obnoxious librarian from hades

The one where costs charging goes to the extreme

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 06:51:00 +0000

The wonderful people in the Cost Buster program came up with a brilliant idea a couple of years ago: let’s stop paying for things centrally, but let the teams that use something pay their share! So instead of central budgets for computers, journals, furniture etc., every department is now charged on their cost centre for what they use. The divisions then of course completely disagree with what they are being charged and everyone spends hours, days, weeks fighting over charges.

After applying this technique to the expensive items like computers, furniture and meeting rooms, the Cost Buster team has now applied this to smaller cost categories like office supplies.

This has interesting side effects. As in a lot of offices nowadays, the photocopier is a multifunctional, high volume device which is shared with different teams. I noticed a couple of days ago that ours had run out of staples, so I sent an email to the Printer Coordinator in charge. He replied that he couldn't buy any staples unless somebody gave him a cost centre. Unfortunately nobody will give a cost centre when most of the staples will be used by others.

What makes it worse is that if somebody sends a job to the printer requesting stapling, the machine just stops until somebody comes down to reset it!

All for the price of a box of staples.

The one with things I don’t want to hear anymore

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 08:13:00 +0000

I don’t do new year’s resolutions. But I do have some requests for my l-users (library users) to *not* use the following phrases in 2012:

Is this the library?

Hello! There’s a big sign on the door, there’s books everywhere, there is a shushing sign on the wall and I wear glasses. Duh.

· Can I ask a question?
You just did

· I am looking for some information
SOME INFORMATION?! I am a highly skilled, certified information professional. I can find needles in haystacks just using the sheer power of bolean and my library magic. So be specific or stop wasting my time.

· I know it’s against the rules, but….
Listen. I don’t care about other people’s rules, especially the stupid rules from HR and finance. But here in the library, my rules are sacred. So don’t even think about breaking them. I can read minds, so be careful.

· Can I borrow this book?
No, you have to buy it. Sheesh. Don’t ask the obvious.

· This may sound like a stupid question, but…
If you already think it’s a stupid question, then it probably is a stupid question. And in the ears of a certified information professional it will absolutely be the worst question of all time – and I reserve the right to laugh and then snort.

So if we all think about this during the holidays, we will get along just fine in 2012.

Have yourself an obnoxious Christmas / Hanukkah / Festivus and a wonderful 2012!

The one where we have to embrace social media

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:42:00 +0000

Sometimes you wish managers would change their mind. Sometimes you wish that when they have done so, they hadn’t.

Until now the social media phenomena was largely ignored by the powers that be. Our PR and marketing department claimed that a good press release was better than Tweets from silly people, and that this whole thing was a hype anyway. Last time I went by our PR and marketing department, they were also using typewriters.

But apparently the CEO latest wife (who could be his daughter) has convinced him that it is absolutely crucial for Hades Inc to fully embrace the social media revolution. And if the CEO wants it – the rest of the management is all over it. And I would be fine if our managers would pretend to be social media savvy, but no, they also want the hard working employees to pretend we are all hip and sharing <sigh>

Below a copy of the most recent memo (read: marching orders) of our social media strategy:

“Dear employees,

during our recent senior management meeting we held a blue sky thinking session, which resulted in paradigm shifting new ideas. As you know, one of our key strategic pillars for growth is “convincing customers constantly”. We have now operationalized this statement and we all can, should and WILL play a role to become Hades Inc evangelists!

We are going to fully embrace the use of social media for customer engagement and brand promotion – and all our employees will become part of our sales channel. Not only will this be much cheaper than paying ad agencies, we have also learned that customers prefer FaceBook Likey’s and Twits above poster campaigns.

As of next Monday, IT will automatically generate a FaceBook, Twitter, Orkut, Google+, LinkedIn and Friendster account for all of our employees, temporary and hired staff: over 300 thousand people. We strongly encourage you to start using these accounts to “friend” potential and existing customers, tell everyone how great it is to work here and what wonderful products we sell.
As we understand that this may take time out of your already busy schedule, we have developed templates of positive messages that you can re-use. Also, if you do not post every day, don’t worry – our Social Promotion and Attenttion Message (SPAM) system will automatically post on your behalf with a positive message about Hades Inc.

This will provide a wave of positive social media karma for our beloved company, which it rightfully deserves.

I am convinced that you share my passion for this new initiative and I will +1 you when I see you online!

Paul Jamieson
Social Media Trailblazer
@PaulyJ

The one where we make our costs transparant

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 13:42:00 +0000

As I have said many times before, most l-users (library users) do not know what they want. I know what they want, which is why I am the librarian and they are not.

The latest thing everyone keeps bugging me about is transparancy of the cost model. They want to know exactly how the costs are built up and then want to analyze it for improvement. Let me tell you, this is all just a heap of nonsense which will generate more work for me. Currently I split all the library costs across the different business units using a very simple distribution key. That key is based on whether I like the people in that department or not. Not transparant, but simple and fair.

But in order to show that this whole idea is nonsense, I have decided to play along and make the costs completely transparant. Which is what they want. But I promise you, they will beg me to go back to the old, non transparant model - because even though my new cost model is transparant, it is complex in ways never seen before (except of course in the mobile phone industry, where they have complex cost models down to an art).

The new cost model is completely transparant:

every team tells me on January 1 their demand for the coming 12 months.

So I want to know how many articles they will request, how many patent searches, how many basic reference requests, how many times they will call for library assistance, the number of photo copies from foreign journals, the number of downloads from our reports database, the number of times they will violate copyright by sharing articles with third parties and the number of stupid questions they will send to me.

What? They cannot predict that? Well, that is not my problem - that would be a problem on the demand side. I am just making it transparant, not simple.

The gift of obnoxiousness for the holidays

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 11:30:00 +0000

If you are looking to for gifts for the holidays (Christmas, The Big Tree Fest, The Celebration Of Dewey), have you thought about giving the gift of obnoxiousness?

I have published two volumes, full of stories about clueless managers, l-users, soul crushing meetings and one heck of a librarian.The second volume has one bonus story, which has never been published on the blog. All the profits will go to my world domination fund.

If you appreciate all the laughs, smirks and evil smiles I have given you in the past 4 years, think about buying one of the books. The e-book of volume one is for example now available in Kindle edition for $1.38

Volume 1
Obnoxious librarian from Hades - via Amazon.com ($12.34)
Obnoxious librarian from Hades - via Lulu.com (11.11 euro)
Obnoxious librarian from Hades - Kindle edition ($1.38, or around 1 euro)

Volume 2
Are you being served and other recipes for disaster - US edition ($15)
Are you being served and other recipes for disaster - rest of the world edition ($15, 12 Euro, 9.97 GBP)
Are you being served and other recipes for disaster -e-book ($3.14, 2.50 Euro, 2.08 GBP)

The one where leaders are weasels

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 19:59:00 +0000

As I have documented over the past 4 years, I have very little faith in our management. They even stopped calling themselves managers, but are now “leaders”, “champions” or (the worst) “evangelists”. Changing the label does however not change what’s in the can – as proven by the most recent memo from our Health & Safety department.

“Dear co-workers,

When we evaluated our most recent fire evacuation drill with our senior management, we decided to take a holistic look at the evacuation process. And we realized we should take a different, better approach to deal with evacuations in case of emergencies.

It all started when we realized that our managers are leaders – leaders in business, leaders in ethics, ~~leaders in bonuses~~ – and therefore they should also lead in emergencies! They should be the ones to boldly lead the way, be role models and make sure the evacuation muster points are up to standards.

This means that from now on, when an emergency occurs or an evacuation exercise takes place – all leaders from senior vice president and above will be warned first via a special pager. A group of VIP assistants will then lead our fearless leaders to the muster points outside, where needed providing them with coats or cold beverages along the way. The rest of the staff will be notified of the emergency or evacuation drill once all our leaders are safely outside.

At each muster point a small, yet functional LAP (Leader Assembly Points) building has been built which provides a shelter for our leaders to to continue their leadership during the emergencies. These LAPs have small, yet functional espresso bars, wardrobes, WiFi, flat screen TV's and completely equipped mini bars. Outside each LAP is a large video screen which will show live video streams of our leaders dealing with the emergency inside the LAP. Every 15 minutes one of the leaders will appear live on the video screen to give a positive, encouraging speech to ~~the little people~~ all co-workers. So even though it may be freezing, or raining – you all will inspired by our fearless leaders.

We believe that this will create a step change in the way how our company deals with emergencies.

Best regards,

Leland Sklar
Global Emergency Focal Point”

The one with the revengeful librarian

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:42:00 +0000

Several people forwarded me the recent newspaper article about the CIA employing “vengeful librarians”, who monitor local radio stations, social media, internet chat rooms, newspapers etc to provide input for government intelligence briefings. And what type of people play that role? “… a masters' degree in library science and multiple languages, especially those who grew up speaking another language, "make a powerful open source officer"

If you have not read about it, here is the link.

If you ask me, these so-called vengeful librarians are missing opportunities. I have been playing the role of “revengeful librarian” for several months now and with great success, if I may say so.

Like the librarians mentioned in the article, I monitor blogs, forums, twitter, facebook, google plus, and even IRC chat on any mentions of Hades Inc, products or subsiduaries. I have four 27” monitors set up that show a constant stream of activity matching a self developed taxonomy of keywords, enhanced with sentiment analysis. Anytime someone, somewhere speaks negatively about my employer, one of our products or managers it will be flagged on my screens.

Not only am I a qualified librarian, I am also a triple-decorated Usenet flamer. For the youngsters under us, “flaming is hostile and insulting interaction between Internet users” according to Wikipedia. This means I am equipped with the right skills and experience to deal with people who clearly have the wrong opion (the right opinion of course being that Hades Inc is the best company in the world, has the finest products and the most ethical managers).

If I therefore encounter someone out on the Interwebs who speaks badly about my beloved company, it’s managers or products – I take action. Using a collection of fake Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace and Google Plus accounts I bury the original post under replies. I will also publish negative posts about the author on a range of blogs and basically Google bomb them to oblivion.

Via an automated script I then flag the user as a spammer, post fake nude pictures of them on .XXX websites, find their e-mail address and the sign them up for the Polish high traffic mailinglist about Harry Potter.

As they taught me in library school: “Librarians don’t get mad – they declassify their opponents”.

The one with the special icons

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 20:24:00 +0000

I use our internal web conferencing solution weekly to host virtual training sessions. Gone are the days where I could bore l-users (library users) in a classroom with my endless slides about Boolean searching in Dialog or how to use the company thesaurus to find paper records. These days I am talking to my computer with a headset and the employees are using their headsets and computer to join my session virtually. And I can only hope the attendees are paying attention…

The web conferencing software offers attendees icons to show their status: red for indicating they have problems, yellow when they want me to slow down, purple for questions and green for all is well. But I think that choice of icons is rather limited. I was hoping we could expand the icons with the following extra “status” indicators, which can be generated automatically by the software:

submarine: the employee is on a low bandwidth location and therefore their audio is garbled, like they are in a submarine below sea level
darth vader: the employee constantly forgets to go on mute and breathes heavily into the microphone
sleeping smiley: the webcam has detected that the attendee has his / her eyes shut for longer than 5 seconds
cookie monster: the microphone detects regular chewing, as the attendee is eating cookies, chips, chocolate or a burrito while attending the web conference
keyboard and mouse icon: the attendee is using the keyboard and mouse heavily during the session, and is most likely ignoring the session while doing his/her email, updating Facebook or playing online games

Any other suggestions for status icons during web conferences?

(this post was inspired by a lunch with Hans de Black, Ronald in the Field, Steven of Westbridge and Joris Greendyke)

The one where we have to provide support blindly

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:42:00 +0000

Several years ago I was part of a companywide project to implement a document management system for all our users. Everyone is now obliged to store their documents in the document management system, where they will be properly tagged and I can reign over them.

But one small group was out of scope for the implementation: our board of directors. Apparently they preferred to continue using secretaries who printed their e-mails, typed their letters and searched for their documents. After a recent secretary revolt, the board of directors now also has to use the document management system themselves.

A new, high profile project was set up to set up a special document management server for all the top secret documents from the board of directors. The implementation consultants had to sign triple non disclosure agreements and had to promise on their grandmother’s grave they would not say a word about how incompetent our board of directors are with computers.

At the end of the project, a small yet critical issue arose. The whole support for our document management system is outsourced to an offshore vendor in Elbonia. When a user has a problem, they call the document management helpdesk who can then take over the user’s screen to provide support. The underpaid helpdesk analyst would then use Google to try and find a solution for the problem.

But since our board of directors needs premium support, they did not want to use the outsourced helpdesk. They specifically asked for a knowledgeable Hades employee to be their first line of support, so the IT department scratched it’s head… there was no person left in IT with any real knowledge about the document management system. All the knowledge and expertise was outsourced, all that was left were senior delivery managers, strategic alignment managers and policy & standards directors.

Except for… the librarian. I am an expert in the document management system and I am a trusted Hades Inc. employee. My manager saw an opportunity to trade my skills for yet-to-be-named-favors and volunteered that I would support our board of directors. I saw an opportunity to trade my willingness to provide this service for an all expenses paid conference visit in a yet-to-be-named-exotic-location.

The interesting bit will be that I will not be allowed to share screens with the board of directors, otherwise I may see very confidential information. So I will have to provide support via telephone only. This will lead to the interesting conversations like:

“Document management support, librarian speaking!”

“Hello, this is Joe Very Important Director speaking. I try to upload a document and it does not work”

“Ok, does it show an error message?”

“Ehm. Don’t know. Where would such a message appear?”

“It should be at the top of the screen. What does it say there?”

“Wait. Let me see, it says: Microsoft Internet Explorer. Does that help?”

...sigh...

The one with the e-book chaos

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 11:42:00 +0000

Close your eyes and imagine the following….

The year is 1988 and libraries are all about paper books and journals, librarians are still the gateway to information and shushing is a recognized skill. A l-user (library user) enters your library and is looking to borrow books for his or her research.

Instead of seeing a large room with books sorted by topic, the whole library is a collection of smaller rooms. Every room has the books of one publisher, and all the doors are locked.

The l-users greets the librarian and is handed a big key ring with different keys plus a flyer with entry codes. This is needed because every room has to be opened using a different method. And it may get trickier, as some rooms limit the number of visitors to two at the same time or they kick out the visitors after half an hour of browsing.

Thank goodness our l-users knows which book he wants and you guide him to the right room. After some trial and error you are relieved that you can open the door for the l-user.

He is now confronted with a new challenge. Every room has different rules for browsing and borrowing books. In some rooms one is allowed to browse endlessly, and in other rooms a mechanic voice bitches after 5 pages: “stop browsing! If you want to read more, check me out first!”

Our l-users finds the right book and reads the instructions on the cover of the book. For this particular book, he also has to borrow special glasses. Without these glasses, the l-user cannot read the book. Luckily the glasses are available and the l-users comes to you to check out the books. You hand the l-user the glasses and put a stamp in every book (please note that every publisher requires a different stamp and that every publisher has different rules about how long a book can be checked out).

The l-user starts reading the books and realizes it would be good to copy a few pages, so he can make notes. Unfortunately, it is technically impossible to make copies from the first book and only 5 pages from the second book (but not all from the same chapter).

At the copier, our l-users meets a colleague. The colleague is interested in one of the books and asks whether she can borrow it for a few hours. But alas, the book is attached with hand cuffs to our l-user. Both colleagues now first have to report to the library front desk to unlock the hand cuffs before they can hand over the book.

Does this sound unreasonable to you? Unimaginable? If we turn the clock forward to 2011, this is however exactly the reality with e-books in libraries….

(this is a translated and slightly edited version of an article I wrote last year for a Dutch journal)

The one with the new ERP system

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 06:42:00 +0000

In the past year, the evil forces of IT and finance joined forces and spawned a new monster ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, which is called “Pioneer” (so called because pioneers go to places you wouldn't ordinarily dream of going).

“Pioneer” will replace the many legacy system used by different departments in the Hades Inc empire around the world. Not only will it lead to ‘better stream lined processes’, ‘enhanced data reporting features’ but it will also end world hunger.

Every few weeks we receive announcements that “Pioneer” has been rolled out to new countries and how the locals are cheering it’s arrival, as “Pioneer” is the best thing since sliced bread. To me it seems like the “Pioneer” project team invests more time and money into marketing than the actual product….

I have been using “Pioneer” for some months now and it now takes roughly twice as long to process timesheets, raise purchase orders and so on, but at least we are all using the same system across the company.

My love / hate relationship with “Pioneer” turned for the worse when I wanted to handle the invoice for a database subscription. The library pays 40% and 60% is paid by the intellectual property department in Golgafrincham (the capital of Elbonia).

No problem said Finance, raise two purchase orders and if you want to pay monthly (we did) split the purchase order into 12 "items". So I raised one purchase order and after much negotiation got Golgafrincham to do the same.

And of course this all went to smoothly. Not so fast said the Feeble Finance Folks , you can't pay an invoice with two purchase orders raised in different countries.

So… Remind me again, what was the ERP system for?

(Thanks to Chris Torrero for the original story)

The one with the project status update

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:08:00 +0000

Sometimes I will receive internal e-mails that make me wish I had the talent to provide a completely distorted, yet believable picture of reality.

Today I received a project status update of the “Zeus” project, the project that will offer us a revolutionary new project planning system. This has been under development for 2 years, has already had it’s budget tripled, has narrowed the scope several times but still has backing from senior management.

The project will not be able to meet the most recent deadline it committed to. The project manager swore three months that this was the final date that they would commit to. Therefore I was wondering how they would get away with again not meeting the project delivery deadline. Read and weep:

“Dear colleague,

we noticed a misunderstanding about project “Zeus” not being delivered on the date previously communicated. The project delivery date has simply been revised. This is not a delay, but a simple date change. We are still committed to delivering the project on the deadline date.

We will assume that this has clarified this small misunderstanding and appreciate your ongoing commitment.

Best regards,

Tom Scott PmP”

The one where old library concepts still prove valid (repost)

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 06:50:00 +0000

(repost as the original post had a light font, which made it hard to read in the e-mail alert)

During a strategic away day at a luxurious golf resort, all “facilitated” by a software vendor, our Chief Technology Weasel apparently put his signature on a bill, which he thought was to pay for two gin tonics. Unfortunately, he forgot to read the small print and now we are forced by said vendor to spend 42 million dollars to roll out their abysmal new document management system. Forget that we already have several document management systems, nobody requested a new one or is even interested in a new system.

The contract with the vendor clearly stated that all other document management systems had to be phased out and that a license had to be paid for every user. In their set up, all users would be able to upload documents without costs, but when you wanted to share your documents you had to cough up money for the amount of people you wanted to share with.

So if you wanted to share documents with 30 or 300 users, you had to pay x dollars per user to share. This was not well received by departments, who had clear needs to share documents but were unwilling to pay to share them.

Luckily the company has me as the librarian, as I have come up with a brilliant solution. Instead of giving access to the documents to all of of 124.000 users across the globe, I propose we only have 42 users (which I will call document “librarians”) with access to the document management system. Each “librarian” will have access a set of documents (which I will call a “collection”), for example the finance documents or the IT documents.

All other employees can contact the relevant “librarian” to find a document (which we shall call “desk research”). The “librarian” then delivers a list of potentially relevant documents (which we shall call “SDI – selective dissemination of information”). The employee then selects the relevant documents, the “librarian” downloads them and forwards them to the employee (which we shall call “document delivery”). All the “librarians” are also in a network, so they can share documents with each other (which we shall call “inter library loan”).

I know, a daring proposal with unheard of concepts - but I have hope it will work!

The one where old library concepts still prove to be valid

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 19:18:00 +0000

During a strategic away day at a luxurious golf resort, all “facilitated” by a software vendor, our Chief Technology Weasel apparently put his signature on a bill, which he thought was to pay for two gin tonics. Unfortunately, he forgot to read the small print and now we are forced by said vendor to spend 42 million dollars to roll out their abysmal new document management system. Forget that we already have several document management systems, nobody requested a new one or is even interested in a new system.

The contract with the vendor clearly stated that all other document management systems had to be phased out and that a license had to be paid for every user. In their set up, all users would be able to upload documents without costs, but when you wanted to share your documents you had to cough up money for the amount of people you wanted to share with.

So if you wanted to share documents with 30 or 300 users, you had to pay x dollars per user to share. This was not well received by departments, who had clear needs to share documents but were unwilling to pay to share them.

Luckily the company has me as the librarian, as I have come up with a brilliant solution. Instead of giving access to the documents to all of of 124.000 users across the globe, I propose we only have 42 users (which I will call document “librarians”) with access to the document management system. Each “librarian” will have access a set of documents (which I will call a “collection”), for example the finance documents or the IT documents.

All other employees can contact the relevant “librarian” to find a document (which we shall call “desk research”). The “librarian” then delivers a list of potentially relevant documents (which we shall call “SDI – selective dissemination of information”). The employee then selects the relevant documents, the “librarian” downloads them and forwards them to the employee (which we shall call “document delivery”). All the “librarians” are also in a network, so they can share documents with each other (which we shall call “inter library loan”).

I know, a daring proposal with unheard of concepts - but I have hopes it will work!

---+++---

If you want to support the author of this blog, who brings a bitter ray of sunshine to your lives regularly since 2007, consider buying the latest book of obnoxious librarian stories:

Are you being served and other recipes for disaster - US edition ($15)
Are you being served and other recipes for disaster - rest of the world edition ($15, 12 Euro, 9.97 GBP)
Are you being served and other recipes for disaster - e-book ($3.14, 2.50 Euro, 2.08 GBP)

The one where we create a new level of performance reviews

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 06:48:00 +0000

After too many years of having to write my own performance reviews, I could no longer come up with HR approved drivel like: “The librarian has treated the team with respect and dignity which has resulted in a focused unified team of individuals all working towards common goals” and “the librarian seeks out innovative solutions to issues that have arisen and is dedicated to collaborating with fellow employees to establish better work processes.”

This year I intend to raise the bar of my performance review and create a whole new class to blow the socks of my manager and the HR dweebs.

So, taking my cues from artist statements, I now have come up with a few examples. Let me know if you have feedback to further improve my performance review:

“the librarian takes a critical view of social, political and cultural issues in the knowledge sphere. In his catalog entries, he deconstructs Greek mythology, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and lullabies that are part of our childhood and adult culture. He re-mixes this with influences from gospel music, modern dance and calligraphy, which leads to conceptually layered pieces.”

“the library should be seen as an unfinished inventory of fragments: books, journals, reports, cd-roms, and other inventions. They are improvisational sites in which the constructed and the ready-made are used to question our making of the world through language and knowledge. The librarian’s arrangements are schematic, inviting the viewer to move into a space of speculation. He relies on our desires for beauty, poetics and seduction”

“Indexing fills me with a sense of accomplishment and integrity, and has proven a most amenable vehicle for translating inner vision to outer reality. I consciously employ both traditional and innovative techniques, letting my unconsciousness lead the way.
The concrete, repetitive nature of this work frees my imagination and provides many opportunities for happy accident and grace to influence the finished product.”

The one where we kill two birds with one hamster

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:59:00 +0000

Sometimes I get the weirdest ideas while reshelving books, which I regularly do to keep the users on their toes. Recently I reshelved all the books according to the second name of the author, which should make perfect sense to everyone who is slightly intelligent.

But, I digress. In my mind I was wondering what to do with the surplus of hamsters from our research labs. For some reason, the Hades Inc labs put the male and the female lab hamsters together in a cage for a few days. This unplanned experiment resulted in quite a number of baby hamsters, for which there was neither room nor need in the labs. Being afraid of bad PR looming ahead, the powers that be wanted to give the hamsters a good home. The group of hamsters was genetically modified to run faster and follow trails – don't ask me why.

As I love all animals (as long as they don't damage my books), I really wanted to help out these poor little creatures. At the same time, I was also annoyed by the slow internal data network. In the past months, the data network in our offices seemed to get slower every day. And now the R&D staff was complaining that it took hours to download the digitized reports. The R&D staff are in a building across the road, which is connected to the main building (where the library resides) by a tunnel.

Tunnel. Hamster. Hmmm.

After some calls with R&D staff and a few friends in building maintenance, I had a wonderful solution: I built the HSDH (high speed data hamster) network from the library to the R&D labs. Whenever someone requested a large digitized report, I would quickly download that to a USB thumb drive. I then hooked the USB thumb drive to the collar of a hamster, and then put the hamster in a no longer used ventilation pipe which ran through the tunnel. The hamster would happily follow the bright yellow line to the R&D labs across the road where it would be rewarded with a treat.

This way we achieved a transfer rate of approximately 4Gb per second by using a group of happy hamsters.

The one with the approval guidance hotline

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:42:00 +0000

During the most recent employee satisfaction survey, the number one complaint was the impenetrable chaos of managers, committees and board within Hades Inc to get approval. No matter how small your request, there was always the need for approval and nowhere was it made clear exactly where to get that approval.

At first, top management was pleased by this as it helped us to spend less money – because if you cannot get approval, you cannot spend it. Clever! But then they realized that is was also harmful, as slowly but surely the company was coming to a grinding halt. Which is not good either for increasing the shareholder return in the long run.

The obvious thing to do would be to tear up all the red tape, fire loads of managers, assign clear responsibilities and tell all committees to take a hike. But indeed, that would be too obvious. Instead, our top managers set up an approval guidance website and hotline. The website contained a database of all our bureaucratic levels of idiocracy, and you could try to find the “approval body” for your category. If that did not work, you could call the approval guidance hotline, where a certified approval navigator would advise you.

“Hades Inc Approval Guidance Hotline, Tom Kelly speaking. How may I help you?”

“Hi, I am calling on behalf of the library. We would like to get approval for a corporate license to the OverPricedContent database, but so far both finance and contracting have not been helpful.”

“Well, let me see. There is the "content management tool steering committee", which says it is ‘a global team to roll out a Content Management System in a standardized manner, leveraging learnings from previous implementations with a focus on efficient roll out, high quality controls and low cost standardized implementations.’ Would that be helpful?”

“Tom, sorry, no, that would be internal content management. I am looking to license external content from a third party”.

“Ah. Gotcha. Then we need to go for a multi step approval. First the Information Services Manager will consult with the Technology Manager to determine the right level of buy-in and alignment across the different committees. This will be verified by the respective industry and function leads, with notification being provided by the Global Information Steering Committee to the Information Architecture Steering Committee (IASC).”

“Tom, great. So the IASC will approve our request?”

“Hahahaha. No, the IASC is just a direction setting body and has no authority to approve anything more important than their lunch expenses. I think the maze for your kind of request is a dead end where ever you turn.”

“But, Tom, then how on earth will we get approval?”

“Librarian, off the record: your best chance is to print out your proposal, head over to the coffee machine in the executive conference wing at 14.43 sharp this afternoon. The vice president of Information Planning & Cloud Services will be taking a break from his 3 hour videoconference, so you be able to persuade him. Don’t ask me how I know this, but as you know – information is power.”

“Tom, thanks for that tip. I may just have some interesting information about that particular VP to convince him to approve our license. A little bit of blackmailing never hurt anyone. I owe you”.

And so another day ends in the library….

The one where we meet the idiot manager

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 09:11:00 +0000

The worst managers are the ones which have a little knowledge. Recently a new senior manager was hired, eager to tell us all how to do our jobs better. As his background originally was in publishing, he also wanted to talk to me about his ideas for the library.
I got called in and I explained that for major technical journals in our industry, I would have abstracts prepared for all potentially relevant major articles, add indexing and add them to the library database. Our researchers and consultants could then very easily find the most relevant articles. This added value did warrant the time and effort the library spent on this service.

The manager smiled and he asked me:

"You have to work smarter, not harder. Why don’t you limit this service to only those articles that describe technology that will be important in the future?"

I replied that "If I could do that, I wouldn't be working here, as I would be able to predict the future and would make a killing as consultant.”

thanks for Chris Torrero for providing the original story!

The one with the nonconformance service

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 06:42:00 +0000

Usually every 3 years the internal auditors crawl out of their caves, sharpen their pencils and descend upon us to make our lives difficult. This time the banner was “ISO 9000 – quality of services by measuring and defining processes”. Every service needed to be documented in great detail, including the quality measures.

The library produced a weekly current awareness bulletin about customers and competitors for the different industry groups in Hades Inc. The bulletin was produced by Sue, my passive aggressive library assistant, who took material from a variety of sources like press releases, newspapers, newsletters and social media, summarized that and provided links to the full stories. Every week this bulletin was posted on the intranet and the industry groups loved it.

The auditor however was less excited and gave the service a “nonconformance” score regarding quality, which affected the library’s overall quality score negatively. The main comment from the auditor was that the content should be “checked” by a certified library professional before being published. The auditor therefore mandated the following process:

Sue creates a Word file with the week's copy and mails it to me. I have to check it, approve it and return it, Sue then cuts and paste it onto the intranet. This doubled her work and increased mine without producing any tangible benefit.

In fact, the quality of Sue’s work fell, because instead of checking for typos herself as she used to, she now left it for me to do.

What's worse, these emails, each with a large Word file attachment, had to be kept in the email system as proof for the audit. This filled my email box so rapidly that I couldn't send any emails. On top of that, whilst under the old system, the news would be on the system often on the day it appeared in the original source, it now it took at least a week before all the steps were completed.

I no longer could stand this horrible process and discussed with Sue what to do. Sue suggested we do something horrible to the auditor, but in the end I could not bring myself to buying a chain saw and paying a visit to the auditor. I did the more sensible thing and stopped producing the weekly current awareness bulletin, as I could not deliver the service with the quality my customers deserve.

A couple of months later, the auditor contacted me and asked whether I had taken steps to address the "nonconformance", I told them that I had withdrawn the service. The auditor was not bothered and told me that this would actually improve the quality rating of the library, as I no longer has a “nonconformance” service on my list.

And surely somewhere in a weird alternate universe this all makes sense.

Thanks to Chris Torrero for the original story

The one where we hide some budget

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 09:11:00 +0000

The Vice President of Strategic Cloud Initiatives, Charmaine de Jongh recently asked me for advice. Which is quite rare, as usually she is far too busy with dashboards, steering committees and leveraging platforms to deal with library matters. She wanted to ask me a favor:

“Librarian, I don’t know you that well, but I know you know as no other how to cheat the system. You have been for god knows how long, you survive every re-organization, your budget is hardly challenged and senior leaders fear you. I admire that. Now, as you know, project Ursa Minor is our mega research project with a gigantic budget, which will wrap up at the end of this year. For reasons that I will not explain in detail, we will have some budget left over. It will be around 50.000 dollars, which we don’t want to lose. We would like to use that surplus budget next year for “networking trips”, if you get my drift?”

“Ehm Yes?”

“Well, librarian, then let me ask you a favor. As you know, the finance and audit sharks will give me a bad scorecard when we have budget left over. But it will be even worse when if they find out we are hiding budget from them. If they are suspicious of me hiding budget, they will look into every corner to find it. So I need to find a place that they will not look into... and I have an idea that you know how to get around this. If you can help me on this one, I will surely owe you a big favor in the future.”

“Charmaine, say no more. Libraries are the best places to store secrets. As you know, what happens in the library, stays in the library. Transfer the money to the library budget and I will take care of it.”

The money is internally transferred to the library budget code and I then transfer it to the account of our external scanning provider. When we started to scan our paper archives several years ago, we made an agreement with the scanning provider to set up a deposit with money that we could use to pay for scanning jobs. That way we don't have to ask every individual customer to pay for scanning their reports, as paying a third party $150 or $300 costs almost the double in bureaucracy. Every department and project contributes to the deposit, and I make sure everyone pays a fair share.

The scanning provider makes an estimate of the scanning costs, takes that from the deposit and delivers the job. However, their cost estimates are not always correct - usually their estimates are too high. Therefore we made the arrangement that at the end of every month, they calculate the actual scanning costs versus the estimated scanning costs and then refunds the difference per scanning job to the library with vague descriptions like "$75 refund scan job QET-9800p".

As the scanning provider knows how tough it is for us to get budget, he lets me hide some of my left over budget in the scanning deposit. When I need some extra money from last year's left over budget, he refunds it in a whole range of fake scan job price re-adjustments. As the volume is quite high and the amount for every refund is low, this flies neatly under finance's radar.

Now I can use this clever scheme to help out a powerful manager- who will owe me a favor now.... Mmm... I have always fancied going on the all inclusive library world tour, visiting all the wonderful, amazing and gorgeous libraries like the Vatican... I may just start drafting a request for that...

The one with the new article delivery process

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 10:12:00 +0000

This week my manager came into my office waving the Corporate Process Audit Report. Apparently there is a group of clueless process obsessed managers in headquarters who take “deep dives” into random processes to see if they meet all the agreed standards. Well, the standards that the Corporate Process Group has drawn up and everyone else tries to ignore.

“Librarian, we’re on their process excellence dashboard for the article delivery process and it is red! That worries me.”

“So what? You still have overdue books. That worries *me*”

“Librarian, you don’t understand, The Corporate Process Group’s dashboard affects my bonus. That is why I am worried. They state that our article request process is not meeting their standards and therefore risking to be labeled non-compliant! That is horrible – I need my bonus desperately this year to buy a new Porsche for my third wife!”

“Boss, say no more. Leave it up to me to make sure our processes are in line with their demands.”

“Great – just make sure you design a process that drives down costs, manages customer demand, leverages economies of scale and follows the manual of authorities! And whatever you do, it has to be complex, the Corporate Process Group hates simplicity as that would end their reason for being.”

Meh.

The article delivery process is elegantly simple. People send an e-mail to the library with the information about the article they require. My passive aggressive assistant Sue picks up the request, completes the bibliographical information, orders it from the relevant document delivery source and if the amount is above 100 dollars, tries to charge the customer’s department. Works like a charm, customers love it.

But now I need to redesign the process, so I decide to learn from the most complex and confusing process in town: the IT Software Demand Process. The new article delivery process will be:

1. User visits the Article Request Portal and fills out a request form for every article.

2. User fills out all details of the article requested: title, journal, volume, number, year, author(s). All fields are mandatory.

3. Portal does cross check with list of journals with document delivery partners. If the journal name is not spelled correctly, the request will be rejected. User goes back to step 1.

4. User has to fill out his details, including personnel number, mother’s maiden name and 15 digit real estate room number. Portal will not remember his details.

5. Users outlines cost – benefit analysis why he is requesting this article in 255 characters or less

6. User submits request.

7. A request for approval is sent to the manager of the requestor. Manager has to go to the article request portal to approve every single request, one by one.

8. If the manager does not approve the request within 2 business days, the Article Request Portal rejects the request without confirmation to the requestor.

9. If all of the above steps are passed, the article request is passed on to the cheapest (and usually slowest) document delivery partner.

10. The requestor can visit the Article Request Portal to see the status of his request: “submitted, “approved / rejected”, “in process”, “waiting for transport”, “waiting for review”, “waiting for lunch break”, “waiting for supplier” or “in workflow”. Each of these stages are randomly assigned by the system.

11. The requestor will have no other means to communicate about his request then by sending an e-mail to a functional e-mail box.

Now, let me just make sure I leak this new proposal for the article delivery process to the research managers in our company, who are the heaviest users of the article delivery service. I will make sure to stress that the library is under pressure to make their life a living hell with more bureaucratic nightmare. I am sure some phone calls will be placed at high levels to stop the process obsessed bureaucrats messing with the precious library.

And all is well in the library again…

The one where social investment goes bad

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 20:35:00 +0000

Some departments should never work together, as it will never result in anything good. Think of IT working with HR, which brought us time writing systems and online 360 degree peer evaluations. Or Finance working with Procurement, which brought us the outsourcing of the bureaucratic nightmare that is offshored invoice handling.

In Hades Inc the social investment department met with the procurement group to come up with a devious scheme which killed two birds with one stone.

MEMO TO ALL STAFF

HADES INC TAKES SOCIAL INVESTMENT TO THE NEXT LEVEL

“At Hades Inc, we take our social responsibility very serious. When I dream of the future, I see smiling children, living in a world full of possibilities. It is up to us to enable that future.” says Hades Inc social investment manager Scott Lee.

Hades Inc has always invested in lofty causes, and recently even sent a complete cargo ship full of pencils to underprivileged children in Elbonia.

Scott Lee: “A recent batch of color pencils did not meet our strict requirements for the western market. There was a slight chance of led poisoning, so we decided to ship them to Elbonia. Not only do the foster children there now have color pencils, we also enhance their diet with a bit of led. Our own researchers claim that this is good for them to build resilience.”

When Scott Lee met with procurement manager Mick Fendercoaster, the two immediately saw opportunities to do even more for Elbonia’s youth.

Mick Fendercoaster’s eyes light up when he talks about a visit to the foster homes: “We shipped those boxes of color pencils and alpaper to Elbonia’s foster homes. When I visited them, all the kids made impressive drawings, which triggered a wonderful thought.”

Scott Lee and Mick Fendercoaster call their plan “Pencils for profit”. The idea is based on the old biblical saying: “give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he eats forever”.

Scott Lee: “Mick and I realized we needed to use the talents of those wonderful foster children. And we were at the same time looking to reduce costs in our organisation. One of the areas where we were looking to cut color printing costs.”

“It hit me all of a sudden that we could give those children a future, leverage economies of scale and reduce our printing costs”, according to Mick. “We installed a satellite dish on the roof of every foster home, a low cost IT infrastructure and now we can project an image on the screens in the foster homes with the click of a button in PowerPoint. The children will then transform that image on screen into hand colored, beautiful slides on paper. We already had a cheap deal with an international courier company, so the prints can be back within a business day for a ridiculous price. PowerPoints are now becoming handdrawn art”.

Scott Lee smiles: “So not only have we cut our color printing costs, but we have given those children a purpose in life and a way to explore their artistic talents.”

END OF MEMO

The one with the new virtual offices

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 09:55:00 +0000

In order to be seen as funky and cool, the central IT and HR organizations launched a virtual 3d office world based on Second Life in the beginning of the year. We were all encouraged to create avatars, have virtual meetings and "explore new avenues of cooperabiity and cross business knowledge sharing". This wonderful new world was called "@Hades", another stroke of genius from the marketing people.

Even though most of our employees did not bother to even use the system, as they are bogged down by time writing, helpdesk ticket systems, workflow notifications and personal development plans, the ones that did use it had a field day. In @Hades everything was possible. People changed genders and skin colors every day, built enormous luxurious virtual offices and even started virtual betting offices (where you could bet whether the next reorganisation would be to align with industries or regions).

When this walhalla of freedom and creativity was brought to the attention of our HR VPs, they took immediate action: a steering group was defined, a series of workshops were set up, an expensive consultant was hired and in the end there was a new "virtual world" policy. Let me share the following memo with you that explains the new policy:

"@Hades version 2

Following the success of the virtual 3d office environment @Hades, HR is now proud to launch the new, improved version following feedback from different stakeholders. The pilot phase clearly indicated that virtual worlds offer opportunities, but also risks which must be mitigated as we are as always risk averse. Even in virtual worlds, our HR policies apply and must be adhered to at all times and in all universes. Below are the main changes in the policy which is intended to make @Hades an even more productive and inclusive environment!

1. Selection of avatars. Based on our principles around diversity and inclusiveness, your avatar must resemble you. The ARS (Avatar Resemblance Service) group will take pictures of you via a webcam and then within 4 working days deliver your avatar.

2. All buildings in @Hades have to be approved by Real Estate. That means that current buildings will be demolished and replaced by copies of real world Hades offices. Your avatar will be linked to the real estate profile system and determine what type of virtual office you can request. For example, only staff with manager level C and upwards can request windows and carpets.

3. In the real world, senior executives make sure they don't have to deal with the lower level staff by using private offices, secretaries to screen their appointments and their own bathrooms. Of course senior executives like to engage with staff, but this has to be managed - therefore we have introduced the cloak of invisibility in @Hades. Senior exeutives can now roam through the virtual worlds without being seen, therefore making sure they can "stay in touch" on what drives ~~the "little people"~~ staff.

Best regards,

Nathan East
Senior Vice President HR Policies"

Oh well, I did not care for the virtual Hades offices anyway. I build my own private, virtual library on my on computer, which is a combination of the Vatican Library, the Jedi Library fro Star Wars and the Library of Congres. Just me and tons of books, all neatly shelved and no user around. As Dilbert once said: people who don't need people are happy people.

The one with the overdue book

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Fri, 13 May 2011 19:35:00 +0000

It is an exciting day at the library as the new issue of “The Dewey Insider” has just come in, my favorite magazine about the wonderful world of the Dewey Decimal System. This volume has an interview with an Elbonian librarian who has dutifully translated the whole Dewey system to his local dialect, and now he can classify his whole collection (15 monographs). Amazing!

It is also the weekly overdue books chasing day – which usually provides me with joy of being able to harrass, nag and pester l-users (library users) until they return the books. As I have stated before, I think our whole profession made a bad decision centuries ago when we let our l-users borrow books. L-users don’t cherish the books as we do: they flick the pages with force, leave them lying around, fold corners of pages and (shudder) write in the margins. No, if it were up to me we would go back to the good old days when books were considered to be so valuable that they had to be chained to desks.

One overdue book is now so long overdue that I need to take special action. I understand that l-users forget to return books and I can even forgive them doing that twice in a row. But with me, three strikes means you are out. And Greg Howe has reached that limit – he has ignored the library system warnings plus my two gentle reminders. I now have to increase the pressure and call him using my tough librarian voice.

“Greg speaking.”

“Gregg, this is the Hades Library Manager speaking. You still have an overdue book, so I have to urge you to return this asap”

“Book? I don’t have any stupid books. I download e-books onto my tablet.”

“Well, you borrowed “The dumb asses guide to tablets” 8 weeks ago, and now it is long overdue.”

“What? That book. Oh yeah. I don’t know where it is. Maybe I left it somewhere in a limo while going to the airport. So watcha gonna do now little librarian – charge me? Come on man, it’s JUST A BOOK!”

As you know by now, I am very reasonable, patient and customer focused – but nobody messes with my books and calls them “just a book”. I have handpicked, ordered, catalogued and shelved each and every one of them with tender loving care. So I now have to revenge my little darling, whom I will never ever see again. So let's go for naming and shaming to take revenge.

Recently another task was dumped on my desk. The internal communications team has installed video screens with company news across the different offices. Now they have another way of brainwashing us while we wait for the elevators or are standing in line for the cafeteria. After the initial roll out and praise from senior managers, the internal comms people realized it was quite tedious to put the news up every day. And since news is content, and the library does content management, it is very logical that the library manages the video screens.

After studying the software that was used to put the news on the video screens, I noticed it was actually not that hard to write some script that automatically converts the e-mails from the comms manager to the video screens.

So now I can interrupt the video screens constant flow of corporate drivel with an important message:

**** WARNING ****

This is Gregg Howe, senior strategy advisor EGK (EMEA). He has not returned his library book on time.

Also, he has searched for “p*nis extension” recently in ScienceDirect, has a subscription to “Big Bikini Babes” which he charges to his departmental account and he stores his Barry Manilow MP3 collection in the project folder of the enterprise content management system.

Repost: the one where we pick up a sport

noreply@blogger.com (obnoxious librarian) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 13:26:00 +0000

Even the obnoxious librarian needs a holiday once a while. So when you read this, I am frolicking in the sun and coming up with new cunning plans and devious schemes. I will be back mid May with new posts, but in the mean time, here's one that still makes me smile:

The one where we pick up a sport

Due to the financial crisis, the bean counters in charge are having a field day. All their craziest ideas are now getting attention from management who want to save money everywhere. All the top managers want to outdo each other on the global Hades Corporation cost saving dashboard.

The IT department is replacing flat panel displays with old, discarded monitors who were gathering dust in the basement. These old monitors may not present the best display, but they do generate heat - so we can turn down the heating in the building.

The site services department is chipping in by introducing "staff participation in office environment". This means we have to water the plants ourselves and are each assigned a window which we are supposed to clean. A brilliant suggestion was also to use old print outs in the printer, as very often the other side of the paper sheet is still empty and therefore usable.

Human Resources (HR) thinks big and decided that last year's performance bonuses are cancelled. Well, except for the top managers, whose employment contracts are so complex and binding that HR doesn't even dare to bring it up. But the top managers have shown compassion and have only taken 50% of their outrageous bonuses. Our CEO has stated that he wants to lead by example and is therefore not buying a second private jet. He will continue to use the old one, even though that is already 8 months old and clearly not state of the art.

To show that our company still cares about us, the new red herring is a program where all employees can pick a sport and the company will refund 50% of the costs involved for the first year Of course there are limitations: a limit of $1000, you need receipts for everything, and the sport has to be linked to your skills enhancement.

I am not a big sports fan, but I finally found an exciting sport that combines concentration, quick reflexes and has a clear link to my library skills: rubber stamp throwing. This combines the longstanding library tradition of rubber stamps with skills from darts.

On my belt I now have a series of rubber stamps, each with a different logo: "please return to the library", "confidential material - destroy after use", "discarded from the library", etc. I have practised my skills and can now throw stamps with eerie precision on targets. Years ago I learned ninja skills at a library conference, which have come in handy in sneaking up on unsuspecting l-users and removing overdue books from offices without the staff even seeing me. The combination of ninja skills and rubber stamp throwing is very powerful.

Rubber stamp throwing is changing my life. It keeps me fit and concentrated - plus, all l-users are now watching their back. Yesterday I was at the library front desk, fully concentrated on fighting a flame war on alt.library.dewey-rulez when I noticed an intern trying to sneak out the door with a reference book. Well, well, well.... we all know that reference books ARE not to be taken away from the library. Just as the intern stepped through the door and thought he was safe, a big rubber stamp flew across the library and knocked the reference book from his hands. He turned around, and *wham* another rubber stamp hit his forehead. Now "reference copy - use only IN library" in hard to remove ink is on his forehead