The Aviary

Alas, I am having a day where all of the people I come in contact with at the library are annoying me. It is mostly not their fault - I'm having one of those days where I just don't want to talk to people - but there are a few where I feel my annoyance is justifiable:

- The lady who came in and told me not to come close to her because she has the flu but still has dvds she wants to hand me.

- The elderly rightwing gentlemen who really really wanted to have a long monologue at me about how the protests in New York and Ferguson are unjustified. Sir, I am working so I can't tell you to take your nonsense elsewhere but you really need to. Also, I do not want to talk to you about ebola, biochemical warfare, or your thoughts on The Russians.

- The person who called and told me she was from the ILL department and asked me if we had a certain title ready to go back to them without mentioning that what she was looking for was a bookgroup kit and not an ILL at all, and then proceeded to get snippy with me for not magically knowing what she wanted.

I feel like I've had my quota of irritating people today, y'know?

I have decided that my least favorite question ever is: "Why do you know that?"

A coworker has a first aid class coming up soon, so I told her about L'Inconnue de la Seine. Because that is totally fascinating - who would not want to know about that? And my coworker just looked at me and said, "Why do you know that?" You know the tone. Like knowing things is strange and off-putting in itself, like knowledge is suspicious.

I hate that. I hate when I give someone a plot description of a book I love or an old horror film and their response is "I just don't know how you keep all that in your head." I hate when my dad laughs at me because I've chosen to use a word that might be unusual but is more precise as to the meaning I want to convey. I bet they have things they know that I don't, special areas of interest and expertise. Why the hell are my areas of interest and expertise less worthy of respect?

Why do you know that? It is a legitimately interesting piece of knowledge - why the hell don't you?

I am having a frustrating day.

So, a few months ago, I was asked if I would like to swap my Friday hours at Bainbridge for Friday hours at Kingston. Since I make more money at Kingston and also like working there better, I said yes.

At the time, I was under the impression that it would be a one-to-one swap - five hours in one place for five in another. Then I was told that I would have to give up one hour at Kingston, on Thursday, to make this work, which was irritating, but I'd be making more money while working less, so okay. But also, it took a very long time for anything to get officially confirmed, and all of this information trickled down a chain - admin to my manager to my supervisor to me - with me always the last to know anything about it, and often being given confused information by my immediate supervisor, who assured me that my manager would talk to me and make sure all the details were hashed out. That never happened.

Finally, they told me that my new schedule would go into effect on September 1st. So I came in this morning, as I always do. My supervisor appeared about 10 minutes later, said hello, and then said, "I don't think you're supposed to be here for another hour."

Turns out, I have lost an hour on Tuesday too, and no one told me. Admittedly, part of this is my fault for not checking my email last Friday, when the schedules were sent out. But also, I kinda feel like maybe, at some point, someone should have sat down with me and told me what the plan was, what exactly my new schedule would be, why they were working it the way they were. I feel like I've been left out of the loop on a matter than vitally concerns me, because everyone who should have been telling me what was going on has been assuming someone else was doing it. The whole thing has felt weirdly shady, since not being told information like this feels like someone is keeping things secret. And now I just feel stupid and pissed off about it, because it's not that they were keeping secrets - it's that none of them were organized or communicative enough to get the thing done properly.

I mean, I'm still okay with the arrangement, mostly. I don't like that I'm losing those hours, but I've pretty much made my peace with it. But I think I should have been told about the damned schedule change before the morning it started.

(Also, I hate being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It sets off my anxiety something fierce - I have multiple calendars wherever I am so that I can check that I'm where I'm supposed to be when I'm supposed to be there. Changing my schedule without discussing it with me upsets me a great deal, which is compounded my frustration at not being informed about what was going on with my job. So I am angry about that, and the anxiety kinda makes me want to cry, which is really not what I wanted for today.)

Things:

- So I started rereading Carmilla instead. I say "rereading", because I have technically read it before, but I was about 9 years old and missed pretty much everything important and don't really remember it at all. But hey, 22 years later, it's pretty great.

- The last 15 minutes the library was open tonight, we had no patrons. So it was just me and the other nerdy person who works there, standing around talking about stuff. And I discovered something inexplicable - I knew that he had watched at least some Farscape, because he understood a reference I made to it some months ago. But tonight it came out that he has only watched the first season and isn't really sure that he liked it and I'm pretty sure I just sort of sputtered at him incoherently for a minute because Farscape! ::flaily hands:: I mean, intellectually I understand that there must be people who don't like Farscape but I don't really grok the idea, y'know?

- There are children outside my window, chasing one of the local wild rabbits with a fishing net. (Okay, it may be a feral rabbit, as it is piebald.) I viciously hope it will bite them.

Within the last 15 minutes, I have had two separate and unrelated patrons ask me, "So, when are you all moving into your new library building?"

When we have built the building, sir-or-ma'am. And we will do that when we have raise 2 million more dollars in order to do so. Do you have 2 million dollars?

No, neither do we.

Dear library patrons,

Yes, we do send out an email reminder three days before your items are due. It's pretty great! However, it is also a courtesy that we provide for you and sometimes, like all technological services, it goes wrong. You might not get the email if something goes wrong.

You are still responsible for bringing your books back on time.

I will apologize for the reminder not getting to you. I will make sure that we have the correct email address in your account. But I'm not going to take the fines off because your books were still late and it's not my fault that you can't keep track of them without us chasing after you.




PS - Why the hell do you smell that strongly of cat litter? Good heavens.

Yesterday, call time for the concert was an hour after I got off work, so I just drove their straight, planning to change into concert attire in the bathroom. And I brought my hairbrush to fix my hair. This morning, I went to get my brush out of my bag to brush my hair this morning and it was nowhere to be found.

"Y'know," my mom says, "I went to the bathroom during intermission last night and there was a hairbrush there and I thought, 'That looks just like Sara's!'"

So my hairbrush was left there overnight. It is probably too much to hope that it will still be there when I get there today.

This has not been my favorite week ever.

Had an 8 o'clock dentist appointment this morning. Which, since I am the kind of person who likes to eat breakfast in the morning and not rush, and also because today is the day I eat two meals while at work and need to pack them beforehand, means that I woke up at 5:30.

And now I am at work. And will be here till 8 o'clock tonight.

I would really like a nap.

So, I am still grumpy. (Making cheese was fun, but then the grumpy came back.) Part of the problem* is that I don't currently have a story.

I usually do have a story. It's the story that I tell myself when I'm paging, or knitting, or doing the dishes, or driving, or going to sleep, or during that bit of the movie I'm watching where I realize that there's going to be a really prolonged battle scene that I'm going to have trouble following so I may as well think about something else for the next five minutes. And it's the story I tell myself to distract myself from unproductive negative emotion, like aggravation or anxiety. Sometimes they're about my current fannish obsession, sometimes they aren't, but there's almost always something.

Except, right now, my brain refuses to produce one. I am between fandoms at the moment, so there's nothing grabbing me there. I've tried going back to old standbys (Dracula stories, Frankenstein stories) but my monsters won't play. I can go over old scenes that I've already plotted extensively, but there's nothing new. And it's incredibly difficult to come up with something original when I'm already grumpy.

It's really quite depressing.




*There are several parts of the grumpiness problem but the rest of them are the bits that are actually making me grumpy as opposed to the bits that are preventing me from getting myself out of it, so I'm not talking about them right now.

Warning: I am going to be a curmudgeon for a moment.


Dear teenaged library-goers,

The proper response when I help you find a book, log into the computers, or use the print-release station is not "Uh huh" or "Mm-kay" or a blank stare. The proper response is "Thank you".

Sweet Loki in a fish basket, were you raised by wolves?

And then, the lady who was scheduled to come for the download session showed up 15 minutes early, with an unexpected and unscheduled friend, but without the necessary cord to connect her nook to her laptop. Fortunately, the friend had a cord. Unfortunately, the friend had a computer that would not install the programs necessary to download and transfer ebooks for the nook.

Also, they left an audiobook in the bookdrop that was missing a disc, so now I have to call them. Of course, I only discovered this 10 minutes after they left.

We have been open for half an hour and I am already done.

The thing is, for most of this week, I have been low-level grumpy all the time. I'm not really sure why that is. I mean, we are currently on the cusp of Summer Reading/end of school, which always makes the library busy and weird, so that's stressful. And there's all the weird with my family, which is also stressful. And I keep sort of thinking that I'm in the early stages of catching a cold. And today is full of patrons being bitchy at me for no real reason and people touching me who don't have permission to touch me.*

So all of that grar is mostly manifesting as a desire to a) not talk to anyone ever and b) set people on fire. Sadly, neither of these options are feasible and setting people on fire probably wouldn't actually be as satisfying as it is in my fantasies.

I think tonight may be a horror movie night.




*And standing too close, but I'm trying not to get angry at people for that. It's not their fault that my personal space bubble increases dramatically in size when I'm cranky.