I keep telling you I'm only the good cop some of the time

A brief rant regarding competence:

I get that different people have different skills to bring to the table. I really do. A clear example of this plays out between my co-worker Karen and I. She is fantastic with detail, and if you give her a list, she runs down it until it's done. I? Am horrid with detail. But great at answering questions like "I'm looking for this book by a Belgian author...I can't remember her name. It's about a woman. Do you have it?"* And smiling my face off for hours at a time.

I'm also good at being patient with people who are just learning the job. None of it is rocket science** but there are approximately ten thousand details, and nobody is going to remember all of them. There are a lot of honest mistakes to be made, and most people at one time or another will make all of them. This does not trouble me.

But there are other kinds of mistakes that I do not have a lot of patience for. An example: what would possess you to shelve the new Sue Grafton novel in the Investing section? That scanner? Is a machine whose SOLE PURPOSE IS TO GIVE YOU INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK IN YOUR HAND. Is it too much to ask that you press the button and check what it says? Or this: I know that I have said to you "the maximum number of copies you should have on the shelf is a facing and five spines." I have said it until I am hoarse. So when you shelve a facing, and beside it 27 spined copies of a book, is there no little bell that goes off in your mind? Even if you were struck on the head on the way to work that day, how is it possible not to look at that and think "Something has gone terribly awry"!?

And then there's the "I somehow think you have missed the entire point of this" stuff. For example, when you cannot find a book on the shelf, and I say "Okay, check the staff picks wall," do you know what the correct response is? I'll give you a hint. It's not "So...I have to go downstairs?" YES! YES, YOU HAVE TO GO DOWNSTAIRS! Especially when you've just finished telling me that people keep asking you for this book, and the computer thinks we have three copies somewhere. Also, yes, you are expected to smile, yes, you have to make eye contact, and yes, your coworkers will eventually get pissed off if you do nothing at work, thereby making their jobs harder.

:pant pant pant:

I know that lots of people hate their jobs, and I understand that. But if you hate it that much, maybe you're just wasting your life, eight hours at a time. There's got to be something better you could be doing. Like looking for something you can connect to in the work you're doing. Or quitting and looking for different work.



*Amelie Nothomb. And yes, we do.

**Although, some of it may involve physics. How else do you explain wrangling 12 tonnes of books into a space where only 10 tonnes can go?