Weird patron encounter of the week:

Yesterday, I changed the paper roll in the self-check machine. This always produces a chunk of extra paper as the machine automatically makes an initial cut to give the roll a nice straight edge for its next receipt. So, I crumpled up that bit of paper and, as I passed the upstairs public internet stations, tossed it into the recycle box next to those stations. And the lady at the terminal next to the box got seriously pissed off. Apparently, what I'd done was "inappropriate", although God knows how. She said I should have kept the paper and thrown it in the recycle box in "my own area". Um. Yeah. It's a public box lady. Anybody, including staff can use it at any time.

I uttered a couple of "sorries" but I don't think she believed me. Which is fair enough, because I didn't really mean it. I'd done nothing wrong.

For the next 10 minutes or so, when I wandered anywhere near that area, to assist patrons with something or other, she just glared at me.

Oooookay.

Look who's been remiss in his blogging. That would be, oh, me.

Finally feeling much better after more than a week fighting off a nasty cold and likely an infection of some kind. Still coughing a fair bit but not as often or as long. It's actually nice to get back to work after being home sick for a week. Especially today.

We played video games at work. Really. A bunch of us attended a workshop on video games and literacies. A couple of women from the University of Victoria gave a little talk on how video games are not bad for kids. And are, quite often, good learning tools. Then, for the second half of the workshop, we actually played games for a while. The verdict: I might do okay on the Wii with a little practice on the controller, I'm half decent at Dance Dance Revolution and I suck pretty badly at Guitar Hero.

So, all in all, a pretty good day to return to work. Plus a few of us went to Japanese Village for lunch. Nice.

We won. We actually won. The library lock-out is over. And we got what we were asking for. Well, mostly. More than I thought we'd get anyway.

Monday evening, our union local met at a nearby (for us) school gym and presented to us a package worked out by the employers and our representatives. Then we voted 85% in favour of accepting it.

We got pay equity. Not exactly the pay equity we were asking for. We were going for equity with Victoria city hall, but ended up with an average of two other municipalities' city halls. That's still a big improvement over what we had and is, in essence, still equity. And it's retroactive to the beginning of last year!

Management has agreed to creating a number of "senior page" positions. This will be a page position that is full-time and permanent, which means benefits. Just like a real job!

It was certainly not a perfect package, but it's a huge step forward, especially considering that we didn't lose anything we already had. There had been talk of changing Sundays to a regular work day, rather than an extra day, but we ended up making no concsessions.

So, I'm back to work today. Just a half day for today and we won't be opening until Tuesday, but we are back! And it mostly comes down to our union members' strength during this last couple of months and the huge public support. Don't mess with library patrons or employees!

A little after 3 PM on the second to last day that the library is open before a lockout...

"It's a madhouse! A MADHOUSE!!!!"

Just a little on the busy side, then.

Today's my last day at work for what could be a very long time. Actually, nearly all of us at the library are having their last day today or tomorrow. We're being locked out.

I've mentioned our labour problems here a couple of times and now things have come to a head. After 5 months of asking the library board to return to the bargaining table and trying to not strike completely, they've decided they'd rather shut us down.

What's really got a lot of us pissed off is that their official press release has this passage:

“We do recognize and value the contribution of employees and would urge employees to ask their union representatives to return to the negotiating table to work out a fair collective agreement that meets the needs of all parties.”

Um, what?? They're doing their best to make it look like we are the ones who don't want to negotiate, despite telling them repeatedly that we would stop any and all strike actions if they would return to the table. Dickweeds.

Lynn and I expect to be okay, as long as the lock out doesn't last more than a few months; we've got a decent amount saved up right now. But a lot of folks are going to suffer because of the board's petty and small-minded actions.

Now, back to that last day.

Well, I certainly had an interesting day at work.

Yep, lame-o bomb threat. I guess to match the one they had on the ferry last week. Probably some pinhead kids who don't have the brains that God gave a troglodyte.

Or possibly someone disgruntled at our on-going job action. If so, this was a stupid way to go about it. We didn't suffer. Hell, we got an double-long lunch hour, hanging around at the nearby Tim Horton's waiting for the all clear. The only people truly put out by this would have to be (A) other patrons and (B) the police, who had to waste manpower (and bomb-sniffing dogpower) making sure the public was going to be safe.

I repeat... pinheads.

Time for a little catch up. And, yes, I've been bad about keeping up this blog. It will almost certainly continue that way. But I think we'll live.

Much work relief. I now have a full-time permanent position with the library. Whew! It's at the Emily Carr branch, which is really my first choice. Not too far from home, not too crazy (although by no means dead slow).

We are still in the middle of job actions, however. We have shut down the public internet terminals, are closed between 12 and 1 everyday as we all take lunch simultaneously, and have stopped collecting overdue fines. We've also had a few strike days here and there, some involving picketing and one where we all went to a "study session" at strike HQ, where we spent four hours listening to talk about pay equity. I drifted off for about ten minutes during hour three. Nobody noticed.

Still, at least I do have that new position. If I play my cards right, I'll never have to go through another job interview again.

I will try to post something half-way interesting next time.

I think our rally at City Hall last Friday went well. (I'm not really certain, as this was my first work-action rally.) Folks were pretty pumped, and loud and boisterous. Which, I guess, is what you want at one of these. Several speakers were there, including one of Victoria's MLAs. There's even footage of it on YouTube. I'm even visible! Just. For about two seconds beginning around 1:20 on the right hand side of the screen.



Oh, wait. Make that around 1:57, counting down. Forgot it did that. Anyway, no more job actions until after Thanksgiving. We're giving them time to "reconsider their position". Here's hoping...

Mutiny update. Arrr! Although we are already technically mutinying against the scurvy dogs, we are still choosing to swab decks and raisin' the mizzenmast, we have had two wee work stoppages. Three hours each, one last Thursday and the other the Friday afore that. But the land-lubbers still refuse to parley, so this comin' Friday, we will be havin' a full day's mutiny. We'll all be meetin' on the main deck at 11 bells, then marchin' to the captain's quarters and then hangin' the officers from the yardarm!

(Non-Pirate Day translation: Strike update. Although we are technically already on strike, we have chosen so far to remain open for the time being, with only a couple of three hour job actions. One last Thursday and another the Friday before. But the powers that be still refuse to return to the bargaining table so this coming Friday, we will be having a full work stoppage for the whole system. We will be meeting at the Central branch downtown, then marching to City Hall for a rally. Anybody in the area interested in helping out woefully underpayed library workers, please come join us on Friday. Arrr.)

I aten't dead. 'Nuff said; moving on.

My mini-golf birthday bash. Wow, that was a long day. In a good way. Nice picnic, a couple of rounds of mini-golf and... the bumper boats. When we'd decided we wanted to do the bumper boats, we though that that would be all there was involved. Boats. Smacking into each other's bumpers. Like bumper cars. When we got into the boats, though, we realized that they had water cannons on them. Oh, boy. The four of us (me, Lynn, Rob and Kama) and a few kids. Needless to say, the kids were merciless with their cannons. Mostly towards Rob, but we all got our share of spray. On the other hand, it was nice to have targets I felt no remorse about soaking back. So, we ended up just a tad wet at the end of it all...




Good news on the work front. I finally score a permanent position with the library, out at the Juan da Fuca branch. It's only half-time, but it's a big step forward. And a relief.

It was all rather whirlwind. Thursday afternoon, I get a phone call asking if I can come in for the interview the next morning at 9! I make it in, do the interview and am told the decision will be known later that day. I got a call right around lunch telling me I got the position! Less that 24 hours. Whew...

Bad news on the work front. A strike seems increasingly unavoidable. This might become my "strike blog" for a while. Heavy sigh.

Ahem. Yes, it's been a while since posting. And I have no good excuse. I have excuses; they're just not good ones.

One excuse is that Lynn and I have managed to get ourselves addicted to World of Warcraft. Really, though, it's a small miracle that we hadn't already gotten sucked into the world of WoW. (I guess that, unabbreviated, that would be the world of World of Warcraft. That's a messy phrase.)

So far, Lynn's got, um, four characters, I think? Maybe five. I'm just sticking to two. Which, in a bit of web weirdness, you can actually see, even if you don't play the game. There's Duglas (so called because Douglas was unavailable on our chose server), the human paladin. And there's Lumiaris (so called because I couldn't think of anything and just went with a randomly generated name), the night elf druid.

Moving on to other happenings... the strike vote I mentioned a couple of posts back? 90% in favour. No strike is imminent, but if negotiations don't improve sometime soon, it looks like we'll be hittin' the pavement.

I hope to have something actually interesting to post soonish. We're going up-island tomorrow with Rob and Kama to mini-golf. There may be photos. And it so happens to be my 39th birthday tomorrow, as well, although it wasn't planned to have the two together. Just turned out that way.

Well, didn't get any of the permanent positions at the new branch. However, this kind of thing usually starts a bit of a domino effect, so there should be a couple of other positions opening up to try out for. Plus, I've got myself two full weeks of work at the beginning of August. 35 hour weeks. Which means guaranteed two-day weekends with Lynn. So that's good.

In more work-related goings on, today is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows day. The day the branches receive copies of the most anticipated book since... well, since ever. We've had e-mails reminding us that the books were strictly off-limits until launch day. I believe the phrase "serious penalties" was used (words to that effect anyway). All the regular copies will, of course, have reserves on them and not hit the shelves proper for months and months. For the Fast Read copies, though, I half-expect fisticuffs. (Fast Reads are high in demand books that you can only take out for one week with no renewals and cannot be reserved.)

It's all quite entertaining really, witnessing a book release with security measures usually reserved for foreign dignitaries and rock stars.

Good-ish and bad-ish news on the work front.

Had my interview this morning for one of the permanent positions at the new Saanich Centennial branch opening in the fall. I feel fairly good about the interview, which is better than I usually feel coming out of these things. Hence the "good". On the other hand, I still may not get the position. Hence the "-ish".

And it looks like this weekend we take a strike vote. Yay. So, even if I do get one of these new positions, we may not be working. And slowly going broke. Hence the "bad". On the other hand, maybe it will be a successful tactic, we won't be out for long and at least some of our demands will be met. Hence the "-ish".

I wonder if it's time to start playing the lottery...

I love it when a patron at the library has a celebrity's name. Last hour, I helped a patron named... Bruce Campbell.

Hail to the king, baby.

I had a voice class with Mark Hellman on Wednesday, the first in a long, long while. Just a little refresher to begin with. The old "engage the body" thing. Becoming aware of my breathing (which really needs some work), loosening up, et cetera.

I did notice one thing in particular. When I tried to exhale long "f" or "v" sounds, they're not quite right. My lower lip went to the same place as it did before I had that dental surgery a couple of summers back. Which is now the wrong place if I want to be properly enunciating.

Still, I felt relatively good about the session. We zipped through a good amount of training over the single hour as I remembered much of it with just a little prompting from Mark. I must schedule a couple more sessions over the next couple of weeks.

On a new topic, I was a king-sized dunce earlier this week. A couple of permanent postions came available at the library. Positions that I fully intended to apply for. Except for the fact that my brain kept telling me I had until the end of the week to apply. Turns out that my brain was wrong. The deadline was the beginning of the week. King. Sized. Dunce. In the slightest of defences, though, I mentioned this to a co-worker and managed to finished my story herself when I was about half-way through. Although she was not thinking of applying for any of the positions herself, she did think that the deadline was a departure from all other posted positions over the last six or eight months. Still. Dunce.

I interviewed for another permanent part-time position at the library's downtown branch. Got word yesterday that I didn't get it. On the other hand, I felt a lot better going into this one than previously. I think I'm improving quite a bit with each succesive interview, so it's only a matter of time before I get some regular position somewhere. After all, I've been doing the auxiliary clerk thing for less that a year at this point. (This is me trying to remain positive about the whole thing. I figure that if I fret too much about not getting a particular position, it'll put me off my game when the next one rolls around. Gotta keep the "Little Clerk That Could" mentality.)

On my way into work yesterday, I walked past a guy who resembled a puffy, slovenly, declining-years Joe Don Baker. So, really, Joe Don Baker at any given point in his adult life.

"Go ahead on."

Heavy sigh...

Well, I didn't get either of the available positions. One of my interviews told me that I did do well enough, I had no answers wrong, I obviously have the knowlegde, I just needed to bring up more points under the "what skill have I got" and "why would you be a good addition to our team" categories. Which I knew.

I get into that small (yet surprisingly echo-ey) room and I metaphorically shrink. My brain shrinks, my voice shrinks and my ego shrinks. Tiny little specks about the size of Mickey Rooney. I'm going to give Mark Hellman a call and set up some voice lessons with him; I'm sure it'll help with the incredible shrinking voice part anyway.

On the plus side, last night my name ended up on its very first "incident report" at work. Yay. I had an evening shift at one of the branches and this... person (and I use the term loosely) was making a pain of himself on and off all evening. Very loud and abusive and more than a little drunk (I detected an alcohol-based funk following him around). It all came to a head when he was using the pay phone and yelling into it. The librarian asked him to leave but he acted like she wasn't even there. So, the police were called. He left before they could arrive, though, so we just called back and gave them a description. He was ranting quite a bit as he left, mentioned that he had been on the phone with "The Major". Um. Yeah. I guess we're all in trouble now. (Please note sarcarsm.) He then asked me where the way out was. We were about 10 feet from the very obvious front door.

As we were filling out the incident report, a patron who'd had her own run in with shared her experience with us. He was extremely rude to her, using profanity... while her kid was nearby!

The pitfalls of being a public library.

...

Okay, reading most of that over in print, it doesn't sound nearly as tense as being there. But believe you me, we had some adrenaline pumping at the time!

Deep breaths, dammit. Deep breaths...

There are a couple of permanent part-time positions coming up at the downtown branch of the library and my interview for them is imminent. Less than half an hour, actually. It's not a big deal if I don't get it, I'm getting plenty of auxiliary hours, but it'd be nice to have a regular schedule, not to mention benefits. And vacation time. Ooooh, vacation time. Still, though, currently doing well.

But, even though it's not a big deal, I'm still a big ball of anxiety. Okay, maybe a medium-sized ball of anxiety. My heart's beating faster that it really needs to and I'm all fidgety. I know I can do the job and I know I have a firm grasp on policy and procedure... It's just that "selling myself" thing. That just gives me the willies.

I should've taken a Gravol or something to calm myself down. Planned to, actually. In fact, I can clearly visualise the box of Gravol sitting on the bathroom counter at home right this moment. Can I have a "D'oh!"?