Up, Cleaning

If someone vomits in a public area of your library, don’t trouble your janitorial staff to clean it up. Simply burn down the building and start from scratch with a new library.

Traps, Setting

Count the Skittles in your candy dish each morning and evening to see if the library's after-hours custodial crew is eating food from your desk.  If you determine that they are, in fact, eating your candy, hide a note at the bottom of the bowl that says, "You have just been busted by a very petty librarian."

Drinks, Dribbling

If you are going to spill dribbles of tea or coffee onto the floor as you leave the library's break room, please be kind enough to leave a trail that leads all the way back to your office.  This courtesy will allow the custodians to easily track you down and beat you mercilessly with their mops.

Support Staff, Naming

The perception of a librarian/staff divide can be a sensitive issue for many who work in libraries. Library adminstrators should be aware of this, and thus name their staff something that says, "We value you and the work you do." Some examples:

• Nonprofessionals (or similarly: Unprofessionals)
• Library Helpers
• Information Custodians
• The Others
• "Librarians"

Custodians, Pissing off the

Don't piss off your custodians. They will stop emptying your trash and will start hiding hateful messages under your telephone.

Things to avoid:

• correcting them for emptying your recycling into the regular trash
  
• playing computer games while they empty your waste basket
• regularly dribbling coffee all the way from the coffee shop to your office
• refusing to participate in idle chit-chat about the weather
• leaving your pay-check stub face-up on top of the trash
  
• snorting like a pig when they crash the library potluck dinner (bearing no food)
• writing "custodians suck!" on the bathroom wall in your own feces

Custodians, Dealing with

Custodians are people too. Don't be afraid to talk to them when they empty your waste basket. Be careful with what you throw away though... sometimes if you don't have much trash they will just grab it out of the can without taking the entire trash bag. This makes trash collection a very personal thing. "Oh no, that's not my empty Preparation H tube..."

Take care to wrap bloody knives in plastic grocery bags, shred sexually explicit love notes, and recycle empty beer cans in the staff lounge.

J