Obnoxious Librarian from Hades (6 page)

It is a quiet Wednesday morning in the library and I am re-arranging all the links on the intranet in alphabetical order whilst tapping my feet in tune with a Led Zep bootleg. All of a sudden the top-secret librarian-in-need phone rings.

The general audience is not aware that all librarians worldwide are part of a secret underground organization that connects all librarians across continents, ages and different types of libraries. The cover is brilliant: library associations. Nobody suspects library associations, as outsiders already roll their eyes from boredom when they hear the word. Not to mention the websites and conferences library associations use to mislead non-librarians from what is really going on.

Do non-librarians really think we go to conferences to discuss "Involving senior citizens into public library reading programs: talk loud and slow", "Libraries: pillars of our communities" or "Library 2.0: hip and wild Dewey style"?

The library associations and their conferences are all part of the worldwide community of librarians discussing the plans for world domination and how to survive the battle with he-who-shall-not-be-mentioned (starts with a G and rhymes with Oogle). Using secret handshakes, covert operations and coded messages (cleverly hidden codes in `book shelving schemes´ and so-called ´MARC records´), librarians live in the public eye but are never under suspicion.

"This is Dr. Venom speaking. What is the top secret pass-phrase for this week?"

"Dr. Venom, this is Larry Laffer. The seagulls are flying low over the green grass."

"Larry, that is a 10-4. What is the emergency?"

"Our brother Big Al is in trouble. His corporate library is under attack by the evil consultants from McQuinsey. Unless he can prove his value within 48 hours, he will be on the street. I have raised the emergency level to 2 and will initiate immediate retaliation. I request your full participation in this war. Can I count on you? "

"We're all blood brothers, Big Al and I both swore our oath to Saint Dewey on the Library of Congress Rule Interpretations, first edition in LIS 101. Consider this emergency to be taken care of."

I put down the phone, shut down the intranet and redirect all library mail to the central spam-reporting mailbox. I don't need distractions now.

Quickly I pull out my little black book of contacts from behind the dusty old set of English - Esperanto dictionaries. With a few phone calls I put my plan in action. To summarize our covert operation:

- Big Al's library peers in his industry will put together a fancy industry report with fancy 3D pie charts and many tables proving Big Al is providing the maximum bang for the buck in the industry;

- The proposal from McQuinsey is totally ripped apart by the library association, questioning every statement, statistic, page number and font size using an overload of counter arguments, citation of documented best practices and statements from library peers;

- The library association will announce Big Al as the librarian of the year and his organization a 'visionary organization in the industry, scaling content and meta data architecture to shift paradigms';

- Big Al's manager will be getting phone calls from big publisher "account managers" complaining that Big Al is a ruthless negotiator, squeezing every penny from their deal, leaving them speechless;

- Every library user in Big Al's organization will be contacted to discuss their involvement. Key users will all send their praise to Big Al and his manager, thanking him for the impeccable service: the right information before they even knew they needed it. And in one case Big Al was able to retrieve a valuable document, thought long lost, that helped the R&D department settle a patent dispute;

- The McQuinsey consultant team will be spammed by our Polish, Russian and Danish library avengers with their daily, high volume e-mail discussion lists about Z39.50, proposed ISBD rule updates and cataloguing best practices.

- Accidents can happen when 20 volume reference works fall off the top shelves on unsuspecting consultants or finding Latin insults written with waterproof markers on their cars.

That should do the trick… if not, we have more tricks up our sleeve of course.

It is Friday morning, nearly 11 and I am humming along to some good old Marillion tunes while I am driving a user in a remote location slowly insane with a chat session. For some reason some users don't seem to understand on how to use the basic search, and then bother me by clicking on the "ask a librarian". I mean, don't they have any self-esteem - not understanding the BASIC search? Why bother me with your lack of self-confidence?

In order to discourage users from bothering me with "ask a librarian" (or better said: to stimulate end user self service) I put in a three-stage challenge-response system where the system shows words in distorted images that the users have to decipher and fill out in a box. To make it more of a challenge, the entry box is programmed to stay one inch from the mouse cursor. That stimulates the hand-eye coordination of users.

But once in a while a user passes the test and a chat window pops up on my computer. It is key to give the user the idea that they are getting help, but are better off sorting things out themselves in the future.

So I type very slowly and answer like ELIZA, the well-known computer program that simulates to be a psychoanalyst.

"I have a problem with finding information."

"How are you today? What would you like to discuss?"

"Fine, thanks - I can't seem to find the internal standards for setting up DPERs."

"I see"

"Well, can you help me?"

"Please tell me more about your problem."

"Like I said, I can't find the standards for DPERs."

"That sounds interesting. Tell me more about DPERs."

"You know DPERs, don't you? Those are our company standards."

"Why do you worry about company standards?"

"I don't worry about them!! I want to find them!!"

"What would it mean to you if you find the DPERs?"

"I need to finish my project asap!"

"That is quite interesting. Tell me more."

"I don't have TIME to tell you about my project. I need the DPERs FAST!!"

"You seem agitated. Why is that?"

"You are not helping me! Can you help me find the standards or not??"

"Why do you think I am not helping you?"

"You don't answer my questions. For one last time: where are the DPERS??!!"

"You seem obsessed with DPERs. I will transfer this chat session to the company psychologist for further discussion."

And off they go. It sometimes breaks my heart to see how hard working colleagues buckle under the pressure. But of course I am always there to steer them towards professional help.

It is Tuesday afternoon in the library around 4 PM and I'm listening to some old Steely Dan albums whilst messing up the new expense claim system. In the past I would get a monthly budget for document delivery based on the average of the past year's data. This saved me from a lot of hassle, which of course goes against the grain of our detail-obsessed, spreadsheet-hugging, bureaucratic finance staff. So they figured out that if they cannot force me to take a salary cut, they can at least lower my job satisfaction.

So now every tiny expense has to be filed separately in the expense claim system. This system was built by a software engineer who hates people and life in general. It defies any Windows menu logic, has no help screens and uses different icons for the same purpose. So on one page you have to click a green block to confirm, on another screen you should use the little disc icon or a green flag. Well, it keeps you concentrated.

The one thing that drives me absolutely nuts is that the expense claim system does not give any feedback. When you click on a menu item, there is not hourglass indicating you have to wait. No, the screen freezes and you don't know what is happening. So you click again. Wrong. Now you have to wait twice as long.

I have demonstrated that it takes me twice as long to use the system compared to the actual work of ordering a document. But I am obliged to use the system. Which means war. So I have developed a script that splits all my invoices into 10-cent claims and then feeds them into the expense management system automatically. So right now I’m feeding the system an average of 155 invoices per minute. Funny - the expense management system goes down after 5 minutes.

Just when I lean back in my chair to enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done, my boss knocks on my door.

"Well, ehm, could I perhaps ask for a favor?"

I sigh.

"Remember I had to demonstrate the records management system to the top leadership team six months ago?"

"Yes, you told me they all loved it and assigned you a bonus."

"Well, I may have overstated the features of the system slightly."

"Like how?"

"The Chief Diversity Officer was critical about the ease of use and said he would only use it if he could have his records filed automatically by e-mailing them to the system. I know that is not possible, but I may have given the impression that it would be possible in 6 months… ."

I fold my arms and smirk: "then you've got a problem."

"Yes, yes, I know, because the top leadership is meeting again next Friday and in the meeting notes I have an action to demonstrate this feature. So… perhaps you could mock it up?"

"Let me get this straight. Six months ago you took all the credit for MY work, plus you made a promise that you cannot keep. Then you waited almost six months before dropping it in my lap?"

"That is a wrong way of looking at this. I would like to see this as an opportunity to work out a mock up of how perhaps one day this feature might work… "

"So, you want to me to create a fake feature, so you can pretend that it works as a beta but needs some work… . and then hope they forget about it before the next meeting?"

"Can you do that?"

"I could. But that would mean re-prioritizing all my other work, and I really need to reshelf all the reference works and alphabetize the links on our intranet. But you may of course try to influence my priorities… ."

"Ok, ok, I must convince the top managers - name your price, as long as it is somehow business related so I can approve it!"

It took me a few days of screen capturing, Photoshopping, smoke and mirrors to create project "fake duck" - hey, it talks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, so it must be a duck. On screen it looks like an e-mail is automatically screened for security classification, keywords and retention period. Then in a cloud of magic glitter, the record is correctly filed into the system.

So now my boss can save his face and put up a great dog and pony show, while I can enjoy my unlimited subscription to the audio book site - so if you'll excuse me, I have 117 hours of nonstop Harry Potter to listen to.

It is Monday morning, 9.05am in the library and I am doing some ego surfing on the web whilst head banging to the muzak version of Metallica. Just the perfect way to start the week, were it not for the meeting at 10am.

The powers that be have decided that Hades Corp should form a strategic vision for information management using long term horizon scanning and out-of-the-box scenario thinking. This roughly translates into a frenzy amongst mid-level managers who sees this as an opportunity to get attention from senior management by pretending to have a clue where we should be heading without a lot of real work involved. This as opposed to the general management motto of "we will deal with the issues on a forward going basis". If this were not enough waste of time, they now have asked vendor X to which we sold our soul by standardizing on most of their overpriced, bug-riddled and bloated software to share their views on what Hades Corp should look for in information management.

Well, let me guess… whatever we should look for is exactly what vendor X has on their development schedule. Vendor X has Hades Corp almost completely in their claws, except for the records management and library system. Oh, they tried to sell us their "solutions". Not that they have anything that even resembles a library system. Or a records management system that I would wish upon my worst enemy. But hey, their sales staff schmoozed the top IT managers, the right gold cuff links where offered and Hollywood award winning PowerPoint presentations did the trick. I had to do a proof of concept with their software and compare it to our current not-so-state-of-the-art-but-working-just-fine-thank-you applications.

So I checked their specifications with our user requirements, which miserably failed. Their products could do the basics but did a lot we don't need.

Management told me that specs aren't always what they seem and users never know what they want, so let's do a pilot to really get a final verdict - vendor X is paying for all the costs. So they flew in their top consultants and their best engineers to pull this off.

They had a week to create an acceptable pilot setup with competing goals: I wanted to prove my point that we should stick to what we have; vendor X desperately wanted to prove their applications were the best thing since sliced bread.

All week I wore the polo shirt with the logo from our current vendor and I provided the vendor X staff with a copy of the current setup. Of course I made it a bit more challenging by corrupting certain indexing and "forgetting" about certain system passwords. Unfortunately I was in off site meetings every afternoon where my cell phone did not work. But hey, life should not be too easy for the ambitious vendors…

On Friday afternoon they proudly showed their setup to a group of managers. Since our Hades managers have no clue what our library and records management systems do, they were simply amazed by all the shiny buttons, creative use of fonts and stylish logos. They admitted not to have a 100% match with all the user requirements, but management stated that our end users would certainly be willing to give us certain key requirements in exchange for nice shiny buttons and customizable font type (which is of course a very critical feature).

After the presentation, all eyes were on me for the final verdict. Would I give the thumbs up or down?

"Mmmmm… your presentation is… . interesting."

"Thank you, we look forward to working closely with you to set up an extended proof of concept."

"But… there is just one small thing that is very essential and a must have requirement… are your applications compatible with hardware to print punch cards?"

"No, of course not - you must be joking! We noticed you put that in the requirements, but we realized that this is a joke!"

"Well, as you should know - Hades Corporation has a very important government contract with the republic of Elbonia. And as records management experts, you will surely know that Elbonia requires all their business records to be delivered in punch cards.

We must be compliant with these government rules, so I am afraid I cannot vote for your systems."

"But… but… "

"Sorry, I wish I could continue our discussion, but my phone just vibrated and I must leave now to check on our MARC Z39.50 filter."