A Series of Unfortunate Events

Nothing in the world is grosser than crusty, dried-out rubber bands. They almost make me not want to be a librarian anymore, not that I need a lot of help in that department these days.

Morale is low here in the trenches. We lost two of our men this weekend, and nobody's sure who will be next. We sit in fear over our keyboards, shifty eyes peering left and right always expecting more managerial treachery to leap from the shrubbery. Twitching at every innocent sound, we pray to someday be free from our post to return to the happy life we once knew, the life our fallen comrades will never remember.

Ok, enough. Friday we were called into a meeting. Apparently management (all 4 or 5 layers of it) has tried everything it can to cut corners and adjust next year's budget to work with our ever diminishing funds. So, layoffs. Fine. Layoffs happen; it's the unfortunate side-effect of working in this industry. They told us at the meeting that technical services was to lose a certain number of people, and two of them were from monograph cataloging. (That's my division.) They apologized, tried to justify it, and answered questions, one of which was "If you've cut all the corners you could, what happens next year when the budget is cut again? Won't there be more layoffs?" The answer to that was in Non-Committal Managerese, but it translates to English as "Nice knowin' ya!"

Then they sent is back to our offices. "Hey, you might be fired in a couple hours! Ok, back to work! Have fun! Chop chop!" Clearly we were not going to get any work done because we had to form a circle and start bitching.

Now, I like my boss. I like his boss. I like her boss. But this has to be on the list of Top 10 Ways NOT To Handle Lay-Offs. I'm not sure who planned it. Nobody would tell us who was being let go, and they all knew. Nobody's happy right now.

I'm not supposed to bitch about work on here because I signed some sort of bullshit privacy thing that said I wouldn't. But before this happened, we already felt like were being dicked around by outside forces, outside forces being a term which here means "by people who are not my boss or his boss or her boss." The division's been shrinking for years, nobody communicates with anybody, we're given conflicting information about how to conduct ourselves here, and people are making decisions that affect our jobs without consulting us catalogers when we're the ones in the thick of it. Maybe my boss or his boss or her boss are a part of the trouble, but I get the impression that we're all in the same boat here and that the bullshit is trickling down from a higher level.

And now this. At it's early stages, low morale leads to minor water-cooler grumbling. As it increases, productivity is affected. After Friday, we've officially passed that to the point where low morale is bound to lead to massive disloyalty. Why stick around here when my job could be gone in a year? I'm not moving up since there's no career ladder to climb. I'm not learning anything since I've been relegated to do copy cataloging of backlog for the past two months, a phrase which here means "a tedious, repetitive, non-morale-boosting task usually performed by paraprofessionals and sometimes students." The pay is barely enough to keep me in clean socks and a Spartan living space. We'll continue to be dicked around, a phrase which here means "treated unkindly and humiliated, as though hit in the face with a dick." So what exactly is the draw?

If they see this entry, I'll probably get fired or something. Today my answer is "Feh!" While unemployment is not the most appealing state of being, I can't seem to let rest the fact that when I found out I was not laid off, a part of me was honestly disappointed. After all, to the well-organized mind, a lay-off is but the next great adventure.