Yesterday Was Awful

Put the blame on Mame, boys
Put the blame on Mame
Mame did a dance called the hitchy-coo
That’s the thing that slew MacGrew…

Don’t know what made me think of slinky Rita Hey-Hey-Hey playfully pulling off one long black satin glove, raven waves falling seductively over one eye…

Auburn waves. Not raven. The Lady From Shanghai notwithstanding, the lovely Rita was most famously a redhead and Gilda, her most memorable film, was a noirish black and white.

Yesterday was awful, one of those working days that makes me wish I’d tried harder to stick it out with the money-grubbing private sector. I arrived roughly an hour early as is my custom and decided to use part of the time to shop for a few groceries. Some thirty minutes later it turned out I’d bought rather more than a “few” items and was relieved to make it back to the front door of the library with several heavy shopping bags of milk, juice, meat, etc. Even bought a pint of my beloved Haagen Daz—on sale, of course. By then there were some twenty minutes to go before time to open for the day. I wasn’t worried, initially. I could see all the lights up, including in the auditorium and staff room spaces… someone had to be there…back there… somewhere…

Not.

No Friendly Custodian Guy, no Briskly Efficient Branch Manager, and—it goes without saying—no Clerks, senior or junior. Nobody. ‘Cepting the painters, who as a rule seldom look up from their mixing and pouring or break from their gossiping, assuming they even heard my increasingly insistent tapping and pounding.

The time ticked away, the unseasonably warm temps began to melt my Haagen Daz, and the patrons began to gather in earnest, most of them youngish men impatient to get on the Internet access pcs and get those job searches, tax preps and circuit breaker requests going. Most of them seemed resigned to yet another late opening day; one or two of them seemed dryly amused. “That’s our people, ya know? We jus’ be like that sometimes.”

I was not amused, dryly or otherwise. I was steaming. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to help it. It was damn near noon; in another minute or two, once again, I was going to be late swiping into that damned time clock, once again through no fault of my own. This was a replay of Saturday, my previous working day, when the only other staffer on the schedule—the only one—finally pulled up to the curb several minutes late. And once again I’d placed an SOS call to the Branch Manager, who was not scheduled to work that day but was now forced to alter her plans due to the irresponsibility of one of her coworkers.

This time around I called the (Interim) District Chief as well, and told him directly how—“tired” was the word I chose—how tired I had become of these irresponsible no-shows, particularly on a day when everyone, the Branch Manager, myself, and four full time clerks, was scheduled to work. One or two of them might be sick or have suddenly to deal with some unavoidable emergency, possibly even three of them, but all five? Five full-timers, each with keys to the door, and none of them are here? The weather is mild and sunny, traffic is running normally, there is no snow—so what could be the justification for this?

Okay, said the (Interim) District Chief, sounding pretty tired his own self, I’ll talk to them.

I’m sure he will. He’ll talk to them, maybe lecture and gently scold them all, the way presumably the previous District Chief did. The Branch Manager will react with her typical stoicism. And the clerks will grumble amongst themselves and sulk their resentment; one or two feeling perhaps a twinge of guilt… and nothing will change. Absolutely nothing.

Why is this? Why are unreliability and a poor work ethic so tolerated by the City? I don’t know for sure and have no data to back me up on this, but my assumption is that it’s a form of self-protection. To keep wrongful dismissal lawsuits to a manageable minimum the strategy seems to be to keep giving problem employees lots and lots and lots of rope with which to eventually hang themselves. I mean, I guess it’s a strategy; presumably by the time serious action is taken against a troublemaker—and by “troublemaker” I do not mean your noble, conscientious whistleblower type—all the protests in the world of discriminatory mistreatment won’t be able to hide the evidential mountain of chronic misconduct.

Which makes sense, I suppose.

But what happens to office morale in the meantime? While all that rope is slowly spooling out, what becomes of the dependable worker bees, increasingly disillusioned and wearied to the point of cynical detachment by the excesses of the slacker drones around them?

So tired all of a sudden; all of a sudden I'm fighting to keep my eyes open. I really should grab my coat and go for a walk. But it’s so gray outside, so dreary-looking, and in any case this is not a neighborhood in which under the best of circumstances I feel all that comfortable walking around.

Maybe I’ll just crawl back into bed and sleep for awhile. And dream of employers who don’t reward inconsideration and indifference.