Workplace snapshot

Despite the title, there is no picture. Except in my mind.

I arrive for work in the late morning, walk through the back staff entrance, and the array of my co-workers is spread out before me, scattered through all the work of the library's staging area.

"Click." My mind says.

It has never done this before. But somehow everything laid out before me seems like a snapshot in time, both random, and entirely representative.

So let me set the stage:

Due to the usual staff shortages (vacations, appointments, illnesses), combined with a couple of unprecedented snow days wherein we closed a couple weeks ago, our shelving is a little backed up. The workroom is filled with carts of library books. Otherwise things are pretty much under control.

One co-worker is in the managers' office talking to the manager. It is a social visit.

Two co-workers are chatting. One is sitting, one is standing, and both seem relaxed into it.

At the phones a co-worker is striving to entertain themselves on the Internet with mixed results.

One co-worker seems to be walking with extreme purpose on a trip to... nowhere?

One co-worker is slowly, slowly, methodically, putting a cart of books in order, as if hoping not to finish.

One person is wandering around the unshelved carts, just sort of looking at stuff.

It is a curious picture of activity without production. I don't entirely object, feeling that everyone is owed a living, but it did explain something about the persistence of the unshelved carts of books. It also seemed to capture a kind of essence of each of the co-workers on the job, telling a tale in a random frozen moment of what they are up to at the library. 

And what was I up to?

Oh.

I was late.

 

Like a rat through a snake

 

I have long envisioned the workings of the circulation department of my library to be like a snake consuming prey. This is because, like a snake swallowing a rodent, my library taking in library materials, both returned by patrons and sent by other library branches, results in a slow, methodical absorption of said materials that is visible by its bulge as it works its way into our system.

Though this graphic, uneasy simile has always been true of my library, it seems most true now. The rate of things coming into our library has always been somewhat uneven, but before the pandemic we processed a higher regular rate of returns. A large bulge of incoming books might be more hidden by a constant influx of items. But under our current pandemic rhythms we have a more pronounced boom and bust cycle. We feast and fast. And as the days pass we can watch our weekly engorgement work its way down our library's snaky system.

Monday is the day. 

Over the long weekend, though we are open, we receive no deliveries from other branches. Our hours shorten. And for whatever strange reasons the pandemic has, we are a little less busy as well (not at all something that ever happened before the pandemic closings). Through the end of the week we grow lean and hungry. All our shelving gets done. The items on our request shelves thin out. We practically hibernate.

But then Monday morning comes. End of the weekend returns pour in. The public returns to the library and with them come their items brought back. Lists of requested books are printed, searched for, and piled at the check in machine. And above all the delivery arrives from half a dozen branches. It is a triple sized delivery. Three days worth. At least a dozen large push bins and dozens of full to the brim boxes stand poised for processing. 

We start to feed it all through. 

It is our rat.

And we're hungry.

We try to swallow it whole. What a lump!

First the bulge of it hits the machine. We run books on it at a furious pace (well, some people more furiously than others). Many of those books are requested by patrons, so the request processing area swells next. Then it all moves to the request shelving, where people's requested books are filed for them to pick up. That area distends with items on carts, waiting to be put on the shelves. Then, as teams of people put the books in their places, the shelves start to get so packed it is hard to fit anything on them.

By Tuesday one can see the results of this gluttony in the areas where we keep our regular collection of items to be shelved as well. The carts start to fill that area where it seems like moments ago there was nothing. But by that afternoon, though still visible, a lot of this avalanche of books and movies and cds is starting to even out a little. One can trace that Monday morning rodent, but it's flattening out a little, starting to conform to the shape of the library, getting crushed and disassembled.

On Wednesday most of the shelving, general and requests alike, gets worked out to feed the shelves of the library, but request lists and patrons coming in for their hold pick ups ease the congestion of the shelves. Only the faintest of bulges is hinted at.

Thursday is almost deadly quiet. The rat is eaten. We sleep.

Friday is cruised through.

Saturday we start to get hungry again.

And Sunday? Oh Sunday. Sunday we dream of gerbils, hamsters, and mice, rats, a big rat, oh god, maybe a rabbit even. I think we could do a rabbit, if we really tried.

Metaphorically of course.

  

Staff communication

Lately, at my library job, we have been getting a lot of informational notes. These tend to be remedial.

"I shouldn't have to remind anyone, but when taking the last piece of tape from a roll you are always responsible for putting a new roll inside."

Or

"I know this is a problem with very few of you, but when taking a payment and putting it into the cash register always make sure to close the drawer when you're done."

I suppose one could find such notes offensive, but they clearly seem to be in response to actual library events. These are never the kind of thing to help me do my job better. They are more a way to keep apprised of what's going on down at the lowest echelons of library worker skill. Plus they're funny, in a painful way, but funny all the same.

"When filling transit boxes please do not pile the books higher than the rim of the box. This makes it impossible to put a lid on. When the box is full to the rim, put a lid on it and start a new box."

One thing I find that adds to the absurdity of all these for beginners only email notes is the fact that in all other ways the communication at our library, outside of the remedial stuff, is horrible. Just last week half of the functionality of our big and crucial automated check in machine was down. For the whole morning staff (and patrons as well) had to do far more, and far more awkward, work to deal with our thousands of returns. They had to return items to remote bins, push them through the snow, and hand feed them onto an inconveniently placed and overworked moving belt. After more than three hours of this the circulation staff found out by mere accident that the issue had been fixed early that morning. "Oh," Some automation services person said in passing "You can use this now. They fixed it early in the morning."

Thanks. Good thing you didn't trouble anyone with a pesky email about it.

Here's one from me:

"Dear Staff, when anything important is broken at the library make sure to ask at least six people to make sure it really is broken. It probably isn't. Also, if something really is broken and a temporary work around has been put into place take the time to consider whether it is a bad, inefficient work around. It may have been put into place by the sort of person who doesn't know how to stack books in boxes."

Circulation staff only

My god! Look at my circulation co-worker over there! Are they shopping for shoes? There's work to be done! Why, when I was over on the phones station it was amazing how hard I worked. I was a blaze of fire! I processed an entire bin of incoming requests in six minutes! A whole cart in six minutes!

Of course, for the other 54 minutes I was, um, shopping for shoes.

And that's really what it comes down to. There is not a one of us at my library who is not, at least occasionally, dissatisfied with the productivity of everyone else. Tempting as outraged superiority can be, mostly this is an impulse to be resisted.

I have consistently found that when we measure the work rate of others we measure it against our own highest possible personal work rate. If I knocked myself out shelving five swollen carts of fiction books seven years ago as flood waters were rising in the library, and I was on a coffee high, that will forever be the standard by which all my co-workers must be measured in every single moment of every working day.

So let me say it again: We measure the work rate of our co-workers by our highest and most perfect work accomplishments, by the rare level of work we perform when we are motivated, engaged, well-treated, happy, lucky, and feeling like it.

Since we can't possibly measure our own work rate against ourselves we must measure it against others. And so we measure it against the worst possible work rate of our co-workers. Sue, for instance, spent an hour socializing and talking about her vacation with half a dozen people. So surely I am allowed to sit here and read this interesting book at my leisure.

We work at a library. Everyone is always allowed to sit and read an interesting book for god's sake! That's the first thing to keep in mind.

But I might also want to keep in mind that after Sue chatted with everyone endlessly about her vacation, she went and cleaned up the entire Children's Room, which was in total chaos, a freaking mess, on a crazy day, and she did it totally alone, while the librarian just sat there!

Fucking librarians.

Giving my all

I want to give my job my all. I want to run at full speed for the library every minute of every day. So I try. But every rare once in awhile something happens that throws me off of my stride. I have to slow down and collect myself. I have to go into a kind of work shutdown, a minimal maintenance level. I do not seek these times out. I don't want to just barely work. But, alas, things happen and I am compelled by events beyond my control.


Here is a partial list of events that force me into a slowdown:


1. Too many books found misshelved by my co-workers.

2. Manager looked at me wrong.

3. Exhausted by extraordinary feat of library clerking.

4. Exceeded imaginary quota of maximum library card registrations for the day.

5. Building temperature is too high.

6. Encountered equipment problem of a recurring and, to me, preventable nature.

7. Scented the unspecified odor of injustice in the air.

8. Scented the specified odor of our regular patron who has hygiene problems.

9. Can't help but notice that I am doing more work than the mean level of library clerk.

10. Am faced with a work schedule that takes too much advantage of my work competencies.

11. Am faced with a work schedule that neglects my special work competencies.

12. Library is quiet.

13. Library was once busy and owes me for how hard I worked.

14. Am feeling a bit peckish.

15. Have not had coffee in the last fifteen minutes.

16. I consider my wages on a relative cultural level.

17. We fail to have a book, game, movie, or CD that I think we should have.

18. An overdue fine of any amount is assessed on my card.

19. I think of European Social Democracies.

20. The weather is nice.

21. Computer is running too slow.

22. I think of librarians.

23. I remember how it used to be around here.

24. I Realize I need to stop and smell the roses.



There's more, but I have work to do.

I mean, unless something comes up.

Good and bad

Another happy day out at the front desk of the library, but almost right away we've got a good news bad news situation:

Bad news:
Someone has spilled their extra large coffee, and it has formed a massive, pale brown lake to the immediate East of the DVDs.

Good news:
In the ranking of the utter vileness of spilled library liquids "Coffee, sweetened" is so far down the list of offensiveness that it nearly qualifies as "Charming".

Bad news:
There is no Janitor on duty today.

Good news:
I had purchased for us a special front desk bucket and sponge that I have been waiting for months to press into action.

Bad news:
No sponge has ever been as absorbent as I fancy they will be, and this one is not remotely an exception. Did I mention that there is a "Lake" of coffee? I did? Well I wasn't kidding. My first impulse before cleaning this sprawling pool of coffee was to rent out canoes.

Good news:
It is an unusually quiet afternoon at the library so I am freed up to meticulously mop up the coffee with my sponge, a thimbleful at a time.

Bad news:
I am working the front desk with the least functional of all my co-workers. While we were at the desk together I was able to easily help every single patron who came to us during which time she observed some kind of strange, non-compete clause and avoided helping anyone. But the moment I go to sponge up coffee she is overwhelmed to the point where a long line forms.

Good news:
I enjoy real world illustrations of our comparative efficiencies.

Bad news:
The cleaning water in my bucket has been so overwhelmed by coffee that it is now, functionally, coffee.

Good news:
My hands will smell delightfully of coffee for the next few days.

Bad news:
I cannot think of a decent way to end this blog post.

Not about me

A couple of days ago I was telling you about the recent unevenness in my work assignments at the library. I mentioned how in a bizarre quirk of fates and under some erratic management I was scheduled during a ten hour day without a single moment at the front desk. I am writing you from the tail end of that very day.

I worked both hard and not so hard today as is my custom. I answered a lot of phones ("WHAT ARE YOU SAYING? WHAT'S THAT? I CAN'T UNDERSTAND YOU ON THAT PHONE!") and mucked about an awful lot with my friendly automated check in and sorting machine ("NO! IT DOESN'T GO THERE! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? ARRRGGGHHHH! STOP! STOP!). I shelved ("WHO PUT THIS HERE! WHO ON EARTH PUT THIS HERE!!!!!"). I handled all of our closing announcements ("THE LIBRARY IS CLOSING IN THREE MINUTES! EVERYTHING SHUTS DOWN AUTOMATICALLY! YOU WILL LOSE ALL YOUR WORK ON THE COMPUTERS! YOU ONLY HAVE SECONDS LEFT TO GET THINGS CHECKED OUT! HURRY!!!!!!"), and as the most experienced circulation worker in the library I consulted with my colleagues on special problems ("HE'S COMPLETELY CRAZY I TELL YOU! THAT'S YOUR EXPLANATION RIGHT THERE! HE'S MAD AS A SACK OF SQUIDS!!!"). But in all of that I did not spend a single minute at the front desk of my library. It was weird. But I felt that I held up pretty well under those unusual circumstances. Really it's the patrons I worried about; I'm afraid they suffered the loss of my calm and reassuring presence.

Dear Neighbor: your cat

Dear Neighbor,


I have been noticing your "Missing Cat" posters that you put up along the river. Let me say right from the start that I have no firm news as to the whereabouts of your cat. But I'll admit I have a bad feeling about it, and I don't think any good news concerning your cat will be coming your way. If your signs and your cat were back off the river, in among the neighborhood houses, you might still have a chance, but I never see cats roaming around by the river. I'm pretty sure that's because the river foxes eat all the cats that foolishly wander that way. The river foxes are pretty well gorged on cats, but, alas, they are never too gorged to not make room for just one more juicy cat, like yours. I mean, it's not like these foxes can chow down on chickens. There aren't any chickens around here, and no fox in the world could take on one of those five foot tall river turkeys that hang out up and down our section of the Mississippi. So outside of a sluggish squirrel or two, I'm afraid your cat is it.

Sorry.

I did want to talk to you about your signs though. Your signs, which look to be common black and white copies on common black and white copy paper, are, no surprise, already falling apart. The poor resolution photo is of such an inferior reproduction that it could be any of a dozen cats that I might see on my daily walks. What I am really saying is that I don't think your missing cat signs really denote seriousness on your part. Looking at your two-hour old, falling apart, poorly made Xeroxes I get merely the pretense that you care about your cat, but I don't, in any way, feel that you care about your cat. If, by some freakish chance, your cat had not been eaten by foxes, or perhaps by a stray coyote, or even an ambitious raccoon, and I found your cat, I'm not so sure I'd even give it back to you. I might keep your cat, where it would be loved and cared for, and not wantonly lost and fed to wild animals. If I did find your cat, not that I'd likely know it was yours from your low quality black and white reproduction of a picture of it, I might choose to care for it myself. And if, tragically, I somehow managed to lose your cat, I would put up quality, proper signs, on coated, maybe even laminated, card stock, with good pictures in color, and possibly even a reward, rather than a handful of cheap xeroxes designed to fill in the few pathetic hours between the moment when your cat disappeared and the moment so shortly thereafter where you can forget your cat forever.

Anyway, good luck finding your cat. I'll keep an eye out nevertheless. And I hope you find this message to be of some assistance in your search.


Your neighbor,


F. Calypso

Sent by God

I know I occasionally make a fuss about being a prophet of the gods, but this pipeline to deities is not usually one I talk about in relation to my library work. So it may surprise you to hear that I have been sent by God to do library work for people. It was certainly a surprise to me, but a library patron told me so on the phone today. "You are a Godsend!" She said with gusto.

A Godsend!

What interaction led to me being proclaimed as a sending from God, functionally an Angel?

She called the library and had some items that were a day late. "I just got back from the hospital from major surgery." She said. "I can't get into the library today and was hoping you could renew my materials."

Earlier in the day I had a call from a woman with late materials whose husband had collapsed and was now in the hospital on a respirator. I renewed her items. I waived her accumulated fines. I was sympathetic. But I do believe in checking. So I made sure that woman didn't have lots of past waives in her record for things like "Hospital emergency". 

With this on my mind I was in a mood to be considerate and waive the fines from the current person's record. Though it may seem the simplest of decencies, waiving fines when no one is asking us to do so is incredibly rare. Here I was considering an astonishing two of these waives in one day. But I checked. I asked "Did you just get home from the hospital today?"

"No." She replied. "I've been home for a few days." And with that, my tiny thread of magnanimity broke. I wasn't not sympathetic, merely the high bar for an unsolicited waive was no longer quite met now that I knew she had been home for a day or two before her items were due. No big extras for her. I renewed her books, told her her late fine amount, and wished her a full and speedy recovery.

"You are a Godsend!" She proclaimed with genuine feeling.

Who, me?

The long view

Well ensconced in my top 11,000 work irritations is one best exemplified in the busy evening I had at the front desk of my library with Dave, whose name I have randomly scrambled, but having only four letters it came out pretty much as it does when you spell it properly. We were very busy. At one point he was doing five card registrations in a row while I ran a more rapid stream of patron interactions over on my side of the desk. I tried to tell him about all the tiger documentaries I have been watching, but by the time I could remember what fascinating Siberian tiger anecdote I was in the middle of telling him about, new people were at the desk needing help. In our first hour at the desk we had one lull, for about a minute, which, of course, was the only time a manager walked by.

The manager chirpily said "Maybe you'd like to bring something out to the desk to work on?"

I don't talk about the failings of managers much here on my blog for two reasons. One, the discussions of the failings of managers is so enormous and toothsome that it would devour this blog whole, and, two, as exemplified in "one", my authority issues make me unable to see these issues in a reasonable, measured, and fully sympathetic way.

But somehow I wanted to tell you this story, so I figured I'd better try and buck up and put on my very wise person's glasses. So I'll try.

The problem, as I see it here, is that we (the workers at my library, human beings in general), see whatever is just before us as the whole story. We think a single glimpse, a moment in time, tells a far greater story than it really does. So when my manager comes upon Vade (oh, it scrambled better this time!) and I chatting amiably at the front desk, she has a huge piece of evidence for us being idle slackers. She could know us, or trust us, or think about the time of day and the actual patterns of the library. She could see how many people are there in the building and what that might mean. She can even hold her tongue and check back a few times if it's really getting to her. But that single moment is too huge, so real for that second that it clouds a reality that's larger, and longer, and truer. And so she fails. She misunderstands the night, the library, and the excellent work we are doing. She suggests we do something that will make our job performance worse, and she errs and alienates and loses respect.

Now you wonder where are the wise glasses. Here are the wise glasses:

I do the same thing.

Mad at this failure of my manager I see only it, giant, emblematic, enraging. But how many times does she let ride my fooling around, my extreme autonomy? How many times does she get it right, trust me, properly read what I do, or give me the extra credit and apply it as I do, to the places that let me chat or read, or make coffee once again? She does it at least some, and probably a whole lot more. How many times has she walked past when it really is quiet at the front desk and just let it all go? I am hassled only very rarely, and if I am going to hate it as much as I do, it might behoove me to appreciate the many many times it doesn't happen. I am responsible and yet I remain quite wild. That fact in itself presents a broader picture of meaning.

Arrgh, these wisdom glasses really pinch at the nose! They're a bit of strain on the eyes too, so allow me to take them off for a second. 

I am no apologist, and there is always an important line to watch here with Managers. I don't even think I believe in Management.

Hmm, that's a bit of relief.

Nevertheless, a little perspective here will do me no harm.

After holding its breath, the library opens

At a large and busy library like my own, there are occasionally great surges. Some of these surges are on the check out side. The summer reading program brings in large amounts of people on its momentous Saturday, and a forecasted weather event that is supposed to cripple the city sends a mighty throng in, desperate to swaddle themselves in dvds and reading material against the imminent disaster. On the return side of things the great surges are dominated by the effects of the rare days we are closed. My library closes for a whole day, like it did yesterday, only 10 or 15 times a year, and a closed day is like a bubble, pushing everything to the far side of it. The day after a closed day, like today, we get, roughly, twice as much stuff back than is usual for a day. Two days worth of check outs share one due date and one work day. Also, because it is the first day after the weekend we get three days worth of deliveries because we do not get deliveries on weekends.

It is a lot of stuff!

And while I have no great love for this vast intake of items, it always fascinates me. It sort of makes visible our great circulation digestive system. Normally stuff comes in and moves through, sometimes carts are full of books, or bins or boxes, but it is pretty well distributed. Put under the great stress, though, of an epic return day, all the elements of our system become visible in high relief, and I enjoy watching the great glut of material work its way through to the shelves. What it always reminds me of is a picture in The Little Prince. I will reproduce some vague version of it from memory:

If I recall the little prince asks people what this is a picture of. Of course, it is a picture of an elephant in a snake:

This is how I picture all our materials running through the system, as a big bulge. First there are bins and boxes and carts and piles all waiting to be fed into the machine. Then all the materials start to work into all our loader bins until we are out of empties and every bin is all swollen and full up and we are desperate. Then those bins start to get emptied into cart after cart until there is a sea of carts of books and everyone needs empty carts but no one can find them! Then they start to go out to the shelves, book by book, until the shelves are packed tight and we cannot find room for them. 

It all takes days and days, sometimes a whole week if we keep on being busy. And just like with a snake digesting an elephant you can see the whole huge swell of it moving through the back area of the library. But, of course, is is not an elephant in there. So I picture it like this:

If you were hoping I had something illuminating and profound to say about all this I am afraid I must disappoint you. It is not all epiphanies and fireworks here at the library. A lot of the time it's just, uh, a snake, er, digesting books. Well, I have pictured it that way for years. And I thought it was time to show you.