Obnoxious Librarian from Hades

This book touches on war, love, jealousy, and loss… it will propel the author into literary history.. no wait.. that was “Gone with the wind”

The New York Times Book Review

The thinnest book in the 817 section.

The Dewey Decimal Classification Fan Newsletter

When I was in Houston in June of 2006 at a library meeting, little did I know that one small brainwave would result in a book. I was listening to a PowerPoint presentation and my brain tends to wander around everything but the topic of the presentation.

One of my fellow librarians, Leah Bartlett had just started thinking out loud about the best way to draw attention to a blog which we thought about setting up. Leah suggested we would post something outrageous to generate discussion. That quickly led to the idea of creating some sort of obnoxious librarian character that would trigger reactions.

That brainwave went around in my brain and that same night I scribbled some notes for ideas. Then life got in the way and I forgot about the obnoxious librarian until a year later he resurfaced as an alter ego. For over ten years I have worked in large organizations and had my share of Dilbert-like experiences. The obnoxious librarian is my way of venting frustrations and amusing others at the same time.

The title and type of humor was inspired by the b*stard operator from hell, a legendary series of Usenet postings about a computer operator in the nineties.

A big thank you to: the Warrior Librarian , LISNEWS.org, Law Librarian Blog and libgig.com for promotion, my faithful readers who would like eternal fame: Penny Leach, Percy Flint, Erwin La Roi and all the others who enjoy my postings. This book is for you!

Major thanks to Paul Weemaes
[1]
 for editing the whole book – all remaining errors are mine.

Last but not least thanks to my wife for the cups of tea and biscuits during my writing sessions.

Find new updates on 
http://olfh.blogspot.com
 or buy the real book via http://www.lulu.com/content/4253767

It is Monday morning, 9 a.m. in the library and the phone rings. This is a nuisance. I am just in the middle of re-writing the Dewey entry on Wikipedia (the entry now goes straight to an entry about an obscure American philosopher named John Dewey, but of course it should point straight to Melvil Dewey
[2]
) and now I have completely lost my train of thought. I let the phone ring three times as I don’t want my “customers” (I am no longer allowed to call them lusers, which is short for library users) to think I have nothing better to do than answering their endless, irrelevant questions.

“Library” (with the proper curt tone in my voice)

“Hello, this is Kevin from sales. I cannot get access to the Wall Street Journal Online”

“Yes?”

“Well, I need to look up some stats for a presentation by the vice president before 10, so I need you to restore my access quickly”.

I always hate it when people try to make their problem mine. To make sure our WSJ access is completely secure, I change the password every 3 days and then post it clearly on the intranet web page for everyone to see. Well, if they know how to find the page, as it is actually not linked from anywhere. And I use a white font on a white background. But for a real motivated user that should not be a problem, I think. I just want to discourage all the casual users, as all they do is hog the concurrent user licenses. Anyway, I want to get back to my important work task at hand so I need to get rid of Kevin.

“Well, Kevin, I just looked in my library system and you still have overdue reports listed here. I need you to return them before I can give you access to the Wall Street Journal.”

“But… but… I only checked them out yesterday!”

“That is not what my library system says – you don’t want to imply my system is wrong, do you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Ok, well, then I’ll see you here at the library at 3.30 when I have the scheduled report check-in time. Bye Kevin.” {click

Just to be sure Kevin will not be a problem in the future, I quickly open the web content management system and start a blog in Kevin’s name. At first I thought that being the solo librarian and web master in the company would be a burden, but it has it’s advantages. Kevin’s new blog, which is featured prominently on the front page of our global intranet, is all about his praise for our competitor and how he would like to “expand his horizon” and “is ready for new opportunities”. You bet Kevin will have an appointment with HR before he can say Wall Street Journal.

Back to my work on the Dewey wiki, as I need to finish that before I have my annual budget meeting. For some reason, all overhead departments must reduce their budget by 5% except for the library. Perhaps it was my note to the CFO
[3]
 about his Google web history, which I stumbled upon in my role as corporate search strategy coordinator. For some reasons the CFO had non-business relevant queries in his account, which might lead a non-informed person to think he was looking for female companionship during evenings on his business trips.

It is Tuesday evening 7 p.m. in the library and I look forward to my favorite task: the monthly overdue book raid. This is the time when I exercise my mandate to retrieve every overdue book and company file. And as corporate clean desk policy focal point, I use that same time to clean desks from non-work related items. I enjoy this task so much, I have to restrain myself from humming “The Ride Of The Valkyries” all the time.

For this monthly exercise I have:

- a dark blue windbreaker with “LIBRARY” on the back in CIA type font;

- several copies of a letter from our CEO
[4]
 that reprimands employees who have broken the holy library rules and / or the clean desk policy;

- the master key to every room, cabinet and desk in the building;

- a portable shredder;

- a portable scanner (to scan interesting material I find);

- a grin on my face

As a librarian, my salary is not on par with other ‘professionals’ in the company, but this type of tasks gives me a lot of job satisfaction. It probably is comparable to the feeling HR managers get when they start a rightsizing or outsourcing project.

I start with my manager’s office and surprise, surprise there are printouts on his desk that are not in his workload basket. The workload basket is an invention from HR to make us all more efficient – all your correspondence should be in that basket, so you know where your work is. Unfortunately, the only hardcopy correspondence we get are memos from HR. The rest of the company and the world just bangs out e-mails with follow-up flags, CAPATALIZED subjects and marked with urgent to get things done.

The print outs contain lots of hand scribbled notes that unfortunately are not interesting enough to scan. I enjoy a moment of silence and then shred them, leaving a note from the CEO behind where the print outs where on the desk. The note reprimands the employee about how serious we are about information security and that the confiscated items can be collected at the CEO’s office. When I found out that nobody ever had the guts to try and collect the confiscated items, this job got a lot easier.

In the other rooms I find several overdue books and files hidden behind a cupboard or underneath annual reports. Why do they think they can hide books and files from me? I still regret that libraries decided to loan books hundreds of years ago. That is when all the turmoil started. We should have continued with chaining books to the stacks.

Back in my office I end the evening with recalling the e-books whilst sipping a latte. Aaaah, this is an area where IT makes my job easier. With the click of my mighty ALA
[5]
 approved mouse I can see who has overdue e-books. Thanks to the wonderful features of PDF I can make the e-books useless as the font is changed to Wing-dings, every other sentence is backwards and the tune to Sesame Street plays over and over again until the book is checked in to the virtual library again.

It would have been easier to just recall the e-books and have a note shown to the user about this, but this makes it more fun.

It is Wednesday afternoon, 3 p.m. in the library and the e-mail announces a memo from senior management by playing the Jaws theme. I like to have audio cues about what type of mail arrives in my mailbox: "The godfather" when my direct manager mails, "Oooops I did it again" when an e-mail has the word "password" and "lost" in it, “The A-team” when a library friend mails and the exorcist theme when the IT department is the sender.

The e-mail is full of bad news worded in management lingo. Fortunately I have many years experience in deciphering this cryptic language, where the word to content-ratio is about 50:1. It is the type of e-mail that on the surface has lots of nice looking buzzwords in a pleasant font, but the hidden meaning is quite the opposite.

"Dear employees of Hades Corp.," (stop your non-managerial, mundane tasks and listen up)

"In our relentless drive for top quartile performance we have launched a new cost effectiveness program which will at the same time enhance customer value."(The shareholders feel they don't get enough money - as we cannot cut our top management salaries or bonuses, you have to cough up money - and stop whining about this thing you call quality)

"To steer us in this exciting program, we have enlisted the value synergy team of McQuinsey Inc, who will bring us relevant insights into how we can

improve our business. Each team lead will work one-on-one with a McQuinsey consultant to come up with innovative, market driven cost-effective solutions whilst maintaining the 110% performance we owe our customers and ourselves." (Since we haven't got a clue how this business works, we have hired a bunch of overpaid and non-informed consultants who will come to keep you from your job - if they come up with something good, we implement it, otherwise we will just dismiss it - and by the way, you will have to do all of this besides your normal job.)

"You will be contacted by your McQuinsey consultant soon to discuss your cost-value balance and potential scenarios on improvement." (You will be confronted with lots of silly ideas to slash your budget, so it is up to you to prove they don't work.)

Oh great, just what I need. I haven't finished the new Harry Potter yet and now the bi-annual consultancy round starts to look for savings.

Luckily, I have been through this before, as these ‘exciting programs’ tend to come around every few years and in general the library in the end is not affected. My motto during these times is what I learned from my first mentor: “If you cannot beat them, confuse them”.

It is 4pm in the library while I am grinding my teeth over yet another dispute with my arch nemesis in the finance department. Even though I have no problems with the CFO anymore, one of his minions is making my life hard.

A few weeks ago I needed to rush order a special publication to return the favor of a very senior manager. Rush orders are not included in the contract with our approved vendor, who by the way is off shored for "cost attractive" reasons (which is why every order takes 6x times as long and requires 12 forms). So I defied company policy and placed the order with a non-approved vendor who then sent an invoice.

I am sure my arch nemesis, the compliance assistant vice president minion, had a glorious day when he received that invoice. He left me a voicemail at 6.45am, knowing this would be the first thing I would hear in the morning - reminding me that this was not company policy and I needed to fill out a SCP (Step out of Company Policy) form to justify the expense.

Following the general finance policy of "keep them in the dark", he does not send me the actual form but a link to their website. The form is hidden somewhere, and I am sure he is grinning in his tiny cubicle, expecting me to call him in desperation as I cannot find the form.

But he has forgotten that there is only one master of findability here: me. As I also am the webmaster of the intranet, I quickly download the whole finance

department website to my local drive. I whip out my trusted tools collection on my USB stick and select a small, yet powerful indexer. This nifty tool rapidly indexes the whole finance website and linked documents, then shows it to me: categorized in Dewey, keywords in ranked order, a perfect balance between precision and recall and of course a KWIC
[6]
 and KWOC index.

With one click of a button I fire off a power user query to drill down to the required form. This all without breaking a sweat.

But, the quest is not over yet. The form has been written in the ancient, cryptic language of finance speak which mere mortals cannot grasp without surrendering their soul and first born to the higher powers of finance. The form contains sentences and words that sound like English:

"Care should be exercised to ensure that costs are not accidentally double-booked, due to both a service entry AND a cost accrual being created, and both posted to the same period.” "Inter Entity Cutback Mapping" and "make NBV value zero and expect to have no depreciation posted if no UOP entered".

I am convinced the whole finance website and all their forms are generated automatically from a database with finance mumbo jumbo. No wonder they can report savings every year, as it gets harder every year to spend company money with their policies and forms. I have more chance of convincing a librarian that Google actually is better than his beloved library catalogue than to get this form filled out correctly.

Fortunately, all of the invoices are scanned and then stored on the records management system. Guess who is the records management corporate custodian - the job that everyone thought would be boring and not glamorous enough? And isn't it pure luck that the original paper invoice is stored in the archive, which just happens to be under my supervision.

I recall the scanned invoice from the system, use PhotoShop to change my name on the invoice to that of the CFO and *presto* a new paper invoice also appears. Guess that invoice will not be a problem, as the minion would never dare to bother the CFO with such a detail.

And all is well in the library again.