At least it's Friday
Oddly relaxing day in spite of another weird encounter with my manager. We've been getting a ton of new books in to build up the collection again since they stopped buying very much last year. A big chunk of those are kids books. Our new kids section is packed, so today, I was instructed to pull out all the books we got prior to November 2020 in order to make room for the cart full of new books to go on the shelf. Except...I removed fewer books than we have to replace them so this culling will a) do nothing to resolve our space issue if we get more new books in the next couple weeks, and b) not even allow us to shelve the ones we already have. I went through and manually counted how many other 2020 books we had (23 in total) in hopes that would give us more space (not really), then went to tell my manager. She was the chief children's librarian prior to becoming the manager and still plays a huge part with the collection.
I didn't sugarcoat it. I felt there was no need to. I said, "You have a problem," then explained the issue. She burst out laughing. When she was done, she said she thought it was hysterical that I don't hold back on giving her bad news. Which just makes my head spin. Because seriously? Is she trying to tell me she'd rather I didn't tell her things, then let them deal with the consequences later? Because it really feels like that, sometimes. And she doesn't deal with them. She had no solution to what I presented, just said they'll have to figure something out. But they haven't even figured out the space issue they had with the board books that was brought to their attention last week. All she had me do then was pull out duplicate copies and set them on her desk. Guess what? They are still sitting there, waiting to be deleted and sent back to Acquisitions. And the picture books that were pulled in January to check for condition (because our picture book section was too crammed and we needed room)? There's still a third of them sitting on a cart behind her desk that she hasn't dealt with. I've pulled a good twenty from it myself when requests from other branches have shown up for them.
*headthunk*
I'm very glad I don't go back in until next Thursday. It'll be interesting to see how they resolve the new kids section.
I didn't sugarcoat it. I felt there was no need to. I said, "You have a problem," then explained the issue. She burst out laughing. When she was done, she said she thought it was hysterical that I don't hold back on giving her bad news. Which just makes my head spin. Because seriously? Is she trying to tell me she'd rather I didn't tell her things, then let them deal with the consequences later? Because it really feels like that, sometimes. And she doesn't deal with them. She had no solution to what I presented, just said they'll have to figure something out. But they haven't even figured out the space issue they had with the board books that was brought to their attention last week. All she had me do then was pull out duplicate copies and set them on her desk. Guess what? They are still sitting there, waiting to be deleted and sent back to Acquisitions. And the picture books that were pulled in January to check for condition (because our picture book section was too crammed and we needed room)? There's still a third of them sitting on a cart behind her desk that she hasn't dealt with. I've pulled a good twenty from it myself when requests from other branches have shown up for them.
*headthunk*
I'm very glad I don't go back in until next Thursday. It'll be interesting to see how they resolve the new kids section.