Miss Information is still annoyed by academia
Almost exactly two years ago, Miss Information was feeling a little frustrated by her new friends at the library school. She had been accepted as a student, sort of except they needed her to submit "just one more thing". They jerked her around for weeks as she provided them with thing after thing only to be told that they'd changed their minds and needed a different thing entirely.
Miss Information turned to one of her co-workers and mentioned that she was annoyed. Her co-worker burst out laughing. "Oh, Miss Information," she said. "You have only just
begun to be annoyed by these people."
So, here she is with two weeks remaining in the program thinking foolishly that they have annoyed her all they can. She is wrong. This week two of her professors announced that the due dates for a couple of massively large assignments had to be changed. So now instead of having until April 16 and April 20 to finish these papers (she hasn't started) she now only has until April 13 and April 11 respectively. Obviously there is no way in hell she can hand in remotely coherent essays with the deadlines reduced so substantially. On the positive side, coherence doesn't seem to be a particular requirement in this faculty.
You absolute bastards. Miss Information is counting the days till she never has to see you again.
Miss Information has the right to remain annoyed
It is a beautiful day. No one is being forced to come into the library. Nevertheless every patron is as cranky as if Miss Information were forcing them to conjugate Latin verbs at gunpoint. She isn't. Even the usually nice customers are sarcastic, which means that the ordinarily grumpy people are turned up to 11.
Simple concepts like whose turn it is to use the computer next are disintegrating into shouting matches. Miss Information hates days like this. On ordinary days she tries to be nice, which is hard enough. When people are pulling each other's hair out over the Internet, she has to be super nice. It is really hard.
It is always hard to deal with Mr. I'm-a-City-Councillor. He likes the library staff to jump through hoops for him and he's never particularly thrilled with their efforts. On "Everyone's Cranky Day", Mr. Councillor wants to use the Internet to watch basketball. He begins by complaining that Miss Information has booked him into the "slow computer" on purpose. His basketball game isn't loading and it's all her fault. He wants to change to the "fast computer" and he wants his full time back because Miss Information gave him the wrong terminal.
Miss Information caved just to get rid of him. It didn't work. Turns out the "fast computer" isn't fast enough. He wants to watch the basketball game, dammit. It's not loading. It's not fair. It's not right. He wants Miss Information to fix it.
Miss Information's knowledge of streaming live sports on the Internet is limited to Olympic women's curling. It was slow to load. She assumes that the more popular sports like NCAA championship basketball might have slightly higher demand. She's betting this is having a negative affect on bandwidth or something. Mr. Councillor isn't buying it. CBS promised he could watch the game free online and Miss Information is preventing him from doing so.
The library is in a part of the city with a large number of sport bars, pubs, and coffee shops with televisions. Ok, it's not free but for only a couple of dollars you can nurse a beer or a coffee and hang around for hours, make new friends, quit bugging Miss Information. It's a great option.
One day when she hears the words: I'm a city councillor, Miss Information promises she's going to respond by saying: Oh, so you're the reason the city is so messed up.
Miss Information blames her cat for all this
Miss Information’s cat has none of the traditional standoffishness of her species. She absolutely adores Miss Information. As you may surmise from this, she is not the smartest of her species either. Every night her tiny little brain convinces her that Miss Information is not merely sleeping, but is, well, dead. Every morning Miss Information is greeted with a joyous acknowledgement of her continued existence—a veritable orgy of head-butting, cat kisses and raucous purring.
You can see how the rest of the day would be something of a letdown.
Yesterday she was supposed to meet the members of her latest annoying group project on the fifth floor of the library school building. Over the summer, the fifth floor was redesigned and is now the
Centre for Deep Thoughts About Important Stuff. Obviously not a place Miss Information has ever been. The one thing she does know about the fifth floor is that you can’t get there from the staircase. She took the elevator. So far, so good. The space unfortunately was not occupied by her group, but by a bunch of eminent faculty members having deep thoughts about important stuff in the open area outside the elevator. Miss Information tried to beat a hasty retreat but the elevator doors had already closed, the stairwell was password protected and the only other room on the floor had a class in it. Miss Information opted for the elevator. She pressed the button and waited patiently. She eavesdropped on the professors’ deep thoughts and important stuff discussion. She decided to never become a professor. Just before she passed out from the sheer dullness of it all, one of the deep thinkers pointed out that the elevator doesn’t come to this floor—although it had let Miss Information out just a few minutes earlier—and that she had to go through the library to escape. Miss Information eventually found the door to the library (there are only 3 doors on the floor and she actually needed
help finding the right one) and got the hell out of there but spent the rest of the day feeling like a complete idiot. She subsequently tried to realign herself with a step aerobics class only to find that it is now something called Zumba, which requires the participants to shake parts of their bodies rhythmically. It was a nightmare.
Fortunately Miss Information’s cat made a big fuss over her when she got home and this is why she may never leave her house again.
