A comfortable rut [or] this blog is stupid

So here it is 2019 and I'm still the Interlibrary Loan clerk for Lending with my medium sized county library system.  My pay levels are finally roughly about matching my best and final year with AIG International Services back circa 2007.  My pay as librarian at TWU was notably higher but then falling back into unemployment for half a year and having to declare personal bankruptcy along the way and then having to take the para position back in summer 2010, which also nearly coincided with my ASD diagnosis.  My pay at first was back down to where it was close to my early years with AIG, which was less than my teacher's salary my first and only year in Friendswood ISD.  All of which is a long way of saying my salary has gone up and down instead of up and up as is the norm and I've thus fallen WAY behind my peers in terms of earning, savings, the whole lot.

Another revelation about my Asperger's is that it comes along with some Executive Dysfunction as well.  In laymen's terms, I'm not always the best at "adulting"; I only fake it.  Paying bills is always anxiety inducing though I do feel better once it's done.  Ditto paying taxes, which I always do, but the past several years I always wait until the last minute and this year was no exception.  I even got a modest refund.  Which is often the case but this was my largest one in awhile.  It's just going to get chucked into my modest savings account and forgotten about.

I've been in some negotiations with my co-worker that handles the Interlibrary Loan Borrowing half of our operation.  She feels resentful that her job is more stressful and she's required to do more work.  She does make more pay than I do as a Paraprofessional while I am still merely a Clerk II, so I have some difficulty mustering much sympathy for one paid more having to also do more.  Seems like it ought to go with the territory.  But she put her foot down and basically low key threatened to narc on me to our manager that I futz around on social media in my "down" time.  Technically we're not supposed to (spoiler: nearly everyone does anyway), but because I know I'm not the only one I do feel under the microscope a bit and unfairly targeted.  We even made the tepid case a few years ago at Staff Development Day that Library employees using social media during work hours aren't necessarily wasting time on frivolity.  They're keeping their pulse on pop-culture trends, interests, staying engaged with community, keeping tabs on the course of political discourse, etc, and that using things like Twitter and Facebook on the job aren't inherently selfish, wasteful or unproductive uses of time.  But policy didn't change so employees do it on the down low...but ever since losing our own personal cubicles after one too many basement flooding events they moved our whole department to higher ground in an adjacent building, and our workspace was smushed together such that we sit in close proximity to one another, and it is much harder to disguise the fact that I'm futzing around online a bit in between official duties when things get slow.

Anyway, long story short I've been helping my partner shoulder more of the work burden and making her life easier. I don't mind it per se, though I am a little resentful she wants to be more talkative and interrupts me more now while I'm listening to my podcasts and this is a little irritating.  I'd prefer to set a task then be allowed to just drive on through it until the end, in the zone and listening to my podcasts and expanding my mind....the frequent interruptions have cut down on my ability to absorb quite as many podcast episodes daily than before.  But maintaining a civil relationship with my work partner is important and so I just put up with it and comply, removing a headphone from one ear when she starts talking and while I fumble for the pause button.  We have our ups and downs, and one of my greater points of irritation are her attempts to micromanage my trips between our annex building and the main building.  Until this point I had full autonomy to go to the main building as I saw fit, at any time.  It helped fill up my day.  It was--legitimately--work.   But my partner is all about maximizing efficiency, which, if we worked in a for-profit business I could be sympathetic to, but as we're public sector employees it leaves me scratching my head as to why we need to be so maximally efficient...that a little inefficiency here and there isn't necessarily a bad thing.  The work always gets done whether we min-max or not.  Shifting the balance of the work to something more equitable was probably long overdue and ultimately just, our slight pay differential notwithstanding.  But obsessing over maximal efficiency 24-7 is not something I entirely agreed with and having my freedom of movement constricted definitely chafed against my inner since of autonomy and freedom to exercise my own judgement rather than being forced to obey arbitrary dictates cast down from on high.  I humor my partner with it because I'm highly conflict averse, but I really do question the value of maximizing efficiency in this particular way.  To what use are we putting this "extra time" thusly saved?  I'm helping out with secondary duties like barcoding of books which is essential but very repetitive and thus nevertheless kind of Zen, but sometimes our cataloging staff do struggle to keep us supplied with the extra, ancillary work, and forever maximizing efficiency sometimes rather exacerbates this problem of supplying adequate extra work.  If we could dial it back a bit and maybe be more tolerant of some system inefficiencies here and there (and allow for more leisure time) it could potentially be better for all parties, or at least for me. 

I recently watched someone who began with us as a part-time processor still in college graduate, go on to get their library degree online, and just now began working as an Adult Services librarian at a prestigious new branch library in our system that just opened.  Meanwhile me with 2 Master's degrees still sits underpaid and underappreciated as a mere Clerk II.  But when I read the description of Librarian jobs the managerial side of them always makes me roll my eyes because it's not what I'm really keen to do.

I can look back with my Autism googles and see why I raised hackles as a manager back at TWU handing out evaluations.  I scored my employees well by the numbers, but my boss was upset with the verbiage I used in the written portions.  I was blunt and honest and didn't sugar coat.  I mostly praised but didn't hesitate to offer advice and correction as I saw fit.  My manager disagreed with my takes so vehemently she redid both evaluations herself as herself, even though the numerical values we assigned didn't vary from each other by very much at all, if any.  I guess the numerical values are just window dressing and the real point are the blocks of text, whereas by my logical ASD mind, I gave much more weight to the quantitative (if arbitrary) numerical scores and regarded the subjective text writeups as largely immaterial.  Apparently I got this exactly wrong and the reverse is true in terms of actual impact on future promotions, etc.  I suppose I should be happy with that, though in my view I think my original textual evaluations were immanently fair and mostly full of praise but the danger being some NT later reading my words and completely misconstruing what I wrote in the most negative, ulterior motive light possible and this being what my then contemporary manager wanted to avoid.

The long and short of it, I find the managerial side of Librarianship mentally exhausting and I just really rather not bother if I don't have to.  But most job descriptions these days do include a managerial portion of the work, even for the lowest levels of library professionals...there's seemingly no escaping it, alas.  This is doubly hard on library professionals who find themselves on the Spectrum and who may provide outstanding reference service generally but may stumble in the managerial work.

I guess I still like my job but I've feel I've almost resigned myself to just get by in the paraprofessional ranks shy of once again realizing my full potential as an exempt staff librarian someplace either in the system or someplace else.

This post itself is rather pointless but I felt moved to make it by way of updating to 2019.  I probably will not update again for quite some time.  Not a promise either way, but until then, Happy Trails!