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We all take turns staffing the ref desk four hours at a time during the summer, and today's my first turn. And as it's the summer and the beginning of the semester, there's nobody much here, and the only action the ref desk is getting is phone calls wanting to know what the hours are (the main library number rigns at the ref desk first).
So first: I've just bought Bangkok 8, a crime novel set in Bangkok, and I'm wondering if anyone who read this knows how to pronounce the main character's name: Sonchai Jitpleecheep. It seems like that's a fairly straightforward phonetic rendering there, but it's also a running joke that no farang (foreigner) can pronounce his name correctly, and it gets said a different way every time, so now I'm second-guessing my original idea.
And I mentiond on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
homasse's journal that I should maybe post a few stories of TEH EVOL ASSISTANT, who I worked with a few years ago, because people would probably find them funny. So, to kill some time here in between games of Bookworm and Dynomite, I shall.
I shall refrain from naming names here becuase I do not want her ever to be able to Google her name. But if you're working in a library in Texas or Kentucky and get an applicant whose initials are E and B, please feel free to drop me a line and ask if it's her so you can set fire to the application and bury the ashes under a peat bog. I am using TEA to refer to her - despite the fact that her title was "assistant curator" and mine was "curator" she was not my assistant, oh no, because she didn't work for people, she worked with them. So she became The Assistant, with 'Evil' added later to modify it.
Anyway. TEA looked great on paper and had good references - as we found out later, mostly so that the previous library she was working at could get rid of her, and I would have been happy to give her glowing references for the same reason when I was still working there. I maybe should have figured something was up when she said that she liked to take a quick 15-minute lunch and leave early at her previous job, and I said sure, that we sometimes did that. Assuming that she would note the 'sometimes'. Hah. She had selective hearing and heard only what it pleased her to hear, and therefore her job hours were mostly 'come in 8:20ish, leave 4ish' and no amount of talking to her about them could make her stop.
In the interview she said she was detail-oriented, which was necessary in this job, but she was too much so - a classic case of being unable to see the forest for the trees. As part of the job, we purchased slides which came in cardboard mounts and put the film chips into plastic mounts with glass, to protect the slides. It requires patience and a steady hand to get as much dust and fiber out of it as possible and you quickly grow to figure out when it's a bad dust day and therefore not worth remounting slides. Anyway, many times there's no way to get all the dust out, so you get the obvious stuff out and go on with the day. As my former supervisor said, "Foilage is your friend." TEA couldn't handle this. She HAD to get ALL the dust out or, apparently, the world would end. She'd spend two hours on one slide if it was a bad dust day, and she viewed me and the grad student workers who could do it faster and who knew when to call it good enough with deep suspiscion.
Her husband also packed her lunch for her every day. Seems like a nice, loving thing to do, hunh? When he went off on business trips (he was a professor at another branch of the university, specializing in cow fertility or some such, and apparently had to run around and look at heifers or the like a lot) he would pack her lunches in advance. Five days in advance. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, grapes, and a Diet Coke. You know how nasty a PB&J sandwich gets after 5 days in the fridge? And she'd eat them, and complain about how bad this sandwich was, and it never occurred to her to, say, MAKE HER OWN LUNCH. If he was gone for over 5 days, she'd order pizza and bring leftover pizza in for lunch.
She'd also go feed the birds every day at lunch and if she misse a day she'd get worried. When she went on vacation she'd bring in a bunch of grapes with the instructions to us to feed the birds twenty (20) grapes each day. She wrote it down like that: "twenty (20)." We usually just ate the grapes ourselves or forgot about them until the day before she got back and then tossed the whole bunch out for the birds. It didn't seem to make any difference in the bird population of campus.
She also had the computer luser attitude that the computer was a magic box and you got it to work by typing in the proper incantation and that any error messages it gave to you meant nothing to her and therefore nothing to anyone else. She'd always click 'OK' to get the box off the screen *before* telling me there was a problem, and no matter how many times I asked her not to do that, she'd do that. Even when I was standing over her watching her replicate what she was doing before, she'd click the error box out of the way ASAP.
More later on her. And maybe I'll write some about the crazy curator at the job previous to that one. I am so happy that everyone here at my current job seems to be normal and easy to get along with and not totally bugfuck crazy.
So first: I've just bought Bangkok 8, a crime novel set in Bangkok, and I'm wondering if anyone who read this knows how to pronounce the main character's name: Sonchai Jitpleecheep. It seems like that's a fairly straightforward phonetic rendering there, but it's also a running joke that no farang (foreigner) can pronounce his name correctly, and it gets said a different way every time, so now I'm second-guessing my original idea.
And I mentiond on
homasse's journal that I should maybe post a few stories of TEH EVOL ASSISTANT, who I worked with a few years ago, because people would probably find them funny. So, to kill some time here in between games of Bookworm and Dynomite, I shall.I shall refrain from naming names here becuase I do not want her ever to be able to Google her name. But if you're working in a library in Texas or Kentucky and get an applicant whose initials are E and B, please feel free to drop me a line and ask if it's her so you can set fire to the application and bury the ashes under a peat bog. I am using TEA to refer to her - despite the fact that her title was "assistant curator" and mine was "curator" she was not my assistant, oh no, because she didn't work for people, she worked with them. So she became The Assistant, with 'Evil' added later to modify it.
Anyway. TEA looked great on paper and had good references - as we found out later, mostly so that the previous library she was working at could get rid of her, and I would have been happy to give her glowing references for the same reason when I was still working there. I maybe should have figured something was up when she said that she liked to take a quick 15-minute lunch and leave early at her previous job, and I said sure, that we sometimes did that. Assuming that she would note the 'sometimes'. Hah. She had selective hearing and heard only what it pleased her to hear, and therefore her job hours were mostly 'come in 8:20ish, leave 4ish' and no amount of talking to her about them could make her stop.
In the interview she said she was detail-oriented, which was necessary in this job, but she was too much so - a classic case of being unable to see the forest for the trees. As part of the job, we purchased slides which came in cardboard mounts and put the film chips into plastic mounts with glass, to protect the slides. It requires patience and a steady hand to get as much dust and fiber out of it as possible and you quickly grow to figure out when it's a bad dust day and therefore not worth remounting slides. Anyway, many times there's no way to get all the dust out, so you get the obvious stuff out and go on with the day. As my former supervisor said, "Foilage is your friend." TEA couldn't handle this. She HAD to get ALL the dust out or, apparently, the world would end. She'd spend two hours on one slide if it was a bad dust day, and she viewed me and the grad student workers who could do it faster and who knew when to call it good enough with deep suspiscion.
Her husband also packed her lunch for her every day. Seems like a nice, loving thing to do, hunh? When he went off on business trips (he was a professor at another branch of the university, specializing in cow fertility or some such, and apparently had to run around and look at heifers or the like a lot) he would pack her lunches in advance. Five days in advance. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, grapes, and a Diet Coke. You know how nasty a PB&J sandwich gets after 5 days in the fridge? And she'd eat them, and complain about how bad this sandwich was, and it never occurred to her to, say, MAKE HER OWN LUNCH. If he was gone for over 5 days, she'd order pizza and bring leftover pizza in for lunch.
She'd also go feed the birds every day at lunch and if she misse a day she'd get worried. When she went on vacation she'd bring in a bunch of grapes with the instructions to us to feed the birds twenty (20) grapes each day. She wrote it down like that: "twenty (20)." We usually just ate the grapes ourselves or forgot about them until the day before she got back and then tossed the whole bunch out for the birds. It didn't seem to make any difference in the bird population of campus.
She also had the computer luser attitude that the computer was a magic box and you got it to work by typing in the proper incantation and that any error messages it gave to you meant nothing to her and therefore nothing to anyone else. She'd always click 'OK' to get the box off the screen *before* telling me there was a problem, and no matter how many times I asked her not to do that, she'd do that. Even when I was standing over her watching her replicate what she was doing before, she'd click the error box out of the way ASAP.
More later on her. And maybe I'll write some about the crazy curator at the job previous to that one. I am so happy that everyone here at my current job seems to be normal and easy to get along with and not totally bugfuck crazy.
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