Elephants (or whatever), Addressing

There are often unspoken issues in library meetings that everyone knows exist, but that no one wants to address. Instead, librarians tend to talk around the real problems without getting to the root of it all. Examples include our desperate grasping for relevancy, our reliance on pitiful software vendors, ineffective management, etc. Any such issue is often referred to as "the elephant in the room." Or "the elephant in the corner." And sometimes the elephant is pink. Or purple.

One good way to force everyone in the meeting to address the unspoken issue is to come up with creative things to call it. Put your heads together and brainstorm. Here are some ideas to get you started...

• the dead elephant on the table
• the pink moose in the corner
• the 300 lb. gorilla at the door
• the turd in the breadbox
  

Once you've reached consensus on a clever thing to call it, addressing the problem will be a piece of cake. Just don't feed the cake to the elephant.

Lanyards, Wearing

One way to judge the quality of a library conference or meeting is to check out the lanyards that are provided to registrants. Lanyards come in a variety of styles: the stretchy, the logo-emblazoned, the too-long, the too-short. The ones that dip your name badge into your soup. The two-ended shoestring style. The looped ones with clips. The ones that make people lean in uncomfortably close while trying to read your name. And the ones that always twist around backwards.

Defining what makes a quality lanyard is a matter of personal preference.

If you find one you like, hang on to it, and wear it at any subsequent conferences you attend. Traveling with your own favorite lanyard is one of the subtle, yet distinct, details that say to the world, "Yes, I'm a librarian."

If that's not enough, the world can just read your name badge.

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.

Racist blogs, Authoring

Don’t author racist or otherwise intolerant blogs chronicling your hatred of Muslims, immigrants, amputees, women, etc. It really ruins the librarians as liberal defenders of civil liberties thing the rest of us are so proud of. Not only are such blogs mean, they’re also terribly tacky.

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

[My Job] Committee, Setting up a

Set up a committee of your peers to oversee your primary area of responsibility. Appoint yourself chair. This is a great way to ...

• give yourself some leadership experience
• practice delegating to your peers
• diffuse responsibility for tasks you don't want to do
  
• share blame for bad decisions
• pad your vita/resume

Do all of this in the name of democracy... because everyone should have a say in how they do your job.

Stat counters, Lessons learned from

Placing a hidden stat counter on a library web site or blog is a great way to see if visitor traffic justifies the time spent authoring the content. In addition to counting the number of new and returning visitors, these counters also give the author some insight into how people arrive at their page.

For example, a surprisingly large number of people reach A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette by doing one of the following Google searches: nude librarians, nude sexy librarians, and sexy librarians (presumably the latter still being clothed). The Guide's authors can only imagine that their accidental visitors are sorely disappointed to learn that librarians, by and large, are not the least bit sexy. And more often than not (thankfully), they do wear clothes.