The last in service day

 

Today I was at what I presume will be my last In Service Day for the library. I have a medium long history of writing about them in this space, and usually my comments on them express very little affection.

 Today's feature presentation was on Inclusivity, which has been the general passion of all training and education from the county at my library for almost half a decade now. It feels all very, I don't know, Soviet? It's like we are being trained with fanatical zealousness at the behest of people who have never really thought much about any of this, or any of the hard things it would take to improve any of it, but really like the sound of it. It is from people who think they can order inclusivity.

It wasn't the worst day though. There are many people throughout my library system that I really like. And I spent as much of the day as I could at the Clerkmanifesto Cafe.

The Clerkmanifesto Cafe? Ah...

(Click through for song and tableau)

The telling question

 

I am, alas, unable to attend my library's half day, spring version of In Service Day. It's not that I refuse outright to attend In Service Days, merely that everything has to happen just perfectly for me to be there. A twinge in my back or the back of my throat, too many misshelved books in non fiction, or a proposed breakout session topic that offends my delicate sensibilities are each on their own enough for me to be unable to attend. But the eliminating trigger this time is the more mundane fact that it is not my normal day to work and I see no advantage in altering my schedule.

As I write about this it is the day before In Service Day. The main discussion among my colleagues in preparation is about how our new library director will be fielding anonymous questions from the audience. One co-worker asked me for a suggestion, and though terrible things occurred to me, I knew they would bear no fruit. Despite knowing just about nothing regarding this person, anyone able to have a meteoric professional rise to the director at such a young age (our new director is not yet 40!) is surely able to provide a non informative, politic answer to any challenging question that we could think of.

And yet as discussions continued towards the end of the day, I was asked again, by others, if I had any questions for our new director. Clearly something telling was wanted. And then, finally, at the last minute, inspiration hit!

"Yes," I said. "Ask him: 

"What do you have against the Jews?""

In Service Day 2021

 

As you read this I am off to my first In Service Day in five or six years. In past years I have avoided it by fleeing the country for Europe, which seemed like a classy, novelistic approach. The plan this year is that due to the Pandemic our library system gathers for In Service Day in a small assortment of our library locations, to spread out, then we crowd into the main meeting rooms therein, and watch various managerial self promotion presentations on a big screen for hours on end. 

But as ever the real challenge for me will be to not become consumed by my hate.

I usually manage this pretty well until we get to the insulting lunch of In Service Day. But I swear I'll do better this year! I just heard one of my colleagues tell a younger colleague about how lunch is the highlight of the day! A thin cheese sandwich made by a Thai restaurant is the highlight of the day!

 There are a lot of different people in this world. 

Some of them get very strange.

Meanwhile, because it has barely come up here in my daily missives  for half a dozen years, some of you (the luckiest of you!) may be wondering what our Library In Service Day actually is.

Here is a helpful primer that will explain it:

In Service Day FAQ

What is In Service Day?

I really have no idea.

In Service Day, 2019

Yesterday my library system had its now biannual In Service Day. It was scheduled on my day off so I didn't go. But the truth is I never go to these things. Yes I hate them. Yes I am on vacation, or very sick, or have no good way to get there. But I'm not sure any of those are the true reason.

Whatever the reason is though I miss out on all the meaningless classes, the vast institutional double speak, the wretched insult of a lunch, and the borderline punative top down bureaucratic affronts to the staff, to the taxpayers, and to the library itself. I miss out on the poor planning, and I miss being herded into shoddily arranged meeting areas, and I miss the miserable box lunch.

Oh, right, I already mentioned the lunch. I really hate the lunch. Did you know that one year it was cheese sandwiches made by a Thai Restaurant? That was one of the better years.

None of my co-workers like In Service Day. And when I see them afterwards they tell me of their resentment. But their resentment is still miniscule compared to my own. I am the master of resentment. I am the veritable Messi of resentment. My resentment is elaborate, unending, and almost magical. I resent In Service Day with my whole heart, with a chalkboard list of a thousand reasons, with a critique that runs for hours. It is a wild, irrational, gigantic, and grandiose resentment.

And so in the end that is probably why I don't go. I don't want to make anyone, in the mildness or their resentment, feel inferior.

More adventures in multiculturalism

The hideously run In Service Days of my library system are one of the banes of my existence, but oddly I didn't much mind this year's In Service Day. In fact, I enjoyed it immensely. I think the key for me this year was in flying to Rome and observing it at a distance,  unaware it was happening, sipping fresh juices on a couch in a Renaissance Palace, looking out over the baroque domes and roof gardens of the city. A simple solution, but elegant.

Nevertheless, upon my return, reports reached me, fascinating reports. And my favorite report is the one about lunch. Well, it's about lunch, but it's about multiculturalism as well.

My library system's feverish commitment to diversity and multiculturalism is of the highest order, so long as you don't count who we hire for any managerial positions, or really any positions of authority, or how we treat the public, all of which would fit in comfortably with Minnesota in the 1950s. But other than that we're right on top of it with mandatory training that has no practical application, occasional public programming, and a concerted effort to hire diversely in direct proportion to whatever job pays least.

It's a start. Possibly an end too. But that doesn't mean my library system has given up. So this year when it came time to order the In Service Day lunch, instead of the hideous gruel known as the Jimmy Johns box lunch, it was decided we would use a local Thai cafe to provide the food.

Thai food! Thai owners! Diversity. Multiculturalism!

A spark of gustatory thrill ignited through the stomachs of our library community. Could we possibly be getting tasty, interesting, maybe even real food on In Service Day?

The day came. I woke up and went with my wife for a cappuccino at Sant' Eustachio before a wander through ancient streets to astonishing sights of pure loveliness. But back in Minnesota my co-workers went to In Service Day. And the thought of a Thai lunch sustained them through strange, droning lectures. Expectation built until the noon hour. Lunch came. And it was in boxes.


Wait, boxes? 

Yes, boxes, boxes with meat sandwiches on white bread. Boxes with condiment packages of mustard and mayonnaise. Boxes with bags of potato chips. Somehow the Thai Restaurant had provided an even worse box lunch than Jimmy Johns had. I didn't even know such a thing was possible. What happened?

In a spark of commitment to diversity the library hired a Thai Restaurant. But as evidence that none of the four years of diversity training had any effect they specially asked for boxed lunches of American Food.

It was very funny. In Rome. Nibbling grilled eggplant. And drinking a lot of wine.

Jimmy Johns

I'd like to introduce you to my new sponsor: Jimmy Johns. No, I personally loathe the sandwich shop, but, sadly, I am always desperate to raise enough cash to afford ever more expensive cheeses. Even with sponsorship I am not likely to anytime soon be able to try a Swedish Moose Cheese that's about $500 a pound, but I am certainly ready for Gorau Glas, a Welsh cows milk blue that goes for at least $40 a pound, or the Italian Bitto, at about $55 a pound. Not that Jimmy Johns would know a tolerable cheddar from a piece of cardboard.

Oops. There I go about Jimmy Johns again. But don't worry, I am violating no terms, they're not really a new sponsor. I'd be as likely to take them on as a sponsor as I would be inclined to turn to my occasional friend Bob Dylan and say "You've got to admit, it was a mistake for you to go electric."  Actually,  I should totally do that. There's something about his "You clown" look that I find endearing.

Every In Service Day my Library serves us box lunches from Jimmy Johns. I try not to make a fuss and instead just quietly go get food elsewhere. But I do make a small fuss. And I think very dark thoughts about my co-workers, who all seem to like these box lunches and don't dump the food contemptuously on the floor crying out "I've never been so insulted in my life!" I also like to spend most of the afternoon fantasizing about having a breakout session on how commercial, mass market meat is raised in America until everyone is sick to their stomach.

But then, a couple days ago, I walked into the break room. We were having a big Friends of the Library book sale and during the sale prep they bring in guys from the County Workhouse to help move stuff, prisoners really. These guys were sitting in the break room, covered in tattoos, pale and muscly and out of jail for a bit. They were having lunch, from Jimmy Johns. And the first thing I heard, as I walked into the room to make my cappuccino, or maybe grab a piece of Bleu d'Auvergne cheese, was one guy saying, with true pleasure and appreciation:

"This is the best food I've had since I've been locked up."

And that's my story about Jimmy Johns.

Greatest In Service Day ever!

My library's In Service Day was pretty amazing, and the reason I'm only outlining my personal experience with the day, as opposed to telling you the full variety of options that were offered to everyone during the day, is in a desperate attempt to try and mitigate your inevitable jealousy. But even with my mitigation the cause is hopeless, you will be writhing in agony as you read this account, eating your own heart out from the inside. Sorry.


8:30:   I arrive promptly for the start of the day breakfast only to find the breakfast buffet is vacated. While bagels, doughnuts, and coffee are on offer, it turns out they have to be eaten on one's own time. Too many fine things are ahead of us for them to pay us to eat as well.


8:32:   I arrive in the program room two minutes late, juggling a half of a bagel and a large coffee. All eyes turn to me from the presentation. Are they thinking "What is wrong with people? What's so hard about showing up 15 minutes early?!" No. They are thinking "Help me. Please god help me."


8:32 - 9:45:   Opening "State of the Library" presentation by upper library management. The general gist of the presentation? "Libraries have been growing less popular over the past four years, but don't worry, we are fully committed to our plan to become more like community centers and less like libraries." Actually I'm kidding. That wasn't the gist, it was the entirety of the content.


9:45 - 10:   Chair moving.


10:00 - 12:30:   Assembled by name tag numbers into groups of six, we... nope, it's all gone. I remember writing stuff down on paper for our group, a sense of crushing despair, and I remember... nope, it's all gone. I can't possibly be expected to retain such rich content for a full 36 hours after the event!


12:30 - 1:30:   I abandoned the fast food box lunches that most people are perfectly happy with, but that fill me with rage and hatred, in order to go out to a nice lunch with Jim. Please see pictures on Jim's phone where the food, which was actually only moderately good, looks extremely delicious due to modern phone technology and Jim's growing skill at food photography.


1:30 - 2:30:  Bland, information free presentation on mental illness issues. This was cleverly planted into the middle of the day to make all the other presentations look scintillating by comparison. After the session let out I stared for ten minutes at the janitor closet door in a state of rapt wonder.


2:30 - 2:45:  Post session assimilation period (see above), followed by opportunity to horde small packages of nuts to snack on for the remainder of the week.


2:45 - 2:48:  I arrived fashionably late at the session on "Micro Aggression" to find that the presenter hadn't arrived, or was waylaid, or didn't feel like getting out of bed, and so was speaking to us from the Internet while we watched a giant screen of a computer doing nothing. A look of insulted disgust crossed my face and I said firmly "No." As I walked out I wondered if I was expressing a micro aggression.


2:48 - 3:45:   I squeezed into a crowded presentation on the last of our major library building projects.  That the library in question is going to look exactly like all libraries look these days was no news to me at all, but that we are cutting down so many trees to build this library that we have to pay blood money to the local municipality was strangely encouraging. It is the historical mission of libraries everywhere to kill trees.


3:45 - 4:30:   Branch meeting. It was resolved that we can do nothing about the smelliest patron we have ever had unless we can catch him in the act of peeing on one of our chairs. And it has to be an upholstered one. If we can just wipe it down it doesn't count.


4:30 - 4:45:   Wrap up. A tad awkward as we had done nothing of any note for the entire day. That can be hard to summarize! We were encouraged to help ourselves to any food that was left and to take it home with the blessings of the library administration. The remaining food consisted at that point of three unwrapped from the package Target "Archer Farms" muffins.  We were also richly instructed in the final chair moving procedures.


4:45 - 5:00:   Chair moving.





Sweet nothing.

  

Another in service day

Oh, feh, another In Service Day come, and gone. I am never keen on these things; the food not to my standards, the trifling, tedious breakout sessions, the closing of the sacred library to the public for a whole day, and, of course, the perversely early start time that has nothing to do with the normal work days of any library. I have been burned so many times on these In Service Days that I was even planning to work on a blog post during the day: Ten Lousy Things About In Service Day. And before I get all mushy about this wholly adequate In Service Day, let me say that I still could do that list. Stick with this blog long enough and you will see that list. Stick with this blog long enough and you will see that list seven or eight times!

But not today.

No, no, not today.

In Service day was lovely. I was in the mood for a bagel. And cream cheese. I had an awful lot of fun at the break out session devoted to playing with children's room apps for iPad. I think I've been playing the wrong sort of video games. I don't like stabbing Orcs! I like making pretty pictures on a touch screen by moving felt around! And though that session was pretty short, I was okay with all the rest of the sessions too. My big fear for the day had to do with some bizarre afternoon plan to watch a DVD about Race and have a discussion. But here was the biggest shocker! It was a three-part PBS series, three hours long, so there was no time at all for any discussion, and it was very interesting, informative, and, vastly the most important, entertaining.

I thought I was going to be totting up my grievances, but no, I was paid to play super cute video games and watch educational television. Be still my inner 14-year old's heart, they payed me $60 to watch a TV show! This slacker thanks the Library Gods.

Wot I Learned: In Service Day

I approached this year's Fall In Service day with a touch of jaundice in my anticipation. To start small, the day itself works badly as a reorganization of my personal schedule. Also I had a mysterious presentiment about the bagels. Furthermore, as a Clerk of the People, I take it hard when we close the Library to those heartbreaking and heartbroken masses. But, perhaps most of all, the schedule of events for the day was seriously unappealing. The keynote for the day was a long, all staff session with the Sheriffs Department to learn about mass shootings in the workplace. I looked up the odds of a mass shooting in the Library and decided that the session should have been on what to do if you, or one of your co-workers, are chosen to be the All Powerful Ruler of the Universe, as this event is at once slightly more likely, and vastly more entertaining to anticipate, than a mass shooting.

To my surprise I learned a great deal during the day. Unfortunately it did not have anything to do with any of the things I was supposed to learn from the day. But isn't the learning the key thing? I think so, and that's why I will now share with you the things I learned from this year's In Service Day.

1. Get to the bagels early, and if you want more than half of one, grab spares and shove them in your pockets.

2. If a bag of nuts with a grade higher than "Peanut" appears on the food table, you should seize it immediately and act as if you just won the Miss America Pageant.

3. The Administration office staff, responsible for providing the In Service Day food, secretly hates us all.

4. More people around my Library System read my blog than I think. They vastly prefer it in written, rather than spoken, form.

5. The librarians know of a strange labyrinth of warrens that honeycomb my Library.

6. The moment that there is nowhere anyone has to be, and all work is optional at my Library, it becomes a ghost town, empty, with tumbleweeds blowing through, and I stand alone in the entire, huge Library having paranoid feelings that there is some fabulous secret staff party I have not been invited to. I make friends with the Library cactus.

7. In staff meetings there is a minutely detailed, invisible wall surrounding all ideas for improvements that is defined by resistance to change, your three worst co-workers, the places that your supervisors have detached from reality, and your personal megalomania.

8. As observable from our upstairs windows, many of our regular patrons believe carpool or vanpool means one or more persons in a car or van, and that the cut off for energy efficient vehicles is seven mpg or better.

Little Free Libraries

As I slowly work up my first series of bespoke clerkmanifesto books (grafted and redesigned into old weeded, damaged, and discarded hardcover books) to distribute into Little Free Libraries I find I am paying a lot of attention to the Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood. I love these little distilled and pure Libraries and am thinking they are the brightest new representation of the popular Public Library out there in a very long time. Within the grand institutional Library systems, or at least in mine, there has been for decades now an awful lot of yammering, attention, worry, and comparison with and to technological development and Libraries keeping up with the times. There is great obsession with e-books, social media, relevance, and changing media. But I don't hear people bringing up much, on In Service days or in various Strategic Plannings, the challenge presented to us by Little Free Libraries. I don't see a lot of people sitting around wondering how Libraries, with all their late fines and institutional processes, closing times, and building upkeep, can keep up with the nimble, mind bogglingly simple to use Little Free Libraries. I don't see us worrying about responding to that challenge.

It's not so much that I actually see The Little Free Library as a challenge. It's more that if we're going to come up with fake challenges like ebooks I like this one better. These challenges are really just excuses and arguments for what we do next. And if we're hunting around for money, how about instead of a grant for iPad dispensers we get a grant to convert all our money raising bookstores into Little Free Libraries. No, not little mini houses on a post, just some shelves of no fuss, borrowable books. I look around my neighborhood and the wee little book houses are popping up in yards all over the place. Clearly it's what our constituency is interested in. Let's give them what they want, Little Free Libraries even within the Library. And then, with the big shoulders of the Public Libraries, we too can contribute to their growth and perfection.