everyone disappeared, but Dan showed up, so that was nice. 

He was bidding on a scroll saw on his phone.

He didn't win.

Dan and the weather

 

On a rainy Monday, I am out at the front desk of the library with Dan. It is busy! And Dan is not happy about it.

"I don't understand why anyone would go out on a day like this!" He exclaimed.

He doesn't like the rain.

If he were home, he would be on the couch, he said.

And so, outraged, he went off to shelve requested books. 

And left me at the front desk to help everyone by myself.

But I don't mind. I like everyone. And I feel sorry for them. 

They're all wet.

Carefully engineered comedy routines

 

A library patron returned a book to me at the front desk of my library. The book had been in a little bit of a tussle with some water. The library patron was quite willing to pay any penalty for this, but as is my wont when patrons go all George-Washington-and-the-cherry-tree with me, I am inclined to forgive if possible in appreciation of the honesty, and to try to re-enact the fable.

I sent the patron on their way and stood up the book, titled "Insomnia", on the desk to hopefully dry it out to a useable condition. Eventually my desk partner, Dan, noticed the book and asked me about it. 

I explained briefly about the situation, holding the book up, and asked him if he had read it. 

Taking the bait, Dan said "No. I haven't. Have you?"

"I was up all night with it."

One of the people all of the time?

You probably can't please none of the people all of the time. But maybe you can not please one of the people all of the time? 

Let's take Dan, for example!

We keep our videogame discs behind the counter at my library. People bring us the empty case, we get the disc, and check it out. The first version of this involved unwieldy books full of sleeves of game discs. I did not devise that system, and by the time I managed to kill it we were up to four different books of games. It was universally despised as a system.

So I created another storage method with the discs in flip rows that one could leaf through. This was a far better method, but still unwieldy despite little improvements we tried to make to it over the years. For all of this time of this method, I had ideas of some kind of product that would hold the discs and flip without letting them flop or slip around when there are fewer discs, or overpack them when there are more. But no matter how I looked I could never find any product or design that would work.

My co-workers complained about the system we had during all these years. I took it a bit personally. I invited ideas as to how to fix it, but I never received a single sensible one. Dan, in particular, expressed his discontent with our system a thousand times.

And then one day I found it! Eureka. Some manufacturer made these little flip cases that slotted in DVD size discs. I managed to acquire what appeared to be the last ten in existence, pried off the lids they had that we didn't need, and arrayed them in a row of ten of them under our service desk counter. 

It is nearly a perfect system.

While some co-workers took the improvement for granted, some patiently listened to me rave about it, and some, gratifyingly,  thanked me for what I had done from the bottom of their hearts. 

Dan, though?

Dan said, "We used to keep forms under here where the discs are now, and it's become very confusing for me."

 

Library beeping

 

There are actually several stories I could tell you about the two loud high pitched beeping alarms that have been going off all day at the library I work at. The backroom beeping has since been fixed. Alas though, the beeping in the library entry continues on and is so maddening that most of the stories I could tell would be far too dark for such a sunny, heartwarming blog as is

CLERKMANIFESTO

herald of the angels and bestower of sunlight.

But I can probably manage to tell one story that does not descend into absolute madness and long diatribes about the County, about all management everywhere, and about the terrifying, threadbare fabric of America itself.

Plus the story I can tell you is super flattering to me. 

So those are always really fun. 

For me.

After a reasonably pleasant couple of hours walking around the Harriet Alexander Nature Area (pictures surely forthcoming), I arrived for work at the library a bit before 11:30. An insanely loud beeping was emanating from the fire suppression unit where our book return is. It was intoxicating in its loudness. I was quickly appraised of the situation. The alarm had been going on for three hours, both filling the back work room and, in the front lobby, filling the whole entry area of the library. That latter of these is where I am now, at the front desk, listening to some kind of modernized Edgar Allen Poe story, being driven slowly mad.

But we're not talking about that.

Everyone else in the back room was already fully insane when I arrived. Some were wearing earplugs. Property Management had been notified and immediately began napping. And so I knew it was up to me if I had any hope.

The alarm cabinet was open. I tried all the things everyone else surely tried. But I won't go into those details because

THEY WILL PROBABLY ENRAGE ME

 I found that if one hit the "Silence Alarm" button, it silenced it for one second, and then started again, but if one held that button down, it just kept clicking, and the alarm failed to engage. Without a lot of boring details, because it was a fussy and difficult to do, I managed to get this button taped down, silencing the alarm.

In a state of what I might best describe as smoldering righteousness, I went to take care of some bit of business on a computer. My longtime colleague Dan came up to me, earplugs stuffed in his ears, and teasingly said "You wanted the bookdrop turned on yesterday!" (It was closed due to some minor cement work on a curb). "And now look what you caused!" He gestured all around him.

I said "What do you mean? What did I cause?"

He gestured around madly. "The beeping!" He exclaimed.

"What beeping?" I asked mildly.

He took out one of his earplugs. He held up a finger for me to wait for the incoming beep.

It didn't come.

I looked at him quizzically.

He said, mystified "It was just beeping. It's been beeping all morning!"

"Oh, I fixed that." I said nonchalantly.

More reflections on Dan

 

I was out at the front desk of my library with a desk partner who was taking the lead on training a new employee. I was mostly shelving requested books and listening to Bruce Springsteen read his autobiography, but now I was all caught up on shelving and waiting for new request books to appear.

Appear they did! Dan came out with two oddly arranged carts.

"I could put these all crowded on one cart instead." Dan said, not meaning it.

"No this is fine." I replied. "As long as they're the first half of the alphabet on one cart, and the second half on the other, as opposed to two complete run throughs of the alphabet." I knew full well they were the latter. Then I said a few more absurd things to Dan and suddenly realized that our new trainee was soaking this all in.

So I turned to the trainee and said "Just so you know, I would never talk to a co-worker or a library patron like this. Dan is a very special case."

The trainee wondered about this so I endeavored to explain:

"Dan is on the axis between the most irritating person you can imagine and a dearly beloved stuffed animal."

Still no Christmas pictures

 

Yesterday I may have said a few things about a colleague I called "Dan" in order to protect Dan's identity. I implied that he took 10 to 15 cigarette breaks every day. I implied this subtly by saying "Dan takes 10 to 15 cigarette breaks every day." In reading it over I realized it is accurate, but perhaps fails to fully capture Dan's charm.

So I include today this picture of Dan. The Christmas aspects of the picture are incidental and I would not include an actual Christmas picture until after Thanksgiving.

So, to repeat, this is a picture of Dan, to demonstrate his charms, and not, except by accident, a Christmas picture.

A Christmas picture would look more like the following example, and so you will not be seeing any pictures like this until after Thanksgiving.

I'm glad we could clear all this up. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

My desk partner

 

I'm out here on the front desk with a colleague who likes to take 12 to 15 cigarette breaks a day. But don't worry, these breaks only go on for 20 to 30 minutes each and we like him, so it's okay, sort of. For the expediency of this account we'll just call this co-worker "Dan", because, well, maybe that's his name.

I said I was out here at the front desk with Dan, but of course he was on a cigarette break so a colleague of ours came out as his proxy.

"I'm Dan for the next 15 minutes." She said, respectfully pretending it would only be 15 minutes.

"If you're going to be Dan," I commented "You're probably due for a cigarette break."

And then a vision came to me. As she left for a cigarette break a new proxy for Dan would come out, and so on, and so on, and so on, until every last library worker was out in the parking lot, smoking cigarettes and looking for owls in the trees back there.

We don't get many owls back there, but the journey is more important than the destination.

Dans out of control

 

I am sitting here on my lunch break, which comes in the evening, wearing a t-shirt with a picture of one of my co-workers on it. It was sent to me by my co-worker and friend, Jim. Yes, I am wearing a t-shirt featuring one of my co-workers!

 And as I sit here, in a co-worker t-shirt, I am working on mock-ups for improving my library with giant pictures of another co-worker, Dan. 

Like this one below:

Or there's this one, with three pictures:

Which naturally led to this more complex motif that I really think my library should do for real here.

And as satisfying as these pictures were I felt they were missing something...

Yep, you got it. They didn't have enough Dans in them!

The incomplete ascent of Minnehaha Creek

 

Today I went on a bike ride, but this isn't the sort of post where I tell you all about it and show you a hundred pictures. 

I found myself heading upstream along Minnehaha Creek. I love this creek. It runs down through all of Southwest Saint Minneapolis. It goes over a famous falls shortly before coming to the Mississippi River. 

It's famous because a poet wrote:

"Hark!" she said; "I hear a rushing,

Hear a roaring and a rushing,

Hear the Falls of Minnehaha

Calling to me from a distance!"

And this poem (there's more than what I included) went super viral in 1885. 

People were into different stuff in the olden days is the only way I can explain it. Like, for instance, the favorite food back then was turtles! I never ate a turtle. And I hardly ever read long narrative poems either. I might like both, but when

What's that?

You only have a few minutes?

Sure. So I was biking up Minnehaha Creek, above the Falls. And I thought "This creek runs all the way up to Dan's house!"

Dan is a person I work with at the library, and sometimes I write about him here because he is on the super short list of co-workers I am allowed to discuss by name. Though I have known Dan for 15 or so years, finding him terribly annoying for the first five, and oddly endearing the last ten, I have never seen him outside of the library or off the library grounds. I thought "If I make it all the way up to his house I will call him on my phone and say 'I am outside'."

I don't know why. The idea just appealed to me. And for reasons related to bird identification I have Dan's number. Although I was only vaguely aware of where his house was.

So I kept biking up the creek towards Dan's house, which is pretty ritzy, but not really his, but that's a whole long story and I know you're in a hurry. His house is like practically next door though to Charles Schulz's old house, which is an anecdote I can't resist no matter how frantic everyone's life is around here, what with the stuff you have to get to and all that stuff with your big hurry which is fine and I totally understand. I get super busy too sometimes!

I came to a bridge. I got off my bike. Up the creek was a fabulous blue heron.

"Wow" I said.

I spent the next hour following it around and taking hundreds of pictures of it.

I'll show you just one of them, okay? At the end.

But it was a super nice time with that heron.

My Grandmother on my Father's side's maiden name was Heron. Though maybe it was spelled differently. 

Yes, this is another of those anecdotes I couldn't resist.

So anyway, hanging out with a heron is what I did instead of maybe, but probably not, surprising Dan.

Dan likes birds, so he'll appreciate it.

Puns going up and puns going down

This will contain the first version with the straight spelling and the second version with the pun spelling. It is a mostly true story.


Straight:

I was at the front desk with Dan during the pandemic. Things had fallen off as they do with curbside pickup at the library during the evening and, because he does some freelance work as a house painter, he was researching different products online that would help him climb down from things, and he was also researching products that would help him climb up on things.

I watched at a distance over his shoulder, then offered my opinion. "If you're going to get one of those I'd get the latter."

He just turned and stared at me.


Pun version:

I was at the front desk with Dan during the pandemic. Things had fallen off as they do with curbside pickup at the library during the evening and, because he does some freelance work as a house painter, he was researching different products online that would help him climb down from things, and he was also researching products that would help him climb up on things.

I watched at a distance over his shoulder, then offered my opinion. "If you're going to get one of those I'd get the ladder."

He just turned and staired at me.

How much fun I'm having right now

Once again time is mercurial at work. For an hour I am scheduled on "Project time" which is a pretty good gig wherein I can freely work on my "projects". So naturally the hour moves along at a blinding pace. You know you're in trouble when you can see the minute hand moving. Put me somewhere I don't like and the second hand will move more slowly than that minute hand.

Not that there's anywhere I don't like.

Nevertheless I got through what I needed to do with my more functional project, that is, the ordering of supplies for the library, in just under half an hour, and I was able to move onto my more amorphous, albeit more essential project, which is my role as the Clown Prince of the library.

I had just put out a fresh handful of the small USB drives we sell to the public for a couple of dollars so that they can scan documents on our copy machine (No charge!). Sometimes we go through these USB drives at a terrifying (for me, who is responsible for keeping them stocked) pace, but other times, like these slow, pre-holiday weeks, I don't need to fill the USB drive bin very often. So naturally I turned to one of my colleagues working the front desk.

"Luke" I said. "I don't want to be critical, but you're not moving the USB drives at the rate we were hoping. Perhaps with each patron you could say something like 'Thank you for using the Library. Can we interest you before you go in one of our USB drives at the special year-end price of two dollars?'"

Luke feigned concern quite well, with just the right touch of looking alarmed that he had let us all down. "How many units should I be moving, say, in an hour, do you think?"

I love when my co-workers play along so well!

"Just three or four." I said. "We're not asking for the world, but every USB drive we don't sell is a dime profit we miss out on."

He looked relieved. "Only three or four? I think I could do three or four." He said, with a touch of up-for-the-challenge moxie in his voice.

I sidestepped over to his desk partner, Dan, and I gestured at him. "I don't expect you to do the nine or ten Dan does, of course. Dan has worked professionally in sales."

Luke nodded his head understandingly.

That taken care of I headed to the back room. There was a librarian there. I considered going over and saying some variation on "Hi, I'm spreading cheer!" But I happened to glance at the clock. My hour was up! Project time was over and I needed to go to the automated check in machine.

Now you tell me, you have been reading along, do you see anyway that the exchange I illustrated above with Luke could have taken 30 minutes?

And yet, somehow it did. Hell, writing this whole, detailed account of the thing only took...

Oh crap, its 3:30?

It took 17 hours!