Miss Information

Miss Information is annoyed by tradition

Every year at this time, the library hammers out schedules for the next year. It always causes great stress and anxiety and when it’s all over everyone hates everyone else. It is eerily reminiscent of the family Christmases in Miss Information’s youth except that no one gets into a slap fight over the proper use of allspice. Good times. At the library, the shift selection process is filled with bitterness and angst because everyone on staff has such poor short term memory that they’ve totally forgotten the bitterness and angst from last year and are shocked, shocked to discover that the shifts they get to select from are exactly the same crappy shifts as last year. Hah. Poor suckers.

Miss Information plays a tiny little role in the whole mess. It is her job to find out the results of the dreaded shift selection process and code the whole thing into the payroll system. That is her sole responsibility. She appreciates your misery but she cannot help you. She has no actual power. She cannot invent new shifts for you. She cannot approve new hours. She cannot move you up the selection ladder by liquidating those who outrank you seniority-wise. She feels your pain. She has great sympathy that you, like her, are stuck working here for another year. She thinks it’s cute how each of you thinks you’re the only one who got screwed over. But see, here’s the thing…Everyone is miserable. Miss Information knows this because when she asks for someone’s 2008 shifts, they complain bitterly about them. No one likes their shifts. No one ever likes their shifts. That the word shift is so close to the word “shit” should give you some clue.

However, Miss Information is working on a deadline and she doesn’t have time to chitchat about your misery. The people in the payroll department are way scary and they want this stuff in the system now. You don’t have to like your new shifts. You just have to have new shifts. So, work something out that adds up to the right number and hand it over so Miss Information get her inputting done and stay friends with those yell-y payroll people.

Miss Information was so tied up in the magic that is the 2008 schedule that she missed her favourite Christmas tradition. This is of course the annual Last Day of School Before Christmas Fistfight at the Library. Miss Information’s friends exchange gifts, but whatever. The circ desk staff assured her that it was not a particularly good fight this year, but she is still sad that she was not present to see one of her beloved card-playing, drug-dealing, foul-mouthed nogoodniks get popped in the mouth.

Oh, well. Next year it will all happen again.

posted by Miss Information @ 5:30 PM