A peek inside fundamentally toxic institutions

Librarians e-mail me is a presentation deck, with speaking notes and script, that should be horrifying to anyone in the profession, except for the part where so many of us in the profession are the ones doing the bottle-throwing or have just been around our institutions long enough that they know this happens, and they've developed workarounds for it or have accepted that their institution isn't going to be able to change and so they're not putting any more effort into what will be a futile, or even disciplinary, result.

It's both logical and terrible that someone at one step removed from a practicing professional would be the person that someone reaches out to in needing to vent, because they're not necessarily going to be able to do anything about it, but at the same time they're also someone who you can safely wave red flags at without it getting back to anyone who might choose to punish you for waving those flags. As the deck itself points out, when you're in a psychologically safe zone, the team supports risk-taking and trying your best to make sure those risks turn out well. Which means more than just good supervisors, I might note. Your collegial cohort is also essential to feeling safe about risk-taking, because you're more than likely going to need their support and input to transform the idea into something that works for everyone and isn't too taxing on a single person. It's most emphatically not "we're not interested in doing this thing that you've proposed, so even if you get it by the manager, you're not getting any support from us about it." Which is certainly a problem on specific subjects at The Organization, as my backscroll will happily inform you.

There's also a certain perception of celebrity in the library world (and the library applications talked about in that deck) that individuals in libraries are able to achieve fantastic things because they can do things like be both a floor wax and a dessert topping. When the reality is that they have plenty of staff working with them or reporting to them that help make those things into a reality. Often at those "entry-level" positions that require doing the improbable on a regular basis. We want and look for "rock stars," and if that phrase made you shudder because of the associations it has with the tech world, I can't say that the profession has learned from their mistakes, including the ones where they let cis-het-white people get all the power and set the agenda for what a library is supposed to look and function like.

There's also the problem, noted repeatedly in the deck, about how the perpetually under-resourced library is often trying to do things that require time, people, and resources to do. Our IT department is understaffed for the kind of place we are, and they're doing impressive work putting out fires as they arise and also trying to plan and put in place processes that will theoretically make for less fires. But there really aren't enough people there to get on top of everything, and that means that librarians and the public get disappointed that we don't have interesting and relevant things for them in our locations, or out on the road. Because we are still working on getting yesterday's technology to stand up on its own without falling over and sinking into the swamp. (There's still enough money, though, for high-level managers to coordinate the work of The Organization. Hell forbid we work on getting staffed up for all of our services before we start getting more supervisors.) The Organization is much better at thinking through resource requirements for new ideas and projects, although what that usually means is "no" or "not at this time" to anything that might be topical or pertinent in the now, because we're permanently perpetually under-resourced. Jam tomorrow, jam tomorrow, but never jam today. At least for any ideas that might come from the bottom, because they can't bubble up to anyone with real power without being filtered through at least two layers of management. If you're not on the committee that's supposedly planning the thing, there's no way of gathering input or directing your efforts to the places they will be best listened to. There's no way of sending signal flares about what's going on in your community that might mean service and structure changes. Change always seems to come from the top, rather than the bottom, and change happening at the bottom seems to be the sort of thing that's best described as "if you can get away with it, do it, and if someone notices, be ready to talk about how things have gotten better because of your change. If it turns out to be a good change, pass it along to your colleagues and see if they might do the same."

And while there's a ticketing system in place, I'm not sure I even know everything that the IT department does and who is assigned to what aspects and how much capacity that actually leaves us to do something new or to make improvements. I try to suss it out with conversations here and there, but it's still fairly opaque. I regularly feel disconnected from the other parts of the system because there's not a lot of communication about what's going on in those places, good, bad, or indifferent, and yet we're all supposed to work together as a multi-branch-headed hydra. It's frustrating (and yes, there's a more than a few slides in there about how frustration is not a problem, and that frustration is often a legit response to the actual problem. But again, there's no way of signal-flaring that there's a problem unless you trust that your manager will relay it along, and that requires your manager to not be the problem themselves, which I have had significant experience with. That, too, gets talked about in the slide deck - once bitten, twice shy. How different might it have been for a manager to give feedback in the moment about something, instead of pushing me straight into anxiety space by going for formal discipline on things that still look like a series of correctable mistakes. I can still be civil to that person when they're in my branch, but I have no interest at all in doing anything more than what I have to, because they demonstrated a fundamental lack of competence to me and that sticks around.)

And when it gets to the "not-men can't be techies," there's the kick-side of that, which is that since I look like a man, and I have some expertise doing things that are technical, then problems that are technical in nature can be sent to me, and once that's done, the person who did the right thing in referring them to me as something outside their knowledge then doesn't stick around to see what happens. (Because there has to be someone at the service points, I'm sure, is the official excuse.) I wonder what they do when I'm not there and that same problem reappears. Which is why I specifically called out for applause when a coworker of mine who's not been on the technology train was taking coursework on learning the new version of Windows that came with our loanable laptops. Because it is applause-worthy to see someone taking the initiative and learning something they're going to need to know rather than waiting for something that's going to be an issue come up and realize how much they don't know and don't know how to go about finding a possible solution. It's a behavior that I want to reinforce as a good thing, even though I'm not in a supervisory role to that person. So, when behavior change comes up as the topic, I realize that I'd get stung by it, too, and not be all that enthusiastic about some sort of change that gets decided upon, and so I'd have to suffer the same way and get myself motivated to make the necessary changes. But at least it would produce the environment we want to have. And it wold rely less on nebulous "core skills and qualities" and more on things that are definable. The Organization keeps telling us that we need SMART goals, but they're not exactly doing their best work on providing a rubric for assessments that provides us with specific steps to take and/or skills to gain and work on. From someone who knows the (clearly defined) work that we're supposed to be doing and can provide us with useful assessments. I like that my manager passes several competency tests, but he's not the person I would go to for someone to talk about what I could do to make, say, Story Time better, because he doesn't have the relevant experience, and the people that do aren't coming out all that often. Which is what makes it surprising to many of my peers when they see what I'm doing, because it's not really anything like what people think of as Story Time, with themes and books and crafts and a strong need for self-regulation.

So while the slide deck itself is specifically about tech and tech-adjacent folk in libraries (because it's LITA, the Library and Information Technology Association), you could probably take that entire presentation and rework it just a touch and it would apply to everyone who works in a library. Or in several other possibly toxic places where the answer might just be to get out while you still can.

December Days 2018 #3: No Plan? No Problem!

[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]

At the end of the last post, I popped an idea out of my head about two characters meeting and having a significant amount of things to talk about because they've both experienced having the adults and mentors in their lives not telling them the film truth when they feel like they're ready for it.

Some stories plot themselves, or at least give you a hook to start with that you can start writing on and everything proceeds smoothly from the research and/or canon review (or reading works that you like in the universe, style, or structure you think will be appropriate for the story you want to tell.) Those are great ideas.

Some ideas (like this one) have a hook and a thought, but they don't offer anything on the way of direction or the way that they should be written. "Okay, so Steven and Ruby end up in the same space and have a chat about their mentors. How do they get there? Why are they there? What's going on around them? Where is that space?" These questions might be helpful, or they might all get a shrug and a "dunno."

Sometimes, on an idea, a single picture or a line of possible dialogue might jump out as a good place to start. So, knowing that one of Steven's special abilities is that he and other people that he can connect with can transform from two people into a composite entity, there's a little bit of gemological punnery that might go on by pairing Steven Quartz Universe with Ruby Rose. (Quiet in the back. I'm trying to do this as spoiler-free as possible. Yes, there's another way this could go, but it requires knowledge that can only be gained by watching Steven Universe. That might turn up later on in the story, though, if it goes sufficiently far.) As it turns out, there's a red variety of quartz that would fit the color scheme of Ruby's character and the generally lighter pink shirt that Steven usually wears. Since combined entities tend to be given new names that reflect their combined selves, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to call that new entity Carnelian, after the red quartz. As it turns out, there's already a character with that name that exists, so we might have to go further into the gem ideas until we find a pretty-looking red gem that we can call the thing, or we can call it Sard, since that's also a name for carnelian, and it fits the darker red palette that Ruby uses.

The presence of that entity might only exist for long enough to stave off a threat to them, but it might also be the way that the two separate entities can start the conversation about why they combined so well, or the feelings that each of them had about being together, which could lead to some background sharing and then a conversation about the idea topic. And that's still without necessarily thinking about the background of how things came together or why.

Or maybe there's a shared line of dialogue between them, that they both say and hear at the same time, something like "I'm not a child anymore!" That might also prompt investigation and some shared experience. Or letting the scene play in parallel, with dialogue cuts back and forth between the characters such that the disparate lines we read as up to a singular rant that gets the point across. There are all sorts of ways that this scene might play out.

Sometimes that infinite-ness seems paralyzing, but the nice thing about creative work, so long as you're not slammed up against a deadline, is that if something isn't working out right now, you can shelve that idea in a fragments folder and try a new way of going about it. Maybe it will link back up with that fragment later, or you can grab that fragment and rework it into something else. Writing is rarely ever completely wasted. But there are things that get written that aren't likely to every see publication, or that have anything to do with anything, ever. It's practice at the craft, if it ends up being nothing else that's useful for what you are trying to write right now. And even then, it might turn out useful. When we talk about structures, there are more than a few of them that are very kind to fragmentation.

A couple of things that always help me out when I'm writing is to be open to shifts. A well-outlined story still has room for improvisation or for a character to do something that seems out of place now, because sometimes your brain is working on something and it sees and opportunity and gives you a subconscious kick to include a new bit here so that later on, when you need to reference something and not have it seem like you were pulling something out of thin air, there's groundwork already laid.

The other is this, attributed to the late Jim Henson: "If you can't get out [i.e. you're stuck and you can't see a way of moving forward with the scene], you just either blow something up, or you eat something, or you throw penguins in the air." It doesn't have to be taken literally, but it is sometimes useful to note [SOMETHING COOL HAPPENS HERE!] in your work and go forth from there if you're stuck and go on to the next part that you can write. The brain might pop up with whatever that something cool is later.

Noodling and improvising some on a single idea may be all you need to make wordcount for an exchange or a chapter or progress enough to get the wheels unstuck and turning again. Going back and revising and editing, polishing and tweaking is for after the writing part is done. And is often best done with the help of others, rather than chasing the perfect words right now before you can go forward. (It can be hard, we understand.) As you get practice and familiarity with your writing and the style and structure you're using, there will be less edit work need at the end and more of your words will ring true to start with.