White whine ahoy

I don't know what they put in the water at work, but tea which tastes perfectly excellent at home tastes...off...here.

And that is my champagne complaint for the week.

How are YOUR lives, dear readers?

GONE CORPORATE

Yes, it's true: I have found a job and it is in the corporate world. A greeting card company has its headquarters in my fair new city and, well, they needed an assistant for their library.

Enter moi.

So far it is pretty excellent. Like the last library I worked in, this one has a pretty narrow focus, collection-wise--but oh what a focus it is! Graphic design, art, typography, needlework, maps and photograph collections, fashion...pretty much everything tactile and interesting to look at and inspirational. There's also a room full of card and stationery archives going back to the 1900s, as well as a room devoted to ribbons, pom-poms, sequins, buttons, and other fun things.

AND I CAN WEAR JEANS.

Librarian's joys

Now that my super-srs-bzns posting is over with, we here at Ye Old Blogge can see a return to the happily pointless posting of yore! With that said, I was ruminating the other day (literally; I was eating an apple and thinking at the same time) on why, exactly, I chose this profession--being that there are No Jobs--and came up with a small set of pleasing observations. Behold:

+I like research. And people tend to ask you things when you are sitting behind a reference desk or wandering around a library looking Knowledgeable. Sometimes they are not-very-interesting things ("Miss, where's the pencil sharpener?") and sometimes they are very-interesting things ("Is this book by...*checks author* Sarah Dessen any good?") and sometimes they are long-involved-but-interesting things ("I need information about America's military presence in Pakistan but I don't know how to use this database"). FUN TIMES, with no sarcasm added! I love research.

+Attendant to that, I like to feel smart. Depending on the population with which you work, your patrons may or may not be generally knowledgeable about research and library resources (and even if you work in an academic library, the students might not know shit). This provides lots of opportunities to look AND feel AND BE SMART! A woman I helped with Excel the other day was practically beside herself with how smart I was. Note: I hate Excel and am not very great with it. But I helped her with what she needed to do, and she was grateful, and I felt warm and fuzzy inside about my helpfulness and my brainmeats and the world was a bit of a better place.

+I like talking about things I like. You, as a reader of this blog, may have noted this. Most librarians love to talk about things they like, whether that is books, e-books, e-book readers, iPads and other techy things, computer coding, cataloguing, social media, or music archiving. My Thing is books, of course, and oh let me tell you how many sizes my heart grows when someone asks me about a book (it puts the Grinch's TO SHAME). The very-interesting question of Point #1 actually happened at my internship--at a high school--and I nearly exploded with YES IT IS AWESOME YES SARAH DESSEN IS AWESOME YES TELL ME IF YOU LIKE IT NEXT TIME I SEE YOU. A similar thing happened the other day with Fire by Kristin Cashore and the new Serenity graphic novel, The Shepherd's Tale. So much sqee. At my workplace, a patron asked if we had a copy of Anne of Green Gables. Since this is a tiny academic library, I had to regretfully say no...and offer to lend her my copy. Because I mean really. IT'S MOTHERFUCKING ANNE SHIRLEY PEOPLE. The answer is always yes.

+I like (re)discovering things I like. Working in a library is, of course, a primo opportunity to discover either for the first time or anew some awesome stuff. As I was doing inventory this past month at my internship, I had the distinct pleasure of going along every fiction shelf and having the internal squee upon seeing all my favorite titles in the collection. Hooray, I thought, look at all the Westerfeld! Look, three editions of Burmese Days! LOOK JO WALTON BOOKS!! I have also had the fun-times of discovering many amazing new titles and authors, including Maggie Stiefvater and Justina Chen Headley.

And that is what I have--for now. I'm sure the list will grow. It helps to remind myself, sometimes.

Service du jour

This article was of some interest to me, given that I work in the food service industry. I don't wait--I host--but of course I work closely with both customers and servers, and have ample opportunity to observe what people would consider to be "good" and "bad" restaurant experiences.

However, the article seems to focus mainly on the relationship between customer and server, forgetting that there are other factors needed to ensure a pleasant dining experience. Given that, I decided to add some things.

1. The customer is not always right. Sometimes the customer is dead wrong (see #3, 4). Sometimes the server/host/busser/manager is perfectly entitled to choke said customer into submission, although one rarely takes this opportunity (pesky job security).

2. It's almost never the server's fault. Really the only time it IS the server's fault is if they, personally, screw up your order--as in, they write down/deliver a Mushroom Cheeseburger instead of a Turkey-Pastrami Melt. If your food is cold or takes forever in getting to you, it's more than likely the kitchen's fault.

3. The manager can do nothing if the restaurant doesn't serve breakfast all day and you feel like French toast. The decision to serve breakfast until whenever is not even the general manager's to make, and once the kitchen closes a certain section, why should they reopen it simply because your brat wants an egg sandwich? Make him one yourself, bitch. Or go to Denny's.

4. When the host tells you to sit somewhere, sit there. Don't point to an empty booth and say, "That booth's empty. Why can't I sit there?" The host generally has good reasons for seating you in a certain spot. If you demand a booth when she wants to give you a table, she'll probably seat you in the booth directly adjacent to the bathroom.

5. Don't whine at the prospect of a fifteen-minute wait. It's not that long, really. Go to the Cheesecake Factory and wait for an hour, then come to my restaurant and be grateful for fifteen minutes. Also, it's not the hostess's fault that the restaurant is full; she can't exactly tell people to leave so that you can sit down.

6. If you want to people-watch while you're eating, eat outside. Duh? The laziness of people confronted with the lack of outside wait staff is incredible. Don't say, "Oh, if there's no service outside I'll eat inside" and then proceed to whine when there doesn't happen to be a window seat available.

7. Don't camp. Order your food, eat your food, pay the check, leave: this is the proper order of restaurant dining. Sitting and talking at your table for nigh on three hours is not a permissible guilty pleasure; it's rude. The longer you sit, the fewer tables there are available in the restaurant and the less money your server makes.

8. TIP, DAMMIT. If you can afford to pay eight dollars for a sandwich, you can afford to leave a decent tip. Ever wonder why apparently all servers smoke, and smoke a lot? $2 on a six-person bill will do that to a person.

This all seems fairly petty, but when you get right down to it, restaurants are a luxury, not a necessity; I think America has forgotten this. As such, give and take is required on both sides--it's senseless to blame a "bad" dining experience on one person. I mean, hey...you could've cooked your own meal, and it probably would have been better anyway.