sixty-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:

Here you go: a reprint of a post not that much more than a year old that caught my eye because it is about problems replacing staff at my (former!) library. This situation was still going on when I retired, and (I'll admit, to my pleasure) they are not even bothering to pretend to replace me.

Though if they did it would be quite a process...

This Spring's half day In Service Day came and went without my attendance. But the one thing that everyone was super excited to tell me about is the moment when the county's human resources department explained to everyone about the the county's 36 step hiring process.

Over the past years my library has been shedding workers like fur from an old sheepdog. Replacements are ever promised, yet never arrive. Finally, an explanation!

A 36 step hiring process. This, the County thought, would surely explain it to us all!

That was the highlight of the day.

I think it was the combination of the ridiculous, the hilarious, and the quietly insane that people found so appealing. Many people told me about how a hilarious comedy show sketch could be made out of it. I disagree. It would make a terrible comedy show sketch. I don't think any of these people have ever tried to write a comedy sketch! This story barely even makes a decent blog post, though I will continue to apply every one of my formidable skills in that department to do the best job possible of it.

Even that may not be enough.

What it really requires is a freakishly talented Jewish Czechoslovakian writer to bring it properly to life, and even they'd probably need a full novel to do it. 

It would be a funny novel occasionally, but that probably wouldn't be its most salient feature.

By the end of the novel I don't think anyone would actually be hired.

Just like in real life.

The picnic again and other stories

 

The honor of my company

 

The structure of me and my library colleagues' workdays is roughly, but thoroughly determined by a daily schedule. This schedule is created with no small amount of effort, but not with much flare, by one of our two managers. We staff members consult it like it is some kind of grand oracle. And it rather is, as it predicts much of our short term futures, the company we will keep, and the intensity and nature of our work tasks in the day to come. Though there may be but half a dozen circulation workers at any given time, there is no time of the day where one can be sure not to find them all gathered around that schedule consulting it like a theater camp checking the fresh postings of assigned roles for that Summer's production.

With such import ascribed to our schedule it is no wonder we all attach an undue amount of meaning to it. I am especially susceptible to this and am prone to easily developing conspiracy theories regarding schedule assignments. I easily feel I am being split off from the co-workers I best like when we are paired at the desk or back room, or that I'm being punished with too many responsibilities. With more cooled passions I can see that I am probably being heavily relied upon with the responsibilities, rather than punished, although I probably actually am right in thinking I'm being split off from the co-workers I like. But even within that I am also aware I constantly overrate the intentionality of the schedule, as, like I said, the schedule maker has no great skill or sense with it, and half the time is just trying to make all the slots full as best she can.

A great example of my misguided paranoia as regards the schedule came this weekend when, with an almost full staff of people I really like, I was instead teamed up with the only really difficult desk partner. My immediate emotional reaction was that I was being punished by being paired with who I was paired with.

Who was I paired with?

The manager who creates the schedule.

I am forced to admit she probably wasn't thinking of herself as a punishment.

Checkmate

 

Whether it be ten percent paranoid or ninety percent paranoid, it has always been my impression that when my manager schedules me with a desk partner at the front desk of the library, she always carefully chooses the person I would least like to work with. I have understood for my whole life that there is something about me enjoying myself that particularly bothers anyone in charge. 

But recently, due to a spate of staffing and schedule changes, I am perfectly delightfully happy with everyone I work with on Sunday. As I write it is the first day of this new regime and I am imagining that creating this schedule must have been torture for my manager! 

Not knowing what to do I she assigned me an even hour with everyone.

Ha ha ha. Even better!

Rock and a hard place

 

I don't often have unpleasant hours at the front desk of my library, but it happens.

In my last hour before I was off for my longer weekend a woman came to the desk to request help on the computers. I directed her to the librarian in the teen room.

She would rather die than walk to the teen room!

"Can't you call them!"

"Where is the woman who was at this desk earlier? Can't she help me?"

While I cannot convey the peevishness of her tone, I can happily report that I soon found out no one was in the teen room. So I offered to go out and see what I could do on this woman's computer. She proceeded to unsuccessfully do what she was doing for a few minutes until I asked if I could have a go. After about 20 seconds, which, admittedly, were also not successful, she exclaimed "I just want a librarian then!"

"Ok." I said, and returned to the front desk.

Five minutes later she returned to the front desk. She wanted to know where her librarian was. Apparently she felt she had ordered up a librarian and I had failed to deliver. My mistake. Now she wanted a manager. This took awhile but I managed to wrangle the one roaming the building as he came downstairs. 

"This woman wanted a manager. I don't think she's happy with me." I informed him.

He then became her sock puppet for the next ten minutes or so, possibly resolving her problem with the assistance of a children's librarian and the free gift of one of our two dollar flash drives. Later, in passing, this supervisor said to me, in what may or may not have been a neutral comment, "Just for your information, she said you wouldn't get a librarian for her."

That done a Nazi came to the front desk.

No, seriously, a real, known, holocaust denying Nazi who is a regular visitor, came to the desk. He stood there and said, I kid you not, "Jewish."

"Excuse me?" I inquired.

He was apparently trying to articulate the Interlibrary loan book he was there to pick up. "Jewish Ritual Killing of Gentile Babies" He said. "It's a book I have on Interlibrary loan."

I went back and got his book, whose title bore no resemblance to what he said, but, nevertheless was what his book was about.

We then exhaustively discussed the rules for interlibrary loan check outs.

I liked him way better than the woman.

And a bit better than my manager as well.

A little bit of not caring

 

Upon my return to work at the library following a short bout with Covid, I found myself rather wrought up at everything. Whether this was primarily due to being tired from a slower health recovery than I hoped I was experiencing, or from a spate of understaffing at work, or from having a lot of responsibilities and not much authority, or possibly due to a combination of all of them, I don't know.

But it was doing me no good.

So I decided to try caring less.

Here I am caring less.

And though I duly noted a dump of irritating transit items left for me in an overnight bin this morning, or the bizarre way that my manager, who is currently inappropriately assigned to the whole back room, keeps coming out to the front desk to answer the phone dangerously close to my personal space, or the continuing problem with the automated check-in machine breaking down over and over in the same way, it is all viewed in the serene manner of a Zen master watching a log drift downstream.

It's just a log.

Breathe.

A burning log.

Breathe.

Full of disease, heading for a wooden town full of innocents!

I can't reach the log!

Oh my god, someone stop that log!!!

Assistantmanifesto

In what is another meaningless change to my vast library career, I am no longer a clerk, or, specifically, a library clerk. My job title is now,

 

Oh my god, I am breathless with excitement!

 

Oh! Wait, maybe I am breathless with covid? 

No. No, it's definitely with excitement. 

My covid is all better.

I'm mostly sure of it.

 

I am a...

SENIOR LIBRARY ASSISTANT

Muahaha! Beware my majestic power! I might assist anyone. No one is safe from my assisting.

I may even assist you!

And as a Senior Library Assistant, my first job will be...

To help people at the library.

LOOK! A patron is approaching me at the front desk of the library!

"How may I assist you?" I ask.

And with that, my job here is done, for behold,

I am a senior library assistant!

 

The wisdom that comes with little power

 

The County is using our large meeting room today for a leadership conference. It is packed full of county middle managers, including most of my library system's branch managers. None of them look like they're having a lot of fun.

A regular library patron asking about this class found out it was about county leadership. They teasingly asked me "Why aren't you in that meeting."

"I only believe in leading from below." I commented.

The teasing continued, perhaps not as mean as it sounds. "Very far below." She said.

So I shrugged: "The only real leadership is the kind that no one can observe."

The road to fascism

 

One of our relatively new branch managers came by the front desk of my library to see if there was anything good for the children's room sitting in our donation bin.

"You know that new Supreme Court ruling doesn't just apply to the President? It applies to you too." I offered cheerily.

"How so?" She asked warily.

"As a branch manager, you cannot be tried or prosecuted for any crime so long as you claim it was done in your role as a library manager."

"Good to know." She observed wryly.

"In fact," I added. "If you wanted to take home that board book you're holding, no one could ever stop you."

She briefly glanced at the board book. I think it maybe had a picture of a truck on it.

She didn't say anything, but I could tell she was already beginning to grow mad with power.

Our future leader

 

All the drama at my library this week has to do with indulgences. A difficult library patron has taken to asking desk staff to take his food to our back room to microwave it for him. I have not been involved in any of the drama, though last week he did ask me to microwave his food for him.

I said "No."

He wasn't happy, but it has gone far worse for others. Apparently he was hostile to two of my colleagues at the front desk when they told him they could not warm his food for him. The circulation manager was brought in as tensions rose, and, infuriating all my co-workers, the manager resolved the situation by warming the mean person's food for him and delivering it to him at his computer.

Aside from the more common sense idea that we don't cook patrons' food for them in our staff areas, we actually have a much publicized library policy that we don't allow warm food to be eaten in the library anyway. But before it ever got to the point of this person raging against his food not being warmed, another of my colleagues had warmed his food, as a point of least resistance to his aggression. This only led to him being more furious when he was refused in the future, which led to the manager compounding the problem by passing the problem forward.

There are times when a careful, limited indulgence can resolve a situation. But nearly always, when someone is asking for something wholly, or even slightly unreasonable, indulging them doesn't resolve the problem, it merely delays the problem while also doubling its size.

And like with a child, only indulged to avoid the difficult work of addressing the issue, one ends up with the worst possible thing:

A President.

Workers' paradise

 

Yes, the library I work at is mismanaged. The people in charge at every level act like royalty. We are increasingly understaffed. No one is paid fairly. And our standards are going to hell. Also, many of the library patrons are extremely unpleasant and increasingly hostile and aggressive. New hires barely know their alphabet, and the old hands are increasingly crabby and bitter.

And sure, I can tell you a few examples of all of the above from my own experience, but really I wish you could simply hear the steady litany of complaints from all my co-workers, as I do, all day long, every day. Nothing could be more convincing. Though a bit much to take, they are almost eloquent in their frustration and disgust.

And so it is that my co-workers leave. They leave for all and any of those many above reasons. They leave this library branch. They leave the library system. They leave the County employment. And some of them even leave the country!

Gone, gone, gone!

And then you know what happens?

They all want to come back.

They all want to come back to work at my library!

Aha!

This, my library, is a fucking workers' paradise!

Either that, or everything else out there is unbelievably horrible. 

Our dwindling staff

 

This Spring's half day In Service Day came and went without my attendance. But the one thing that everyone was super excited to tell me about is the moment when the county's human resources department explained to everyone about the the county's 36 step hiring process.

Over the past years my library has been shedding workers like fur from an old sheepdog. Replacements are ever promised, yet never arrive. Finally, an explanation!

A 36 step hiring process. This, the County thought, would surely explain it to us all!

That was the highlight of the day.

I think it was the combination of the ridiculous, the hilarious, and the quietly insane that people found so appealing. Many people told me about how a hilarious comedy show sketch could be made out of it. I disagree. It would make a terrible comedy show sketch. I don't think any of these people have ever tried to write a comedy sketch! This story barely even makes a decent blog post, though I will continue to apply every one of my formidable skills in that department to do the best job possible of it.

Even that may not be enough.

What it really requires is a freakishly talented Jewish Czechoslovakian writer to bring it properly to life, and even they'd probably need a full novel to do it. 

It would be a funny novel occasionally, but that probably wouldn't be its most salient feature.

By the end of the novel I don't think anyone would actually be hired.

Just like in real life.

Clerkmanifesto, the video version

It's all in the video today:

Concern troll

I have recovered from the shock of putting up my portraits only to have to endure people just... walking by them like they didn't exist. Over time now, it has slowly become clear that my pictures are an attraction for people and that, despite that weird first couple of hours, I can regularly find people checking out my co-worker portraits with anywhere from fleeting to active interest.

Toddlers in particular like them, but that's a story for another time.

So after a couple of days I was actually feeling pretty good about my show. Look at me, I have made art and people actually look at it! 

So that's... cool. 

But you know the Universe, it simply can't stop self-correcting.

There are two theories to this. 

Either the Universe is an asshole or..

It's built on a fulcrum.

There might be more than two theories, actually.

Anyway, I was making some lunch in the breakroom, a patty melt if you're curious. An old librarian who's a newer branch manager came in. They used to be good at their job. Now they're a manager. They said "I had a staff member write me and express concern about people's pictures being publicly displayed and how they might not want that. So I wanted to check in and see what kind of permissions you got."

"Let me get this straight." I said. "A staff member who is not in this show is concerned that someone, who is in the show, hypothetically, will be upset by it?"

The manager affirmed this.

I explained that I told all the people when I photographed them the same thing I told this manager when I photographed them (this manager is in my show)- that I was going to add in their animal and eventually I would probably have some kind of show or more public display of them when I was done with it all, and if they wanted to take part I would need to take their picture.

The manager said that's what they thought, but because of this message from another staff member they wanted to check.

I said I understood their perspective, but that the person raising concerns should have received far less consideration and was, frankly, up to no good.

The manager said that they thought the person raising concern was doing it from a good place.

I said we would have to agree to disagree then.

Performance reviews

 

It is time at my library, yet again, for our performance reviews. There is the part of these that are filled out by my manager(s) that are of no great interest to us today, and there is the part that I fill out. As I have begun to let fly on my self-evaluations on these forms, showering myself in love, I have also found them suitable for publication on clerkmanifesto, feeling they may be of interest, and possibly entertaining to, any stray denizen of the Internet who comes here seeking sustenance. 

You may think you are on the Internet, but this is merely the Internet as it once was. You are currently a refugee from the Internet.

I just wanted you to know.

Anyway, there were four questions on my Performance Appraisal that I was instructed to fill out. They are presented as follows:

  

Reminder: Refer to the County Competency Model for detailed description of values behavior expectations.  

 

  

Employee Self Rating  

 

 

  

Extraordinary. This year of library clerking will likely go down in County history as the greatest performance of clerking we’ve ever seen. Feldenstein has been flawless, inspirational, heroic, and utterly dedicated to the County, the library, and to the community of the world itself. On a technical jargon level, Feldenstein also “Consistently Meets Expectations”, but it is so much more than that, much like saying “The Beatles “Consistently Meet Expectations” in creating songs”. 

 

 

Employee Comments and Supporting Examples:   

 

       

 Here is a random example of the kind of thing Feldenstein does every day: 

 

Feldenstein is at the front desk of the library with a co-worker. The co-worker, having a hard time, cannot find a missing item for a library patron. The co-worker is getting curt with the patron, and the library patron is getting frustrated. Feldenstein, using years of knowledge, experience, and deductive reasoning swiftly tracks down the lost item in an unusual spot, all while also engagingly helping another library patron. He graciously hands the item to the unhappy patron, makes a charming joke to defuse the situation, forms a friendly bond with this once disgruntled library patron, deftly justifies and excuses his co-worker, redirects the library patron’s newly found wild enthusiasm to the virtues of the library and to the county itself, all while also weaving the patron he was originally helping into a sense of joyous library community. 

 

It is this kind of activity that perfectly exemplifies what an amazing asset Feldenstein is to every aspect of our organization and suggests that he should probably be vigorously promoted, paid far more than he is, and given major commendations and professional recognition, even if he is likely to be too humble to accept these well-deserved and, frankly, long overdue, accolades. 

 RESULTS ACHIEVEMENT  

  

Reminder: Refer to the County Competency Model for detailed description of competency behavior expectations.  

  

  

Results Achievement: Employee Self Rating  

 

 

Rating Feldenstein, as we have seen in the “Self Rating” section, is difficult to do because Feldenstein sets such a high standard that he flies off of any chart and exceeds even the most exalted tribute. Whether we measure the results he achieved on a curve compared to others, or as an evaluation of what we might imagine as possible, Feldenstein is unquantifiable in the extraordinary contribution he makes to the library, the county, and the community. 

 

 

How would we rate this employee's Results Achievement? 

 

Probably the greatest ever seen on any evaluation form ever. Frankly miraculous.  

 

Also “Consistently Meets Expectations” in the same context of, for instance, “Shakespeare ‘Consistently Meets Expectations’ in playwriting”. 

 

 

  

Employee Comments and Supporting Examples:   

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

    

 It’s not just the nearly uncountable number of people Feldenstein has helped in this past year, whose days he brightened, and whose library experience he enriched. It’s not merely the sheer numbers of books shelved or processed, the problems solved, the co-workers supported, or the behind-the-scenes repairs of every kind, physical, spiritual, and analytical, that Feldenstein does every day. But it’s also the under the radar light of humanity Feldenstein brings to what is surely the most beloved library in the State. It is his tireless artistic and programming contributions to the library, his process insights to make things work better, and his ability to rise above any structural failings in the institution to relentlessly elevate the library experience for every single user every single day. Feldenstein’s humility, humor, knowledge, commitment, and competence, cannot be recognized enough, and I am thrilled to finally see even a tiny piece of it acknowledged and addressed in this document. 

 

Does this extraordinary library clerk have any shortcomings? 

 

In a word: No. 

 

Does this miraculous county employee have any room for improvement? 

 

In a word again: No.  

 

And yet, each year, like the very finest of vintages of wine, against the realm of what seems to be possible, he does continue to improve. 

  

  

 

  

    

  

Overall Employee Comments:   

Please provide a summary of your work during the stated review period. This can include your contributions, successes, areas where you learned through mistakes, etc. It should also include 1 – 3 values and/or competencies you would like to focus on for development in the coming year.   

       

 

This year has been yet another extraordinary achievement for Feldenstein, and he is an inspiration for everyone who meets or works with him whether they know it or not. Summarizing his work in this past year is difficult because his achievements are so sprawling and glorious. Let’s just say that he made one of the best libraries in the entire country better. His playful artwork peppering the building, his laser-like proficiency at getting the work of the library done, his personal charm and self-sacrifice, and his tireless efforts that vastly exceed any remuneration he could ever receive, are the guiding North Star of everything Ramsey County and its libraries could ever dream of being. 

 

In the year to come, Feldenstein hopes to find new ways to bring magic, wonder, and success to the library and to inspire others to strive for his level of wisdom, humility, humor, egalitarianism, justice, equity, and heart to create an even better working county community.