Monday, May 29, 2006

Work, Doing

At some point in your professional library career, you may be faced with a task or project that just won't go away. You can't delegate it to your library's staff. There's no library committee with jurisdiction over it. And for whatever reason, you can't create one. There's not enough time to slough the thing off onto a fellow librarian. And ignoring it won't make it go away. You can't talk your way out of it. You'll find yourself painted into a corner and the only way out is to bite the bullet and...

(gulp)

... actually work.

Should one of these rare occasions present itself, purposely perform the assigned task as poorly as you can. And turn it in late. Hopefully your poor performance will keep anyone from ever asking you to "do work" again.

Remember: a reputation of incompetence can serve you well in the future.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is another option-- begin searching for a new job as fast as you can. Then leave the unpleasant task to whoever gets your job.

Anonymous said...

Are you sure you never worked with me?

Anonymous said...

I like unstricken's approach. Just wait them out and get the credit for starting a project and complain that someone else didn't have what it takes to finish it.

Anonymous said...

You seem to have forgotten that librarians know one another's tricks. Therefore librarians have started giving all of their work to the staff or student workers then being glory-hounds when the job actually gets done.