Obnoxious Librarian from Hades (9 page)

It is Monday morning, 8.33 and already this week is ruined. The trusty old library computer makes a weird noise. A few sad bleeps, but that's all. I am afraid the hard disk may have passed away, but luckily I make my own backups ever since back office IT support was outsourced. All I want is a new hard disk, so I can restore my backup. But in order to get a real IT person (do they still exist?) at my desk to replace the hard disk, I need a help desk ticket number.

Recently our help-desk was re-shored after a survey pointed out that nobody actually called the help-desk anymore following the off-shoring. First, management was pleased as this clearly indicated that IT was just working fine. However, comments from the survey indicated there still were many problems, but Hades employees just didn't call the help-desk anymore out of sheer frustration.

Our management made a bold decision to re-shore the help-desk back home. To be more precise, they awarded the help-desk contract to the local job centre which is across the road from our office. A win-win situation: Hades Corporation pays a mere penny and all the unemployed people can learn "on the job" how to be demeaning to people and anticipate a future career involving a headset.

"Welcome to the Hades Corporation no help whatsoever desk. We are understaffed, underpaid and hardly skilled, but at least we speak English."

(10 minutes cheesy piano renditions of sappy 80s ballads, interrupted every 2 minutes by "Your call is important to us. All our operators are currently busy talking to each other, clipping their toe nails or surfing the web. Once we feel like it, we may actually answer your call.")

"Hello, how may I help you?"

"Hello, well, my computer does not start. It makes weird noises when booting up."

"Can I start a remote desktop sharing session?"

"No, my computer does not start at all, so I cannot start programs."

"Oh well, I just follow a script here, it's not like I know anything about computers or even am remotely motivated to help you for the measly payment I get. Is the power-plug correctly inserted into the wall socket?"

"Listen, that's not it… this is a problem with my hard disk."

"Sir, I am under clear orders to follow the script from the knowledge base."

"Yeah but… "

"Can you insert the rescue floppy into the floppy drive?"

"Floppy? This is 2008 - floppies are extinct!"

"Sir, please follow the script with me or else I cannot help you - please put the floppy in the floppy drive."

"I don't have a floppy or a floppy drive!"

"YOU MUST HAVE A FLOPPY AND A FLOPPY DRIVE! That's is what it says here on my screen!"

"Once again, I DON'T have a floppy or a floppy drive!"

"Sir, I am trying to help you here but you are making it very difficult for me. If you have lost your floppy or floppy drive, which is company property by the way, can you ask your colleague to borrow you a floppy and a floppy drive?"

"No, of course not, you help desk-dimwit, nobody has floppies anymore! Please skip this nonsense and create a ticket to have my hard disk replaced."

"Sorry, I can only assign a ticket number once we complete the script… so let's get back to the floppy."

Five minutes later I am across the road, using a hammer, nails and wooden planks to block the doors of the employment center where our help-desk resides. One my way out, several colleagues asked me what I was going to do… once I explained, they all came along to help. Isn't it wonderful how people will become an instant group once they have a common goal? One guy even brought barbed wire!

It is slightly after teatime in the library and I am wearing my Hawaii shirt, sipping a piña colada and humming along to the “Hawaii & surf” music channel on my computer. My boss is back from holiday, and for the first time ever I'm happy to have him back… Let me explain… .

In general I use my manager's holiday to fix all the bad decisions he made in the past year and in general have a great time, without worrying about being interrupted for non-library relevant requests.

My boss always hated taking holidays, as he was sure Hades Corp would go down when he was not around 24/7. Funny how all managers have this idea of being indispensable… Every year he would take his mandatory minimum amount of vacation days, but still reply to e-mails and call the office every day several times. He was then always completely stressed out by balancing the demands of his family, who wanted to enjoy the holiday and his addiction to being in touch with the office.

It was always very tempting for us to freak him out, for instance by sending e-mails like “Hi boss, the CFO has slashed your budget proposal. But I have said that’s ok, since you overestimated several projects anyway.” He was always so happy to be back in the office, I think I have even seen him gently caressing his leather chair on his return.

This year his wife demanded he would not be in touch with the office; otherwise she would destroy his collection of rare vintage Polynesian stamps.

My boss took a one-day course “Your Blackberry will be fine without you – how to survive a holiday without access to e-mail and phone” and even thought about delegating responsibilities. But the idea of someone else lower in the food chain doing his job gave him the jitters.

Then he made the worst decision of his career so far. He hired an interim manager to take his place during the two weeks he was on holiday. This interim manager happened to be his brother’s son who just finished his MBA – which of course means that you can handle anything and know everything. They agreed to have daily contact by fax, which my boss had arranged to be secretly inserted into his morning paper at the hotel. If he then had to send instructions, he would ask the hotel concierge in code to send e-mails on his behalf. Something like: “the croissant at breakfast was very tasty with peanut butter” would mean “the savings target for the new off site data storage can be reduced, send a new proposal.”

Just when I thought it could not get worse – the two week interim manager turned out to be a micromanager with a bit of knowledge. This is one of the most dangerous kinds of managers, as they want to be involved in everything but only have a slight idea what the work is actually about. His wife volunteered in a library during college, which made him a world expert on libraries.

On his first day, he went around the office introducing himself and started to ask endless questions:

"Why do you use the Dewey Decimal Classification? What is the benefit of that versus the Cutter Expansive Classification?"

"I want a full run down of all planned and unforeseen expenses you plan to make in the next two weeks plus the considered alternatives and business cases."

"I want to be on top of all the issues. Before you sent an e-mail, let me see it first. I will correct your mistakes in red font and then return it to you for improvement."

"I worry about the productivity of this department. I am sure you can do a lot more in less time. Tomorrow I will bring my stopwatch and spend the whole day next to you so I can observe how you work."

As you can imagine, this does not create the right atmosphere. I could already see the dweeb standing besides me, telling me to “move the mouse up – UP… click!”.

My passive aggressive assistant Sue tried to get rid of him by planning a meeting with him in a remote meeting room. She used an excuse to borrow his cell phone, stepped outside the meeting room where she locked the door behind her and wandered off. Unfortunately he escaped through the window.

I tried to send a subtle signal by superglue-ing everything in his office to the desk or wall. The video of him trying to pick up a pen or using the mouse has been a hit on YouTube, but he had everything replaced within a few hours.

So the only thing we could do was to fight fire with fire…. I send a fax to the hotel where our manager was staying, praising the interim managers way of working. I went over the top to applaud his initiatives, how top managers were very pleased with him and that the rumor was the interim manager could do the original manager's job for less money. Within two days my boss was back from holiday due to unforeseen developments in "the market" which required his presence.

I may not like him that much, but at least he does not interfere with my daily work. As the saying goes: you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone.

It is Wednesday afternoon in the library and I am lip-syncing to Kraftwerk’s classic "Autobahn" album. Earlier this month I smelled something in the air… Was it a rare, first edition book in decay? Was it the smell of fear from the recent new hires? No… it was the nasty smell of unwanted change.

It started out with several men carrying tape measures walking around our offices, looking at floor plans and taking notes on clipboards while mumbling. Mumbling is never a good sign.

A week later we all received a memo about project "Smart refit":

"As always your fearless management is focused on improving the bottom line. During a recent three-day smart building management workshop in a remote location with plenty of golf and drinks, we had an epiphany: let’s not renew the lease on several buildings around town and aim to get the optimum out of the buildings we own. In your terms that means squeezing more people in less office space. Don’t think of it as a pure cost reduction, it will also increase cross-departmental bonding, shorten communication lines and reduce global warming. We are sure we can reduce the heating in the building as we will all generate enough body heat.

On a related note we have concluded that all middle management need their own office (but without a window of course) to discuss sensitive matters, make up fictitious targets and play Solitaire. Last but not least we will increase the number of meeting rooms as you can never have enough meeting rooms."

The impact for the library would be enormous. We had to reduce to half of our current floor space. All those scruffy books, journals and library staff where just a waste of space and oxygen.

I was able to successfully prevent the first idea: throw out half of the collection. My business case clearly outlined the value and ROI of the print collection, so I reached a compromise. I would find an off site storage vendor that would house half of the collection and offer a service to deliver a book or a journal volume within an hour of request. And all of this for a nickel and a dime.

When a librarian is stuck between a rock and a hard place, (s)he gets the best ideas. I told my boss I knew a very good company that could provide this service, was very respected in the industry, had very affordable prices and that I would personally vouch for a successful move. But when I would have to work according to the official Hades corporation rules of contracting and procurement, it would take ages. First I would have to draw up requirements, perform a market scan, split requirements into must haves and nice to haves, gather industry benchmark data, issue a RFI (request for information), RFP (request for proposal), RFB (request for bribes) and a RFQ (request for quotation). Hence, this would take forever. Or we could do this unofficially, get it done through my buddies in the real estate department and be the first department to give back half of the floor space to management.

My boss recognizes an opportunity to score with his managers so he agreed to approve my choice of off site storage vendor as long as the project would be done in a week and I would personally be accountable for everything. Every manager loves a decision that will score with the higher powers and if it goes wrong, have someone to shift the blame to.

A quick call to my pal in the real estate kicked of project "the stealth off site library". Being the one and only records manager, I have responsibility for all the paper and physical records. Since most of the are confidential, management did not want them stored off site. Also, they were too cheap to invest into a proper off site storage vendor. So they gave me a large part of the basement, which is so rundown that nobody ever wants to be there. My part of the basement is locked for security, so nobody except me and my buddy in logistics knows what we store there. And let me tell you - there is enough space to keep half of the library collection there.

After office hours, we moved half of the library collection to the basement. We then created a service request form for retrieving materials from the "off site" storage area. My boss gets charged $5 by the real estate department for every request. The guys in logistics and I have calculated we will have enough money for a jacuzzi in the basement by the end of the year…

It is Thursday night, way past office hours and I am still in the library with a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne to celebrate my promotion to senior assistant manager of library, records and information services.

During my annual appraisal session last month with my manager I almost fell of my chair when he asked me whether it wasn’t time for a promotion. A manager suggesting me to get a promotion? Was this an alternate universe? Was I dreaming?

No, it was for real – he wanted me to get promoted. Not because I was doing such a fine job but being underpaid… nope. My boss himself was looking for a promotion, but he did not have enough staff reporting to him with the right pay grades. So in order to qualify for a promotion, my manager needed to promote the staff below him – logical. 

Well, let’s promote the librarian to senior librarian. That sounds easy.

But Hades Corporation would not be the enormous, bureaucratic and inefficient organization it prides itself to be if they hadn’t installed a best practice worthy process to discourage staff from even THINKING about asking for a promotion. This all in line with the company finance manager’s slogan: the best cost saving is a cost not made at all.

The basis of the whole process is getting support from your manager. In my case, I was lucky – but if you can’t get along with your manager, you have no chance of a promotion ever. The rest of the promotion process is “employee driven”, i.e. you have to figure this out on your own with an application designed by a programmer who hates people.

The human resources department for once buried the hatchet with the IT department and invented the SYTYCGAP system (So You Think You Can Get A Promotion). This combines the best of both worlds: the meaningless corporate doublespeak of HR plus the plan, implement and forget mentality of the IT department.

First of all you need to check the competence requirements for your job. Right. The job of librarian was not in the system, as this job was never interesting enough to be formally described. The bad news was that I first had to create the competence requirements myself and then had them mystified by the human resources department. The good news is that I made sure the competence requirements were an exact match of my skills, knowledge and behaviors. When my job competence profile was “improved” by HR, it had 38 different items to fill out.

Secondly the competences consist of skills building blocks and skill building blocks are grouped according to the Hades Corporation Group Leadership Framework. If your head is not spinning by now and you can explain these concepts without laughing, you have passed step 2.

Last, but not least I had to provide evidence of the level of skills the system expected of me. You can’t just claim to have skill level 3b in “enabling an information management architecture”, “successfully embraces different values” or “effectively leverages information assets”.
No, you need someone in the organization to confirm your claim. This weeds out anybody in the organization who does not have friends, as nobody in their right mind would state something for someone else if there isn’t a benefit for them.

Luckily I have lots of friends on the organization and managers who owe me favors. In this case I thought it would be best to get an impressive friend to support my promotion.

Benjamin Chen is Hades Corporation’s Chief Chaos Officer. Nobody really knows what he does all day, but once every year he comes up with an idea or invention that makes the company enormous amounts of money. Besides being a reclusive inventor, he also is a pistol sharpshooter, speaks 14 languages and he plays the piano blindfolded with one hand while simultaneously solving Rubik’s cube with the other hand.

In general he does not attend meetings. When he does, he will be in the back of the room practicing his ninja skills and at the end of the meeting summarize the way forward with a thought provoking haiku like:

Bottom up, top down…
How to define a strategy?
We always debate

Or

A visionary
builds products for the future
but with no market

Benjamin is feared and respected by all, but also a very good friend of the library. He is notorious for never returning books, but is always a very good ally when the future of the library is at stake. So he was more than happy to write the following note:

”The librarian is a pivotal enabler of research and development at Hades Corporation. He is a highly skilled information guru who plays a key role in providing technical and scientific support to staff. He gears the service provided flexibly towards the requirements of the employee needing his service. Last but not least he is an adept and responsive provider of access to the complicated databases in our industry. Given the level of expertise, skill and versatility, I have no hesitation in recommending the librarian for a well deserved and overdue promotion.”

And with that my promotion application form was complete. Of course the HR cycle took various levels of approval, rubber-stamping, authorizing and filing before it was final. But at least now I get pay 2 bucks more per hour! (before taxes).