I recently read Linchpin by Seth Godin, and it made me remember some of the absurd things I witnessed while working in public libraries (which I did, briefly, between 2004 and 2007).
“Not my job”
In Linchpin, Godin is interested in who does the things that isn’t in anybody’s job description. He reckons that this is an opportunity for anyone wanting to make themselves indispensable: do these jobs, and effectively write your own job description.
One of the libraries I worked in had a caretaker, who retired and was not replaced. Previously, whenever there was a mess that needed clearing up, the caretaker did it. After he retired, nobody did it, so the library got a lot more messy.
I remember one time there was a particularly bad mess (I can’t remember what it actually was, but to make my story more colourful I like to imagine that somebody had done a huge turd in the children’s library). Everybody thought the turd was disgusting, but nobody was willing to clear it up. “It isn’t in our job descriptions,” they said. I wanted to do it myself, but was sternly told not to by my colleagues. Their concern was that, if one of us cleared up the turd, our senior management would use it as a justification for not getting another caretaker, since the library staff were capable of clearing up for themselves.
So the turd remained, for far longer than it should have. It was a health risk, it was unsightly, and it reflected badly on our service – but nobody was willing to clear it up.
In the end, the library manager – the most qualified, most experienced, most highly paid member of staff – got out a mop and a bucket and spent an hour or so removing the mess. I remember thinking how silly it was that somebody who was being paid a large(ish) amount of money for their professional and management expertise should be doing such menial work. I thought it was a waste of the Council’s money.
But after reading Linchpin, I’ve started thinking about this story in a different way. Perhaps our manager was the most highly paid member of staff precisely because he refused to be bound by his job description, and instead focussed on doing what needed to be done. Ultimately he was responsible for maintaining the good condition of the building – and perhaps, realising that he couldn’t rely on his stubborn staff, he thought it’d be best just to do the work himself.
Thinking about it that way, perhaps it isn’t a waste of money to invest in people who actually get things done rather than arguing about roles and responsibilities.
“It’ll never change”
At another library, there was a colleague who, every day, had to do a particular task using a special piece of equipment. One day, the equipment stopped working properly, which meant that it took my colleague much longer to do her task. Working in the same room, I kept hearing her moaning about how terrible it was that the equipment wasn’t working, and how typical it was of public libraries that this should happen.
I asked if she had reported the malfunction to our technical people. “Oh, that won’t do any good,” she said. “They’ll never fix it.” But had she actually reported it, I asked. “There’s no point,” she repeated.
At the time I was baffled. She was obviously annoyed that the equipment wasn’t working, but had taken no steps to solve the problem. I didn’t understand. But the longer I worked in public libraries, the more I saw precisely the same thing happen: people moaned about all sorts of things, but didn’t seem too interested in solving the problem. They used unconvincing excuses to talk themselves out of taking any action.
By refusing to change things, we can cling to the notion that we are unlucky and hard-done-by. This absolves us of any responsibility for our situation, since we can delude ourselves that it is external factors that have put us here. The way to change things is to see these obstacles as surmountable, since every problem has a solution as long as we are willing to try things out.
This has little to do with public libraries, of course, since we see this behaviour in any institution where people are hiding rather than working hard to stand out.