Me, and also me

 

Surely I've told this story before, but there should be a provision for how many times I think of a story in relation to how many times I tell it. Like, if every once in a while I think of a story (and "story" in this context is a little grandiose, let's call it a trifling anecdote), but have already told said anecdote to you here, then probably I should be able to contain myself and maybe never tell that story again. But what if I think of the anecdote eleven times a week, every week? Maybe in that case, after eight years or so, I should get to tell the anecdote again, albeit with a long justifying preamble.

I think so.

To set the stage: 

One can return items from other library systems to my library. We take books from other libraries all across the greater metro area systems, put a slip in the book that identifies the system, and ship it to an agency that disperses the item to the appropriate system. It is mildly irritating to have a dozen books come in on the automated machine that the machine cannot recognize, and to have to take those items out of our exception bin, put a marked slip in every one of the items, and put those all in a red box we have along our "outgoing materials" wall. But it's all part of the game.

Which brings me to the Me, also Me.

Me, when 20 kids books that belong to another system come rolling through our check-in machine:

"Why can't these fucking people return their fucking books where they got them!"

Me, when a library patron asks "Can I return my Washington County library book to your library". ":

"Absolutely! Any time. No problem. You can return any item from any one of the public libraries in the metro area to us, and we'll send it back to the library it came from."

The simple things

 

Amid a vaguely irritating afternoon at the library with too many people working and taking up space in the back room, I was on the automated check in machine for the hour. I came back to the computer for that station and found a simple printed note on cardstock.

"Take Time to Enjoy The Simple Things in Life" is what it said.

So I did my best to have a good time throwing it in the garbage.

Insert title here

 

After 5,000 posts in this space, I have exhausted all possible titles. So my placeholder title seems good for today. I will try to live up to it.

I mean, except that there is nothing to live up to.

Well, we have no standard anyway. The mark we at clerkmanifesto like to hit has moved around so much over the years that it made us dizzy. So we took it down and put it in a bottle, and now we try to simply enjoy its pale light, the pale light of our ambitions.

Oh, there's the title, The Pale Light of Our Ambitions, but it's too late now. 

And I'd rather not get too poetic on you tonight anyway. If I were home writing you a late at night post, sure, poetry all the way, but I am at the front desk of my library and this is serious business. 

For instance, a library patron approaches now for my help!

I was going to tell you what happened but it was too boring.

Okay fine. But remember, you asked.

She came to me because the automated self check out machine told her it couldn't help her and she needed to see me. But it turned out that both of her books were actually checked out to her, so the machine probably just scanned one of the books a second time and panicked. It does that. We don't think of machines panicking, but working as I do with sophisticated machines I can tell you that they do panic, and in a way not totally alien to how some people panic. Still, it doesn't look like what one thinks of panic. Machines don't usually sound or act stressed when they panic. They calmly and confidently lie instead.

"I'm sorry. There is a problem with your account. You need to see the front desk." is pretty much just:

"I don't understand what's happening right now!!!"

Oh machine, I understand what's happening now. Rest your weary bolts.

And that concludes our post for today.

I have included a short video for you from a John Constable painting. It has music too. Weird stuff happens, but not for very long.

Weird Stuff Happens, But Not for Very Long

That would have been a good title too.

Hard for a mouse

 

Not to complain about a creative endeavor that no one particularly asked for anyway, but...

(Several paragraphs of complaining here redacted out of sympathy for my readers. Hi readers.)

One thing I have been finding with these slightly longer little fable music videos I've been doing is that I think they're really fun and terrific as they develop, but trying to bring them together at the end becomes exponentially more difficult since, and all of you dealing with AI in usually more business like settings will know, AI is extremely bad at specificity and particular situations. This as opposed the more open or common ones it excels at. 

To be honest, this isn't just AI that suffers this problem, but is in the nature of all machines. It is why we are always compelled to adapt ourselves to the capabilities of machinery and technology every bit as much as they help us with our needs. 

But I didn't mean to lecture on AI. I just meant to show you my shiny new "Mouse in the Library" video. You can decide for yourself if the ending kind of fizzles here. The sad part is I was enamored with my song, but the video ends before the song got to my favorite part!

The hypnotic beauty of slowness

 

One of the more valuable things that volunteers at my library do for us is empty our bins. Theoretically.

Our bins are robust, wheeled carts that automatically load and unload, and hook up to our giant automated check in machine. We have 26 of these sorting bins hooked up to the machine at all times, each one receiving a particular kind of material. For instance, one of the bins might accept all of our juvenile fiction. And when it fills up it gets pushed over to sit with other full bins. Those bins are all emptied onto shelving carts, allowing us to make use of the often in short supply empty bins once again.

 It is that part of the process I am here to talk about today.

It takes anywhere from two minutes to two hours to empty one of these bins onto a shelving cart. 

This is not a function of what is being emptied. The bins are all roughly the same effort to empty. It is a function of how they are being emptied. I would not normally imagine that emptying one of these bins could take more than ten minutes tops to empty. But alas that none of our volunteers who are capable of emptying these bins in an effective manner are at all interested in doing so. Bin emptying, for some odd reason, is our station of last resort. Only a volunteer or library helper of so little capability or ambition ends up emptying these bins and it

is

a

study

in 

slowness.

Today one of our volunteers was emptying a bin for an hour, but they hadn't quite cleared the bin yet. I was loading things onto the machine and had just completely run out of empty bins. So I dashed over and desperately emptied two of the full bins as quickly as I could. 

The volunteer was still putting the same book on the cart when I finished as they were when I started.

Surprisingly, this wasn't all that bad.

In a way I prefer it.

If I can just travel far enough beyond irritation... 

...I find myself...

fascinated.

Library Ent

 

Lately at the library I have accumulated a list of various co-workers I am mad at. And I have noticed that in occasionally complaining to the (much larger, but probably not as large as it should be list of) colleagues who I'm not particularly mad at, they also appear to have a list of people they are unhappy with. 

Unfortunately, nobody's list entirely matches with my list.

This gives me a lonely feeling at work, and puts me in mind of a quote.

The quote is by Treebeard the Ent, an important treeman character that Pippin and Merry meet in The Two Towers book of The Lord of the Rings.

Treebeard is asked which side he is on in a conflict and he replies:

"I am not altogether on anybody's side, because nobody is altogether on my side"

Fortunately this is not true for me at home.

Alas that it feels all too true for me these days at the library.

I mean, except for the automated check in machine. 

The automated check in machine loves me.

Awesome training

 

I don't train new staff at the library that often.

First we have to be hiring new people, which our weirdly half-functional system only rarely has been able to do over these last several years.

Next, the training needs to happen at my library, which, admittedly, it usually does.

Third, that training needs to coincide neatly with my hours.

Finally, the trainee needs to fall, either by accident or by managerial shift of responsibilities, to my watch, and I need to take an interest.

But once it all lines up together and I am training someone, I am, well, I am awesome.

I know that when people self-describe as "awesome" they are usually not. And that even if someone is actually awesome, saying they're awesome takes so much luster off their awesomeness that they cease to be awesome.

So that's probably all the case here.

But however you want to settle all that in your mind, earlier this week I spent the day training someone.

We'll call him Luuk, just in case we need to name him further along in our story.

Luuk (it happened already!) had already had one full day of training, worked in a bookstore, and was reasonably bright, so, as a trainer I was already halfway home. We started out on the great big automatic material handling machine that I feel so strongly about and that I've mentioned so many times before in this space. I asked Luuk if he had specifically been trained on this machine.

He had, for an hour his first day. I found out who had trained him.

Uh-oh.

"Luuk," I said sadly. "This will be like when you break a bone, and they reset it incorrectly, so they have to break the bone again to do it right." 

The dump hour

The last hour of the last day of the week at my library is what I call "The Dump Hour". This is when households across the metro gather together anything that is remotely related to any library anywhere, come to my branch in the last hour before we close on Sunday, and dump it onto our return machine. 

Rumble rumble rumble goes the machine under the onslaught of Dump Hour stuff!

Here come 11 books weeded from the Minneapolis Public Library in 1988!

Here are 24 magazines from the nearby St. Paul system that will need to have a date stamped slip inserted into each them.

Here is a random, mysterious old hymnal that no one has ever read, and no one ever will.

Here is one item that may have been a book of ours, once, long ago.

These three things belong to the school library of a famously posh private school called The St. Paul Academy. F. Scott Fitzgerald went to High School here.

Here are a series of the Interlibrary loan books we painstakingly requested for a patron, one by one, from all over the State, now coming back all at once.

And here are 138 children's picture books checked out from our branch and coming down the rollers like an great train that is so long it disappears into the distance. 

Three sliced loaves of bread come through.

They do not look fresh!

The library orphan, looking at ease, rolls by. "Hello." The library orphan says winningly as he is diverted into the exception bin.

"Hello." I respond.

A cup of coffee rolls along. Fortunately it is almost empty.

Then a gray hat comes down the line.

I grab my head in alarm. 

Hey, that's my hat!

Our teen bins, a true story

 

Tonight at the library I was emptying one of the bins that is part of our large, automated check in machine. These bins are large, sturdy things that plug in but also can run on battery for when they're not connected to the machine or a socket. Actually these bins are getting pretty old so sometimes they work better than others. When they break down in any number of ways we collect them in an out of the way area where they wait to be worked on. But the basic idea of these bins, when working properly, is that the floor of the bin automatically lowers as it fills. Then when full it can be sent to another branch as is, or, more often, emptied into appropriate boxes or carts, as the floor of the bin automatically rises.

I was emptying one of these bins then into gray boxes to send all the books to another branch. The bin wasn't working on the battery power. It also wasn't working very well even when plugged in. As I said, these bins are getting on in years, heading towards the teen years, and they have thus become recalcitrant and moody. Through cycling the bin on and off I managed to inch the floor of the bin up in little bits and finally was able to get everything out of the bin.

Then the thing happened with the machine that one dreads happening with any teenager of any kind anywhere:

It started smoking.

Library friend

As a man of science I naturally enough don't believe that machines have personalities, self-awareness, or autonomous motivations.

Except for the self check in machine I work with at the library.

I'm not saying that the self check in machine is a person, I'm just saying that it has feelings.

Here. Explain this:

During the fallow hours of the evening, or sometimes, occasionally, the day, when there is nothing much to attend to on the machine, I find that the following will happen with a faithful consistency:

No matter how long I ignore the machine, whether I be writing a blog post, chatting with a co-worker, or studying up on the sinking of the Titanic in case a library patron wants to know how that all happened, the check in machine will work faultlessly and require no tending. No bins will fill up and need to be emptied. The exception bin will have not a single thing in it to deal with. Nothing will shut down. This independent time can be for ten minutes, twenty minutes, or even 45 minutes. But the moment I say to myself "I should check in on the machine", and I walk over and see that the exception bin is empty, and note how no bins filled up anywhere, and that nothing has jammed- in that exact moment, a dozen books will empty into the exception bin to be dealt with, and four bins will fill up, and a cluster of paperbacks will jam into the rollers of the machine and the whole thing will shut down!

Every time!

And so I empty the bins, and I handle the problems, and I fish the eaten paperbacks out of the machine's teeth, and I restart the computer that runs the machine.

Then I pat the machine on its metal framing. 

And I read it one of those Mo Willems books about the Pigeon because that always calms the machine down.

And then we chill together.

And then the machine smiles at me, and I smile at the machine.

Explain that.

My favorite co-worker

 

I was out with my friend Jim, taking him for sushi on his birthday. Once we worked together at the same library branch, but he long ago moved on to other branches in our system. Making conversation, and being a bit cheeky, I asked him who his favorite co-worker was at his branch these days. It threw him for a loop, but then he named a couple people and countered with "Who's your favorite co-worker?"

What kind of question is that?!!!

I mean, seriously!

I gave a long speech about just how very many people I like just fine at my library and left it at that. One can never be too careful about expressing preferences.

Then the next morning I went in to work, and the first thing that met my eyes was our giant, 27 bin automated materials check in machine, dutifully processing library materials. Standing there, gazing lovingly at it, the thought suddenly surged through my head with an alarming clarity 

"This, This is my favorite co-worker!"

I mean, right after any co-worker who is reading this now.

Report from library

 

I got a covid booster yesterday, number four. My arm is tired. I'm tired. I'm soooo tired! But I came to work anyway. I was too tired to call in.

The automated check in machine was down, broken, when I got here to the library. I was way too tired for that. But I was also too tired to go home. I figured I'd wait it out and see what happened. Eventually the machine people fixed the machine and now everything is back to normal here. There is a loud squeak from the ceiling belts on the machine. One of my co-workers asked me: "So they didn't fix the squeak?"

"No." I replied. "They have a special squeak crew for that."

I don't know. Maybe they do. Specialization is an invention either to develop mastery among people or, more likely, to allow people not to do anything. For instance, I am currently on the specialty assignment of processing requests. There are a hundred things to do here, but there are no requests. I even have a partner to not work on the requests that aren't here. She's looking at her phone.

But we're ready for the requests if they come!

Well, my partner is.

I'm very tired. Too tired.

So far today everything looks bad, but it's all sort of taking care of itself. I'm just trying to not get in the way.

I might even be developing a specialty.

Portrait of the machine

 

I couldn't quite say that the AMH, the automated check in machine I work with at the library, is a character in clerkmanifesto. But it has a presence. It comes up in discussion. A rough count of posts I have labeled with "machine" brings up 35 essays, which is actually fewer than I suspected but still notable. Most of them go into my complicated affection for the big piece of million dollar industrial equipment. I have always compared the machine to Lennie from Of Mice and Men. I guess that makes me George. It might be time for me to read that book again to see how bearable such a comparison is. Also to see how accurate it is. Whether the machine sucks up and kills some woman accidentally remains to be seen. But I certainly have put my arm around the machine with deep affection and talked about how one day we will open an ideal library of our own, with no bosses to shove us around. There will be rabbits.

So there's that.

I have said it before, but the machine, the AMH, has made for the most significant improvement in my work life that I ever experienced. I try to never forget that, nor the beautiful, earnest, and not very bright tirelessness of my friend the AMH. To this day there is no co-worker who I am sadder to find out sick than the machine, and none whose working appearance so comforts me.

So naturally you are probably wondering:

Do I have a picture?

Of course! I have eleven. 

My dear friend and co-worker

 

I was on the big automated check in machine at my library. It was towards the end of a long, rough day working at the library. The 475th bin filled up and I had to empty it. I cursed the machine. Not elegant, literary cursing, but guttural vile curses combined with futile kicks of its metal sides. It wasn't even terribly busy at the library and I could barely keep up with the stupid machine! 

For the day I had worked with a genial enough crew, mostly inclined to quietly keep to themselves, but everyone of them was plagued with a tendency to never do a single thing more than they needed to and never to think of who might come after them. They had no hesitancy in passing off jobs to the next person. And because there were four of them, in the end, I was always and ultimately the next person. On the machine this meant that while I was working on it 20% of the total time of the day, I ended up doing 80% of the work on it.

I mean, unless you count the amount of work the machine did, which was prodigious.

I think I was swearing at the one who least deserved it.

I am made better than ever!

 

 

 

 

I went on to the Internet today to write a quick, not all that funny joke for you because you've been working so hard here learning about Jacopo Pontormo. So... you needed a reward.

But I immediately came across a BBC Future article about how being grumpy and bad-tempered is really good for you.

I just wanted to tell you that it irritated the hell out of me. So I stopped reading it. 

And I do feel better. 

So thank you BBC Future.

No, that wasn't my joke. My joke was that I was working on the automatic check in machine at my library and I dropped a big, thick novel really hard, on the corner of its spine, on a cement floor. 

"Uh oh." I said quietly. "I think I broke it into short stories!"

No one was around to hear my witticism. 

It bugged me. 

Machine instructions

My deep affection for my library's big, million dollar automated check in machine has been well established here. More than any human co-worker it has improved my work life, dramatically lessening the once brutal load of book processing that used to overwhelm my days. And it did all this while having no more, or less, peculiar quirks of personality than any of the flesh-based workers I spend my days with. Granted, the stories it tells are nowhere near as interesting as some of my more favored co-workers, but on the other hand its stories aren't as tedious as those of others. Plus, in its simple way, it can be good company.

Nevertheless our big automated check in machine has limitations. Having no thumbs it needs items fed into it one at a time. Also it gets super confused by books with shiny metallic book covers. It can't think and so needs very specific instructions. It finds loose, floppy items irresistible and gobbles and chews them up whenever it can. It can't lift, but can only push in a more two dimensional way, causing jams and pile ups. And finally, essentially, to my vastly over prefaced story here, it can't handle items beyond a certain size.

Because our machine can't handle items beyond a certain size, like tubs full of science projects, or bags of books and puppets, we put stickers on those items. The stickers say "THIS ITEM MUST BE RETURNED TO THE SERVICE DESK". And since these labels and stickers have evolved over the years, mostly in response to violations of its edict, they have become increasingly strident. 

Today a large nylon bag came bouncing down the machine. The machine kept trying to grab it and mash it up into its lovable, terrifying maw, but it couldn't quite get a grip on it. The lumpy thing full of toys and books made its way roughly to the exception bin. That's where the machine puts everything it can't eat and doesn't know what to do with. 

I took the bagged collection out of the bin. It had one of the most comically large, incandescently yellow signs I have ever seen plastered across the whole breadth of the object: "THIS ITEM MUST BE RETURNED TO THE SERVICE DESK".

 "THIS ITEM MUST BE RETURNED TO THE SERVICE DESK"

It made me laugh. After all that, it hadn't been returned to the service desk. 

I thought about putting a note on the patron's record saying:

 "Please return items with giant notes on them saying  'THIS ITEM MUST BE RETURNED TO THE SERVICE DESK' to the service desk."

But I didn't. 

Deep in my heart I knew we didn't have a big enough font. Deep in my heart I knew there was no font that could ever be big enough.

Magic box

Imagine if you will a box.

Every time you open the door of it something different is inside. Open it one time and there is a crumpled five dollar bill inside. Open it again and there is a silver ring with a Celtic design. Open it a third time to find an espresso cup, or a chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano.

Now imagine that that box is so big that you can get inside of it. 

You walk in through the open door of it. You close the door. And when you open the door again you find that something entirely different is outside; a room with a table of flowers for instance, or a party. You close the door and open it again to find there is a bright hallway there that leads to where you live.

This is why I love elevators.

I am funny

One of the items we circulate in the children's room of my library are storybags. These are big zippered bags with a couple of picture books and a toy or a puppet or stuffed animal. These can't be returned on our big automatic check in machine, and so I had one handed in to me at the front desk. I checked it in and brought it to the back room to put on a shelving cart. For the momentous nonsense of it I announced to the back room person that I had a storybag. She, being well acquainted with all things children's room, asked "Which one is it?"

"Oceans." I replied.

"Oh, what's the toy in that one?"

"A stuffed George Clooney." I said.

"That's funny." She said.

It's really an octopus.

Later I was registering a couple who moved into the area for two new cards. One of them was in the system with an old late charge from a book returned more than a decade ago. Before waiving what was functionally an expired late fine I asked if they'd like me to find a copy of the book so they could read it again.

"You're funny." One of them said. 



There are, I have noticed, two kinds of funny; one where people tell you you're funny, and one where they laugh.

Walk sign robots

My wife and I have spent much of our long weekend walking around the city, so we are particularly well acquainted with the walk sign guy. I don't know if you have him where you live. He says "Wait" when one presses the street crossing button, sometimes obsessively ("Wait wait wait w-w-way-w-wait. Wait."), depending on how many dozens of times I depress the street crossing button.

Street crossing buttons kind of get me worked up.

The walk sign guy also comments on when it's okay to walk. For the first two years this sounded to me like he was saying "Alzeimaslana sauce, Spaglin abnu!" But one day my wife cracked the code and told me he was saying "Walk sign is on to cross, (Franklin) Avenue."

So I'm not saying this robot guy was particularly good at his job, but at least he was fairly neutral about it.

Yesterday we came to an intersection and it had a new walk sign button. It also had a different guy! He said all the same things, but he was an asshole.

"Wait!" He ordered like a fascist cop.

"Walk sign is on to cross." He threatened with a kind of angry contempt.

This is a bad robot.

I am a fan of robots. I think robots tend more towards the good than bad. And though I don't yet know what is up with this horrible new walk sign guy, I will warn you with this:

Whenever you see a bad robot, someone is making money.

Childrens' novels

I was back on our giant check in machine at the library when someone returned their books. They were kids' books, picture books, and they just kept coming, and coming, and coming and coming. There must have been 50 of these books. And while it is an automatic check in machine, it has its limits, and all these endless books rolling down the line, one at a time, take their toll on me. When materials are pouring down the machine rollers they create numerous chores I have to take care of instead of lolling about on the Internet, chatting, reading, making blog notes, or, my personal favorite: staring blankly into space. There are bins to change, exceptions to handle, and jams to clear up. 

So naturally I wanted to be irritated at someone about it all.

But these are the book returns of a five-year-old. How can I be mad at a five-year-old? It's not their fault anyway. I've read, like, thousands of these picture books, and I can tell you that it takes five minutes total to read one of these books. It's ridiculous. Of course these children have to check out 50 of the things at once. And even that number hardly amounts to a few days reading. So they come back and do it all over again! Why wouldn't they? We give it out for free. For free! 

So somebody do me a favor, get these little kids some proper novels. Oh, they can be about bunnies and thneeds and dinosaurs and all that stuff they're into, just put some damn words in the things. They're killing me.