OK, so don't take Ativan when you have to catalog videos, books on tape, or weed old fiction. It really makes you develop an attitude toward the work you're doing. Like, you know, do I really care what the subject headings are? And which actors should have links to the video of this movie? Maybe I'll just leave out the headliners and include the lesser-knowns to give them their moments of fame in our online catalog. And as for the weeding, let's just throw them all out without checking to see if they've circulated, except for the ones with nice jackets on them. If they have clean jackets with nice pictures, maybe we should keep them. Yeah, that's the ticket, let's have a good-looking collection of books, the hell with circulation figures. We're not open to the public anyway so it's not as if anyone ever actually SEES our books. And now I'm frantically sucking down Diet Coke trying to care about SOMETHING, anything. I can't possibly catalog anymore videos or books on tape, I just don't care about format or subject headings. And now is certainly not the time to do the performance characteristics for the second clerk, who is currently not speaking, or even establishing eye contact with clerk #1. I finished up the perf. chars. for clerk #1 and went over them with her. She seemed to think it was ok but said I don't praise her enough. jesushchrist. What a good dog you are here, have a milk bone. So now I have to do the difficult one, clerk #2, who has a very difficult personality but does excellent work. Very hard to please (impossible, really), shuns you when you don't please her, is not a good old-fashioned team player. And that's what we look for here on Team Tech Services, team players. I play the role of Department Head and cataloger and general asshole, according to them.

Tomorrow is our 40th anniversary celebration at our annual meeting. We're supposed to have collected reminiscences of lots of fun times we've all had. I've been here 20 years, hard to believe I've worked here half as long as this agency has been in existence. When I came there were 2 bookmobiles and 25 employees. Now there is one bookmobile and 12 employees. Can't blame me for that. Anyway, it's lunch and tales and yucks, will kill most of the day. Group hug. The board will tell us how wonderful we are. We agreed unanimously to accept their counter offer yesterday. They countered their own offer, which I thought was pretty funny, but it was a good offer for us so we said yes. Now let's put this payroll mess away and get to the real fight: contract negotiations. Roll up our sleeves and let the bloodletting begin.