The one where we take a sabbatical

Its is a stressful time in the library as I am in an edit war on Wikipedia about the role of obnoxiousness for librarians. For some reason, the user named librarians_suck keeps removing my updates about how relevant the skill of obnoxiousness is for the future of our profession.

Just while I am completely engrossed in a new paragraph, the phone rings. Well, that is a nuisance. Looking at the display, I see it´s not someone I know and therefore very likely a l-user (library user), so I ignore the phone. But it keeps on ringing. Now, this is disturbing as I am losing my train of thought.

I pick up the phone: “Library” (sounding as disappointing as I can)

“Librarian, this is Kevin from sales”

Wait, Kevin from sales. This rings a bell.

“Yes?”

“Librarian, 3.5 years ago you got me fired from my job. I vowed to take revenge for this, so I plotted and schemed for several years to come back to Hades Inc. And now I am back as senior executive vice president of sales. And I really, really wanted to call you and tell you that you are terminated, finished, fired! But….”

“But…?”

“I cannot fire you. It pains me to tell you this, but I need you. Actually, I need a big favor from you on which the future of my job and partly the company depends.”

“I am listening…”

“Librarian, I still hate your guts. But as you know, we have been trying to sign a deal with the royal prince of Hydra to access the extremely valuable natural resources in his country. After countless visits and proposals he has told us he will sign a multi-billion dollar deal with us for the next 25 years, but with an exotic requirement. He demands from us that Hades Inc builds him a library – a royal library, with marble floors, leather bound books, a handwritten card catalog and golden signs asking people to be quiet.
This stupid request is now the one thing that we need to fulfill in order to get this deal and put the competition behind us. So, librarian, would you be willing to go on an all expenses paid sabbatical for the foreseeable future to build a library for the prince?" Money and staffing are not an issue, that is completely up to you.”

“Well, Kevin, of course I am flattered. But it sounds like a lot of work, and I don’t know whether I can leave my job here….”

“Librarian, you are a tough negotiator. Let me sweeten the deal. We’re not only going to pay for all your expenses, put you in an exclusive resort, providing you with a personal assistant, cook, driver and cataloger – but we’re going to allow you to hand pick a collection of first prints of Elbonian poems, which I know is something you collect.”

“Kevin, perhaps I could indeed hand over parts of my duties to my passive aggressive assistant Sue and provide some management remotely. It will be an honor to do my duty for Hades Inc and live in luxury, while I construct the worlds most exclusive, expensive, astonishing and insanely awesome library for the royal prince.”

“Wonderful, librarian, wonderful! If you can pack your bags this afternoon, I will have the company limousine waiting outside and bring you straight to the company jet.”

I put down the phone, and all is well in the library again. A sabbatical may just be what I need after fighting bureaucracy, clueless managers, soul crushing meetings and l-users.

So for now it’s goodbye, my readers. Who knows I will return one day to tell more tales of the obnoxious librarian – but if I do not return, it has been a pleasure to share my stories with you. And don’t forget: we can all use a little obnoxiousness in our lives!

The one where we make money via keyword matches

 There’s a new wind blowing inside the Hades Inc. bureaucracy for support departments like the library: we are strongly encouraged to look for inter-organizational funding opportunities. This is a brilliant new concept where they continue to reduce our budget every year, but I am now “empowered” to look for creative ways within Hades Inc to find additional funding.

The catering services team have taken the lead in this. They have put advertisements from other Hades Inc departments on the plates during lunch. So when you have finished your soup or your salad, you will see a message at the bottom of your plate: “Time writing – it’s essential and can be fun” or “The creative media team can put your department in the spotlights”.

Then the coffee machines were refurbished to have LCD displays in them. So while you are waiting for your coffee (well, lukewarm brown liquid), you are shown advertorials about services, products and even customer testimonials.

My manager keeps pushing me to also “think out of the box” and come up with alternative ways to get funding from other Hades Inc. departments or companies. Well, to me the library is a sacred place for knowledge which should not be ruined by advertisements, cross promotion or other garbage.

The intranet on the other hand, I care less about. As you know I am not only the solo librarian in this company, I am also the solo webmaster because IT did not think it was sexy enough to manage it on a daily basis  after the multimillion dollar upgrade project. So I was stuck with the daily operations, but in return I have full control over every webpage, blog, discussion board and even the intranet search engine.

And the search engine is exactly which will make the library rich by using the so called “keyword matches”. The search engine has this great feature where I can plug search results on the top of the results page based on the user’s queries. Normally we use this to provide quick access to websites that are requested often but hard to find.

So I have made a deal with one of our Hades Inc subsidiaries: Hades Inc Travel, which offers apartments and holiday houses all over the world. It is not well known, but they do offer discounts for Hades Inc staff. And with the economy still not picking up, they are quite eager to rent their apartments and holiday house, even at a discount.

It took me an evening of tweaking, but now I have made sure that every query made via the intranet search engine has a keyword match result for a holiday apartment or house:

“You are looking for stock options. Why don’t you cash your stock options and enjoy a once in a lifetime experience in a Hades Inc. Travel beach hut?”

“Pension plans? Hades Inc Travel has excellent holiday apartments in exotic locations where you can start thinking about your pension!”

“Transesterification of triacetin can best be studied in the luxury Hades Inc Travel lodges on the beaches of Elbonia!”

“There is no better place to study the socioeconomic status and cultural influences on language than in the 5 star desert resort from Hades Inc Travel”

And I have negotiated a deal whereby I get $0.05 for every click and 10% of every booking made via the intranet search engine. Now excuse me while I go and count my money in a luxurious Elbonian beach hut.

The one where costs charging goes to the extreme

The wonderful people in the Cost Buster program came up with a brilliant idea a couple of years ago: let’s stop paying for things centrally, but let the teams that use something pay their share! So instead of central budgets for computers, journals, furniture etc., every department is now charged on their cost centre for what they use. The divisions then of course completely disagree with what they are being charged and everyone spends hours, days, weeks fighting over charges.

After applying this technique to the expensive items like computers, furniture and meeting rooms, the Cost Buster team has now applied this to smaller cost categories like office supplies.

This has interesting side effects. As in a lot of offices nowadays, the photocopier is a multifunctional, high volume device which is shared with different teams. I noticed a couple of days ago that ours had run out of staples, so I sent an email to the Printer Coordinator in charge. He replied that he couldn't buy any staples unless somebody gave him a cost centre. Unfortunately nobody will give a cost centre when most of the staples will be used by others.

What makes it worse is that if somebody sends a job to the printer requesting stapling, the machine just stops until somebody comes down to reset it!

All for the price of a box of staples.

The one with things I don’t want to hear anymore

I don’t do new year’s resolutions. But I do have some requests for my l-users (library users) to *not* use the following phrases in 2012:

Is this the library?

Hello! There’s a big sign on the door, there’s books everywhere, there is a shushing sign on the wall and I wear glasses. Duh.

·         Can I ask a question?
You just did

·         I am looking for some information
SOME INFORMATION?! I am a highly skilled, certified information professional. I can find needles in haystacks just using the sheer power of bolean and my library magic. So be specific or stop wasting my time.

·         I know it’s against the rules, but….
Listen. I don’t care about other people’s rules, especially the stupid rules from HR and finance. But here in the library, my rules are sacred. So don’t even think about breaking them. I can read minds, so be careful.

·         Can I borrow this book?
No, you have to buy it. Sheesh. Don’t ask the obvious.

·         This may sound like a stupid question, but…
If you already think it’s a stupid question, then it probably is a stupid question. And in the ears of a certified information professional it will absolutely be the worst question of all time – and I reserve the right to laugh and then snort.

So if we all think about this during the holidays, we will get along just fine in 2012.

Have yourself an obnoxious Christmas / Hanukkah / Festivus and a wonderful 2012!

The one where we have to embrace social media

Sometimes you wish managers would change their mind. Sometimes you wish that when they have done so, they hadn’t.

Until now the social media phenomena was largely ignored by the powers that be. Our PR and marketing department claimed that a good press release was better than Tweets from silly people, and that this whole thing was a hype anyway. Last time I went by our PR and marketing department, they were also using typewriters.

But apparently the CEO latest wife (who could be his daughter) has convinced him that it is absolutely crucial for Hades Inc to fully embrace the social media revolution. And if the CEO wants it – the rest of the management is all over it. And I would be fine if our managers would pretend to be social media savvy, but no, they also want the hard working employees to pretend we are all hip and sharing <sigh>

Below a copy of the most recent memo (read: marching orders) of our social media strategy:

“Dear employees,

during our recent senior management meeting we held a blue sky thinking session, which resulted in paradigm shifting new ideas. As you know, one of our key strategic pillars for growth is “convincing customers constantly”. We have now operationalized this statement and we all can, should and WILL play a role to become Hades Inc evangelists!

We are going to fully embrace the use of social media for customer engagement and brand promotion – and all our employees will become part of our sales channel. Not only will this be much cheaper than paying ad agencies, we have also learned that customers prefer FaceBook Likey’s and Twits above poster campaigns.

As of next Monday, IT will automatically generate a FaceBook, Twitter, Orkut, Google+, LinkedIn and Friendster account for all of our employees, temporary and hired staff: over 300 thousand people. We strongly encourage you to start using these accounts to “friend” potential and existing customers, tell everyone how great it is to work here and what wonderful products we sell.
As we understand that this may take time out of your already busy schedule, we have developed templates of positive messages that you can re-use. Also, if you do not post every day, don’t worry – our Social Promotion and Attenttion Message (SPAM) system will automatically post on your behalf with a positive message about Hades Inc.

This will provide a wave of positive social media karma for our beloved company, which it rightfully deserves.

I am convinced that you share my passion for this new initiative and I will +1 you when I see you online!

Paul Jamieson
Social Media Trailblazer
@PaulyJ

The one where we make our costs transparant

As I have said many times before, most l-users (library users) do not know what they want. I know what they want,  which is why I am the librarian and they are not.

The latest thing everyone keeps bugging me about is transparancy of the cost model. They want to know exactly how the costs are built up and then want to analyze it for improvement. Let me tell you, this is all just a heap of nonsense which will generate more work for me. Currently I split all the library costs across the different business units using a very simple distribution key. That key is based on whether I like the people in that department or not. Not transparant, but simple and fair.

But in order to show that this whole idea is nonsense, I have decided to play along and make the costs completely transparant. Which is what they want. But I promise you, they will beg me to go back to the old, non transparant model - because even though my new cost model is transparant, it is complex in ways never seen before (except of course in the mobile phone industry, where they have complex cost models down to an art).

The new cost model is completely transparant:

every team tells me on January 1 their demand for the coming 12 months.

So I want to know how many articles they will request, how many patent searches, how many basic reference requests, how many times they will call for library assistance, the number of photo copies from foreign journals, the number of downloads from our reports database, the number of times they will violate copyright by sharing articles with third parties and the number of stupid questions they will send to me.

What? They cannot predict that? Well, that is not my problem - that would be a problem on the demand side. I am just making it transparant, not simple.

The gift of obnoxiousness for the holidays

If you are looking to for gifts for the holidays (Christmas, The Big Tree Fest, The Celebration Of Dewey), have you thought about giving the gift of obnoxiousness?

I have published two volumes, full of stories about clueless managers, l-users, soul crushing meetings and one heck of a librarian.The second volume has one bonus story, which has never been published on the blog. All the profits will go to my world domination fund.


If you appreciate all the laughs, smirks and evil smiles I have given you in the past 4 years, think about buying one of the books. The e-book of volume one is for example now available in Kindle edition for $1.38

Volume 1
Obnoxious librarian from Hades - via Amazon.com ($12.34)
Obnoxious librarian from Hades - via Lulu.com (11.11 euro)
Obnoxious librarian from Hades - Kindle edition ($1.38, or around 1 euro)

Volume 2
Are you being served and other recipes for disaster - US edition ($15)
Are you being served and other recipes for disaster - rest of the world edition ($15, 12 Euro, 9.97 GBP)
Are you being served and other recipes for disaster -e-book ($3.14, 2.50 Euro, 2.08 GBP)