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The little things have added up, so I thought I'd throw them together for your amusement and my sanity. Made long for your pleasure.
Stinky people
Now, these are not homeless folks or those in shelters or halfway houses or any other such programs. No, I mean the chain smokes who come in so saturated with cigarette smoke that I can't breath at the desk. Or the drunks who are so well-marinated they leave a cloud of pickled books & dvds in their wakes. Or, oh so worse, and what I'm dealing with now are the General Stinky People. They look like your average computer user, dicking around with words with friends or farmville, but you can smell them all the way across the room. Thanks, stinky folks. You make me want to cut the nose right off my face.
Do your job
Typically, for the most part, I like my boss & coworkers. They're nice people. But can I get a cup of motivation around here? Or a teaspoon of management? Guh. We have an assistant director who's so damn lousy at assistant directing that the director created a new position, Assistant to the Director, to take care of that work. Which is part of what I do. Why'd Director create a new job instead of making the Assistant Director assist? Hi, management skills, please? AD is so bad at doing her job that me & the children's librarian are now running adult programming (AD's field--she does one long-standing program that's run forever and takes no effort to continue), which is DEAD SIMPLE. Seriously. Adults sign up for stuff. They actually come to stuff. I don't get teens at my teen programming (same. 3. kids. and I advertise in all the schools, in house, in the paper, guh), and sometimes the kid's stuff just bombs--parents have to actually bring their kids. Adult stuff? Call performer/workshop giver/presenter. Book date/time. Advertise. Watch as program fills, runs successfully, and gets fabulous, you should hold more of these feedback.
Speaking of program fails. Children's Librarian. When you're making a program you can't assume that our program room is not in use! We have plenty of outside groups that fill out the application and sign up ahead of time! We have a whole notebook that keeps all this information. When you set up a program, you have to check that a) the room is available and b) sign up for that slot. You'd think you'd have figured this out by now since you screwed this up last summer, too.
drama drama
Okay, I get that you're new to this. You've never quite done your programs this way. You've done 'em at schools where it's a captive audience, blah blah. That said, this is way too much handholding and fiddling and dealing with and talking down for someone running a fiber arts workshop. SERIOUSLY. OMFG.
Our poster sucks and you want to print up your own, in color, and have the library pay for 'em? Uh, no. We do ours in house. Sunk cost, and all. The display on the table widges you out because you think people will steal your stuff? (Oh, and thanks so friggin' much Assistant Director for butting in that we won't be able to watch all the time so we can't guarantee blah-friggin-blah. You made Presenter way more uncomfortable and difficult to manage. We should move our fabulous poster and tape up your samples? FINE. DONE. Oh, and you want it out on the front desk? Sure, why the hell not.
Oh, and you're going to all the schools and passing on your own posters to the art teacher? Um, hi, I told you I was in contact with the school librarians and THEY PASS STUFF ON TO THE TEACHERS.
We have to buy all the supplies? On top of your fee? Uhh . . . okay, but we're keep all the leftovers. We didn't buy enough supplies? That's $270 and you'll have to make it last for BOTH workshops. SUCK. IT. UP.
Seriously, she came in nearly daily to fiddle with her display and adjust this and adjust that and ask if we can open up the teen workshop to adults and it's getting so close and what if people on the waitlist make other plans. In the end, we were able to sell participants $60 worth of supplies and had at least HALF left over. blah.
Oh, and can we type up a letter of recommendation for her?
2 good 2 follow UR directions
Our wireless is a little bit different from walking into Overprice Deluxe Coffee and logging into their network. It's even a little different from popping into Sammich Shoppe and using their phone number as the WEP key. I get that. It's weird to you. Cool. But I can only walk you through it if you follow my instructions!
a. select our interwebs, it's called Lieberry Tubes
b. open the browser of your choice. (I usually list the obvious options cuz 'browser' gets me lost kitty head tilt)
c. type in LieberryWebsite.org
d. use the nifty randomly generated username & password to log in. (printed on a slip of paper I give out)
Why does everyone get stuck after step a? Instead of following my Super Simple Directions I get
SuckyPatron: But I'm not connected, whine, whine whine.
Me: *explain*
SP: *WHINE* I'm not connected. It's broken!
Me: *re-explain*
SP: WHINE WHINE IT DOESN'T WORK!
Me: Humor me and open up Internet Explorer.
SP: *grumbling, muttering, cussing and opens up IE*
Me: Type in LieberryWebsite.org.
SP: *hunt, peck, type-y*
Me:
Press enter.
IE: *shows intertubes log in page for nifty log in slip*
Me: *Uber-cheerful* There! Now you can log in!
SP: *depending on the type: sheepish or grinding teeth in utter hate*
The utterly worst of the worst? The ones who come back AGAIN and AGAIN to repeat this process. Desk, meet my head.
Big Brary Blows
Dear Big Brary,
You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake. You are part of a consortium. When you play by your own rules, you make life difficult for everyone else. We have over 40,000 people in this town. While not all of those have library cards and not all of them are children, there is no fucking way in hell you can memorize every precious child who gets a library card from you. And by library card, I mean gets an account without the physical library card. So you look up every precious child to enter your library because every single person on your children's department staff has memorized every single child. BULLSHIT. I don't care that kids lose their damn card. You are supposed to give them the card. They need that card to check out books here or at any other consortium library. I don't know little Johnny and little Suzy and little Tyrese and little Shaniqua. I ask EVERY PATRON INCLUDING CHILDREN for a library card. And no, I can't just look them up. Card or it didn't happen.
On a similar note, we use a consortium-wide delivery, Big Brary. These are not just your books. So maybe those craptastic paperbacks that you don't care enough about to catalog and barcode but manage to stick a genre sticker onto could at least also get your damn library's stamp so we know who to ship it back to. (they're not the only offender, unfortunately . . . trade paperbacks and magazines)
No love,
the person who tells small children they can't check out books or movies because not only did Big Brary not give them a card, Mommy forgot her card and her license even though SHE DROVE (< issues all their own -_-)
it doesn't bite
Coworkers, meet the computer. The fun thing about computers is that they are wonderful tools. These computers are locked down in such a way that YOU CANNOT BREAK THEM. If you're not sure how to do something, you can play around with it. Do what? Play around with a a a a computer?? Yup! Click different things until it you see what you need! Have a few free minutes? See what you can do in Word or Excel! Log into the databases and do some dummy searches! Computers can even be fun!
No, seriously, I don't want to come in and find out that one of our patron computers has been shut down for three days straight because it did something funny and you decided to just shut it down and not tell me. YOU DIDN'T EVEN TRY RESTARTING IT! We have had trainings on this. RESTART IS YOUR FRIEND. Especially for the patron computers--they're set to wipe & boot from a restore point!
The printer's acting up? You mean the part where I can select file>select printer>receipt printer>thermalprinter? And then it works? Right. That.
Warning: steel yourself for the brain broked
A patron has text in a word doc. They don't want to attach it to the email, which you know how to do because I trained you on that. Instead they want the text of the document to somehow magically jump into the body of the email. Nope. Can't help you there.
^lather, rinse, repeat. Not all my coworkers are this bad, just half of 'em.
Stinky people
Now, these are not homeless folks or those in shelters or halfway houses or any other such programs. No, I mean the chain smokes who come in so saturated with cigarette smoke that I can't breath at the desk. Or the drunks who are so well-marinated they leave a cloud of pickled books & dvds in their wakes. Or, oh so worse, and what I'm dealing with now are the General Stinky People. They look like your average computer user, dicking around with words with friends or farmville, but you can smell them all the way across the room. Thanks, stinky folks. You make me want to cut the nose right off my face.
Do your job
Typically, for the most part, I like my boss & coworkers. They're nice people. But can I get a cup of motivation around here? Or a teaspoon of management? Guh. We have an assistant director who's so damn lousy at assistant directing that the director created a new position, Assistant to the Director, to take care of that work. Which is part of what I do. Why'd Director create a new job instead of making the Assistant Director assist? Hi, management skills, please? AD is so bad at doing her job that me & the children's librarian are now running adult programming (AD's field--she does one long-standing program that's run forever and takes no effort to continue), which is DEAD SIMPLE. Seriously. Adults sign up for stuff. They actually come to stuff. I don't get teens at my teen programming (same. 3. kids. and I advertise in all the schools, in house, in the paper, guh), and sometimes the kid's stuff just bombs--parents have to actually bring their kids. Adult stuff? Call performer/workshop giver/presenter. Book date/time. Advertise. Watch as program fills, runs successfully, and gets fabulous, you should hold more of these feedback.
Speaking of program fails. Children's Librarian. When you're making a program you can't assume that our program room is not in use! We have plenty of outside groups that fill out the application and sign up ahead of time! We have a whole notebook that keeps all this information. When you set up a program, you have to check that a) the room is available and b) sign up for that slot. You'd think you'd have figured this out by now since you screwed this up last summer, too.
drama drama
Okay, I get that you're new to this. You've never quite done your programs this way. You've done 'em at schools where it's a captive audience, blah blah. That said, this is way too much handholding and fiddling and dealing with and talking down for someone running a fiber arts workshop. SERIOUSLY. OMFG.
Our poster sucks and you want to print up your own, in color, and have the library pay for 'em? Uh, no. We do ours in house. Sunk cost, and all. The display on the table widges you out because you think people will steal your stuff? (Oh, and thanks so friggin' much Assistant Director for butting in that we won't be able to watch all the time so we can't guarantee blah-friggin-blah. You made Presenter way more uncomfortable and difficult to manage. We should move our fabulous poster and tape up your samples? FINE. DONE. Oh, and you want it out on the front desk? Sure, why the hell not.
Oh, and you're going to all the schools and passing on your own posters to the art teacher? Um, hi, I told you I was in contact with the school librarians and THEY PASS STUFF ON TO THE TEACHERS.
We have to buy all the supplies? On top of your fee? Uhh . . . okay, but we're keep all the leftovers. We didn't buy enough supplies? That's $270 and you'll have to make it last for BOTH workshops. SUCK. IT. UP.
Seriously, she came in nearly daily to fiddle with her display and adjust this and adjust that and ask if we can open up the teen workshop to adults and it's getting so close and what if people on the waitlist make other plans. In the end, we were able to sell participants $60 worth of supplies and had at least HALF left over. blah.
Oh, and can we type up a letter of recommendation for her?
2 good 2 follow UR directions
Our wireless is a little bit different from walking into Overprice Deluxe Coffee and logging into their network. It's even a little different from popping into Sammich Shoppe and using their phone number as the WEP key. I get that. It's weird to you. Cool. But I can only walk you through it if you follow my instructions!
a. select our interwebs, it's called Lieberry Tubes
b. open the browser of your choice. (I usually list the obvious options cuz 'browser' gets me lost kitty head tilt)
c. type in LieberryWebsite.org
d. use the nifty randomly generated username & password to log in. (printed on a slip of paper I give out)
Why does everyone get stuck after step a? Instead of following my Super Simple Directions I get
SuckyPatron: But I'm not connected, whine, whine whine.
Me: *explain*
SP: *WHINE* I'm not connected. It's broken!
Me: *re-explain*
SP: WHINE WHINE IT DOESN'T WORK!
Me: Humor me and open up Internet Explorer.
SP: *grumbling, muttering, cussing and opens up IE*
Me: Type in LieberryWebsite.org.
SP: *hunt, peck, type-y*
Me:
Press enter. IE: *shows intertubes log in page for nifty log in slip*
Me: *Uber-cheerful* There! Now you can log in!
SP: *depending on the type: sheepish or grinding teeth in utter hate*
The utterly worst of the worst? The ones who come back AGAIN and AGAIN to repeat this process. Desk, meet my head.
Big Brary Blows
Dear Big Brary,
You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake. You are part of a consortium. When you play by your own rules, you make life difficult for everyone else. We have over 40,000 people in this town. While not all of those have library cards and not all of them are children, there is no fucking way in hell you can memorize every precious child who gets a library card from you. And by library card, I mean gets an account without the physical library card. So you look up every precious child to enter your library because every single person on your children's department staff has memorized every single child. BULLSHIT. I don't care that kids lose their damn card. You are supposed to give them the card. They need that card to check out books here or at any other consortium library. I don't know little Johnny and little Suzy and little Tyrese and little Shaniqua. I ask EVERY PATRON INCLUDING CHILDREN for a library card. And no, I can't just look them up. Card or it didn't happen.
On a similar note, we use a consortium-wide delivery, Big Brary. These are not just your books. So maybe those craptastic paperbacks that you don't care enough about to catalog and barcode but manage to stick a genre sticker onto could at least also get your damn library's stamp so we know who to ship it back to. (they're not the only offender, unfortunately . . . trade paperbacks and magazines)
No love,
the person who tells small children they can't check out books or movies because not only did Big Brary not give them a card, Mommy forgot her card and her license even though SHE DROVE (< issues all their own -_-)
it doesn't bite
Coworkers, meet the computer. The fun thing about computers is that they are wonderful tools. These computers are locked down in such a way that YOU CANNOT BREAK THEM. If you're not sure how to do something, you can play around with it. Do what? Play around with a a a a computer?? Yup! Click different things until it you see what you need! Have a few free minutes? See what you can do in Word or Excel! Log into the databases and do some dummy searches! Computers can even be fun!
No, seriously, I don't want to come in and find out that one of our patron computers has been shut down for three days straight because it did something funny and you decided to just shut it down and not tell me. YOU DIDN'T EVEN TRY RESTARTING IT! We have had trainings on this. RESTART IS YOUR FRIEND. Especially for the patron computers--they're set to wipe & boot from a restore point!
The printer's acting up? You mean the part where I can select file>select printer>receipt printer>thermalprinter? And then it works? Right. That.
Warning: steel yourself for the brain broked
A patron has text in a word doc. They don't want to attach it to the email, which you know how to do because I trained you on that. Instead they want the text of the document to somehow magically jump into the body of the email. Nope. Can't help you there.
^lather, rinse, repeat. Not all my coworkers are this bad, just half of 'em.
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