Obnoxious Librarian from Hades (3 page)

It is Friday 4 PM in the library and I cannot seem to wipe the grin of my face. Is it because tonight the local movie channel is showing “The Librarian” and “The Librarian 2” back to back? No. Is it because David Sylvian's “The librarian” is on the radio? No. Let me explain the reason for my grin and good mood, even though it isn't payday or “hug your librarian” day yet.

I am obnoxious, usually to make my point or get even. Sometimes both. But once in a while the universe sees my point immediately and makes that clear. Today was one of those days…

Every year, my company Hades picks a global target that we all should focus on, besides our normal work of course. Lots of consultants get paid obscene lots of money to come up with workshops, interactive sessions, posters, slogans etc to brainwash all of the employees. Last year the target was relentless compliancy, and we all had to stand up during so called town hall meetings to pledge our commitment to the Hades Book of Compliancy.

This year the big target is 360 degrees safety (they must have a special guy to come up with the names for the targets). Seems like our shareholders are worried that our safety statistics are not “top quartile” in the industry. I once asked during a departmental meeting with a vice president what will happen because everyone in the industry wants to be top quartile, so it seems like a never-ending race. The VP told me that was a very interesting questions and he'd get back to me on that with more information. I am still waiting. Luckily I am not holding my breath.

So in order to make us all fully aware of what we need to do to become the best of the best with regards to safety, all our managers have to brief their team on the same day. It just happens that on that day, our manager was in another office overseas. So he decided to kill two birds with one stone and host the safety briefing virtually via our new desktop based videoconference tool. We all have a web cam on our screens, which most of us cover up with a plastic coffee cup. You never know if there is a feature where your manager can turn on the web cam without you knowing.

At the given time, we all tuned in to our managers' safety briefing via the video conferencing software. The nice thing is that the software also includes a chat facility, which can be used to chat with the presenter… or with others on the session without the presenter aware. You can guess the latter is used the most during management presentations.

Halfway during the safety briefing, just before I almost doze off after being seriously bored with endless slightly out of focus PowerPoint slides and the monotonous voice of our manager, I hear sirens. But they are not in our building. I hear sirens through my headset – the sirens are in the other office where my manager is. I remembered that one of the very first slides stated very clear that safety must take priority, especially when in doubt. So I fully expected my manager to close the session, apologize and evacuate the building.

But he didn't. He looked around, mumbled something about it probably being a test and carried on with his slide set. In the background it was clearly visible that other employees were evacuating…

It is Thursday morning, 11.02 AM and I am bored in the library. I have already randomly switched signs on the shelves (people like to search for information online, so why not offline), put up the excuse of the day (solar flares) why the library catalogue is offline and changed the interface language of the intranet to Portuguese (it is after all Dia da Liberdade). But still I am not my usual obnoxious, happy self.

I pick up the phone and call my buddy in meeting services. Just like me, he is undervalued and underpaid. He is a certified facilitator, but spends most of his time explaining to senior managers how to hook up their laptop to the projector. So we both know that job satisfaction will have to come from ourselves. One of our favorite ways to lighten our mood is to crash a meeting: drop into a meeting unannounced and try to create a maximum of confusion without being recognized.

A prerequisite is that nobody in the meeting knows you, so we quickly scan the list of meetings for today. As our office is also a regional headquarter, there are lots of visitors from other offices who meet here. And we're in luck, today is the first meeting of a cross country group of tax and legal consultants who will spend all day talking about “Shared Service Centers: Off-Shoring or Outsourcing?” Fascinating. That meeting just begs to be crashed.

Especially for these occasions I keep a sharp business suit in the library, hidden behind the cupboard full of bound library journals. I put on a pair of hip designer glasses and practice my management mumbo-jumbo: “We will dramatically increase our exclusive strong commitment to integrated systems design. A key driver in this process is web 2.0 that will enable the collateral application frameworks” and “We will inevitably take the lead in outsourcing, only to speed ahead of the pack in the world-class field of the economically sound corporations. Virtual input gives rise to the first class team players, on a going-forward basis.”

Key to a successful meeting crash is to be totally self-assured and radiate power. So I wait until the meeting has just started and then walk into the meeting room. The presenter stops, and shoots me an angry glare. The rest of the attendees look up and I wink at them: “Sorry, the jet was late. What can I say? Please continue.” I pull up a chair and squeeze the seat as close to the presenter as possible. I open my briefcase, pull out a laptop and put that on my lap.

With a sigh, the presenter continues his slide set. I have already upset him with my entrance, so now it is up to me to build up my game. And what better makes a statement than a ringing mobile phone? My buddy in meeting services is just outside the meeting room and calls me just as the presenter has finished one sentence. The mobile phone in my suitcase is on top volume with the Macarena. I feign surprise, open the suitcase and turn off the phone. “Sorry guys, I forgot to turn it off”.(Again: Can't get these extra lines to go away… )The atmosphere in the room now gets tense, so we're on the right track. Now I open the laptop and start typing whilst the presenter recaps what he tried to say already twice. I sigh deeply, look up from my laptop and start looking around. I whisper, just a little too loud, to my neighbor: “hey buddy, is there a power outlet here somewhere? I need some juice.” My neighbor wants to get rid of me and points to the power outlet behind his seat in the wall. So I slowly open the squeaky briefcase, get the power cord out and squeeze myself behind my neighbor’s chair. He now has to move his chair forward, suppress his anger but still show an interest in the presentation.

Everyone in the room now really is distracted. Time for my grand finale. I wait until the presenter clicks to the slide with the agenda for today and then snap my fingers at the presenter. He grinds his teeth and asks: “Do you have a question?”

I get up from my seat, lean over the table and point my finger at him: “Well, I represent the entire north-east region for cross-business work streams and I just came back from a meeting with our CEO. He made it very clear that the new work stream alignment leadership board should be consulted about restructuring plans! Your meeting undermines that corporate decision and I am baffled by your blatant attempt to waste corporate resources!”

I look around as if I am Bruce Banner who is about to turn into the Hulk. I yank out the power cord, shove the laptop and the power cord in my suitcase and stride towards the door. At the door, I turn around and say: “If I were you guys, I'd reconsider this whole project and come up with a darn good explanation how you will align this with our global work stream targets. I expect a memo by tomorrow!” With that, I slam the door shut and leave.

Within five minutes I have changed back into my normal clothes and pop over to my buddy's office. “Man, you were great”, he says, “the look on their faces when you slammed the door… !” And then the best part begins: watch what happens next in the meeting room. Since every meeting room is equipped with the latest in videoconferencing, there are a couple of cameras in the room. So with a bag of Doritos and a few cans of Pepsi we have a wonderful afternoon.

It is Monday morning in the library and too early for trouble. Yet, I have the unmistakable feeling that something bad is about to happen. I switch on Pandora, the streaming music website and the first song it plays is Elvis Presley's “Trouble”.

Hmmm.

I open the mail and pick up a new book that has to be catalogued: “The 13 mistakes of highly ineffective people”.

Hmmm.

I quickly touch my Nancy Pearl
[7]
 action figure to prevent further signs of trouble. But it is too late. On my desk is a post-it note from my manager: “please come to my office ASAP to discuss great opportunity for career boost”. That comes down to: “I want to delegate a task which is either very unpopular or too complex for me, so I'm giving it to you. If you achieve the goal, I take the credit, if you fail – you're the scapegoat”.

After an hour I come back from the meeting with my manager and all the signs were right. I have been put in charge of project “Document Object Oriented Management” (DOOM). A recent IT user survey has pointed out that end users can't find the documents they need. Of course I could tell everyone why:

Users don't know what they are looking for;

If they think they know, they are looking in the wrong places;

If they are looking in the right place, they use a maximum of two words;

They can't be bothered to read the help or work through the 5-minute tutorial;

But hey, the IT managers will not take simple explanations as an answer. They will take any excuse to build another system. Which is just the opposite of what the users want. But then, IT managers are not there for the end users of course.

To cut a long story short, in a recent meeting with all the IT head honchos project DOOM was initiated which should put an end to users not finding documents. I have been tasked to organize a workshop with the key stakeholders to align vision, outline a road map with milestones and define clear deliverables linked to business priorities. In short: it has as much chance of succeeding as a snowball in hell.

But then, I can at least have some fun with the workshop… So I invite the following key stakeholders to pitch against each other:

The search maestro: convinced that all users need is a concept-based search engine, and metadata is completely useless and outdated;

The records management evangelist: everything is a business record and therefore should be declared as a record, requiring 37 metadata fields, cross referenced with endless master data lists;

The document workflow preacher: metadata is useful, but should be stored in the document and search engines will be redundant when people just follow the workflow;

My passive aggressive assistant Sue, representing the library: computers are evil. Everything should be stored on paper in duplicate and indexed in her rolodex using the 1978 edition of the indexing bible.

All the participants think everyone else is wrong and they are deaf for other viewpoints. But they have more in common: they will repeat their ideology until they see blue in the face and need a whiteboard with a marker to make their point.

And I have put only one whiteboard and one marker in the meeting room. Let the games begin!

It is Monday afternoon, 3.35 PM in the library and I am just about to take a nap behind the reference works section in the library when I get an e-mail from my boss:

“I want you to attend this seminar about how to turn libraries into profit centers – a great opportunity to create a real paradigm shift! I expect a proposal with best practices related to our high level strategy with quality-assured guesstimates.”

(Sigh) So the good news is I get to spend a day and a half at a nice hotel on company expense. But I have to come up with a proposal that looks real enough, yet will not encourage my boss to really believe that libraries can be profit centers. A library is a shrine and treasure of wisdom, a sanctuary of stillness and the center of tranquility. Not a profit center.

I close the door of the library, put on the 'closed' sign (“library closed for upgrading to ISBN-13”) and hammer away at my keyboard.

FROM BOOKS TO DOLLARS – THE HADES LIBRARY AS PROFIT CENTER

Based on best practices gathered at the seminar, which I benchmarked with industry peers, I have come up with the following ideas to have the library perform at an economic optimum.

1. Use contextual advertising on the corporate intranet;

2. Sell confidential company reports on eBay;

3. Put advertising on all scanned company records;

4. Sell copies of our telephone directory to headhunters and competitors;

5. Rip out the last page of every book and when asked for, sell them;

6. Also, remove the conclusion of every electronic article ordered and charge for it;

7. Charge $1 per minute when calling the library.

Good, I got that done. Now I am off to the seminar where I can skip all the presentations and workshops. This leaves me more time to catch up on listening to audio novels, check out the hotel pool bar and in general “network”.

It is Tuesday afternoon 4 PM in the library and I have unplugged the phones and shut the door. I am in love. Head over heals. For the past three days I cannot think straight, every waking moment is spent dreaming and longing. But it is an impossible love.

The object of my affection is the iDop Feel, the new multimedia-lifestyle device that has been launched earlier last week after months of speculation about features, colors, name and price. The iDop is everything I want and more. It has a 5 mega pixel camera (ideal to create hi-res photos for blackmailing), Wifi and an internet browser (so I can check out Flickr's stupid library signs stream during lunch), an MP3 player (so I can listen to "Tales of a librarian" by Tori Amos and the audio book of Melvil Dewey's life), a video player (so I can watch bootlegs of the Australian comedy "The Librarians"), a lightweight yet powerful instant messenger (so I can gossip with other library bloggers), the most advanced photo browsing software (which on the fly removes wrinkles, grey hairs and goofy smiles), gigabytes of storage space and (drum roll) a near-perfect e-book reader. Gasp. With this device, I'd never have to talk to another human being or get bored!

But alas, Perfection also has a price tag. In the case of the iDop Feel, that price is way over my budget. But I want one. I need one. I must have one. It would be my precious!

If only I could persuade my boss to buy me one. Hmmmm. Now, that's an idea.

So to quote Baldrick from Blackadder: "I've got a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel."

I start off by calling one of the managers in the Knowledge & Learning Department. That department is the brainchild of one of the vice presidents and is fighting for power with IT, which I report up to. Both departments claim to own "knowledge management", or to be more precise: the obscene budget for knowledge management, a concept so vague you can fund many projects with dizzy acronyms and non-measurable outcomes. A bit like marketing.

Anyway, I entice him to play a pawn in my new game:

"Hi there, did you get the memo about the enhanced knowledge facilitation paradigm shift program the IT VP started? I think you guys should be included in this… ."

"Woah there, what's that?"

"Well, I just got this memo about how IT will 'shape the company's tacit knowledge retention curve by clustering organization wide wisdom sharing sources on a single device… "

"Could you send me a copy of that memo? Because I am sure the Knowledge Officer would be interested in that".

And of course I am more than happy to share a copy of that fabricated memo by sharing the link in our document management system. The next step is to make a copy of that memo, but attribute it to the Knowledge & Learning Department. Then I am on the phone to the assistant of the IT VP:

"Hi there, I was just wondering why IT wasn't mentioned in the memo about the enhanced knowledge facilitation paradigm shift program from the Knowledge & Learning Department?"

"Woah, hang on there - what memo?"

"Well, I just got this memo about how the Knowledge & Learning department will 'shape the company's tacit knowledge retention curve by clustering organization wide wisdom sharing sources on a single device… "

"That's not their job - IT is responsible for knowledge devices! Send me a copy of that memo and I'll escalate this".

Since I am the all-powerful admin of our document management system, I can see the flurry of forwarding and comments about the memo in the system. It looks like both IT and Knowledge & Learning want to own this project by claiming they are way ahead of the other.

So I innocently pop over to my manager's office, who looks desperate: "Those fuzzy wuzzy knowledge maestros fooled us again. I have just heard the Board wants to fund their proposal for a feasibility study regarding a new portable knowledge device… "

"Well, what if we did not only have a proposal for a feasibility study… but an actual working prototype… . with all of the organization’s knowledge in audio, video and text integrated in a touch display, wirelessly linked to our infrastructure and loaded with the virtual library?"

"Librarian, are you for real? I don’t have months and ten thousands of dollars to beat the knowledge department!"

"Well, actually I could put this together for a mere 900 dollars and three undisturbed days in an offsite secret facility. I promise you can demonstrate it next Monday at the interdepartmental project proposal meeting."

That explains why I am now in a five star hotel, all expenses paid and lying on a king size bed with my iDop Feel. This morning I loaded it with a random selection of business records, a complete backup of the intranet, all the recorded speeches by the IT VP, our collection of e-books and a local copy of the Wikipedia. So I now have 2.5 days left on company paid time to start this romance…