Thursday, September 04, 2008

this is not a part of other duties as assigned

I have been at my new position for almost two weeks now and I think that I hate it.
I am sure in part some of these feelings of negativity are due to the transition (again), Monster Squad being far away in Thunder Bay, the responsibilities of being a single caregiver to three animals (one who wants way more attention than the other two) and the fact that this job kind of sucks.
And do you want to know why it sucks?
Because it is not my job.
I am a trained librarian. My job is to help people use the library, find materials, do story time with wee one's to help them develop literary skills. I help to buy books for the library, to develop the collection, maintain the collection. Part of my position is also to maintain my skills in terms of computer and literary knowledge.
Now apparently my job is to be a social worker.
And well to be perfectly honest if I wanted to be a social worker I would have gone to school to be a social worker.
This is not what I signed up for.
When I accepted this position I assumed it would be similiar to all the other services specialist positions in the system. That I would spend time on training other librarians how to do their job, that it would involve more collection development, and more detailed reference questions.
No one told me that I was going to have to deal with apathetic little bastards who want to play victim and don't actually want to use the library for its intended purpose.
Perhaps on that note I should elaborate.
We have a great deal of problem teens in this library. And this is not an overstatement. These kids are in gangs, they are into hard drugs, they don't go to school, they don't have a great deal of civility or manners. They are what I would call " a bunch of fucking assholes"
And I am not being racist. I could care less what the colour of their skin is. This is about how they treat people, not only their peers but the complete strangers around them. These kids feel that the world should take all their shit and that they never have to pay any price for it. And unfortunatly the system has confirmed this ideaology for them. The majority of these kids who are problems in the library have been arrested at least several times. Nothing happened to them, nothing came of it aside from a slap on the wrists. So now they have no fear about authority, they could care less that we want them to be quiet or leave the library. They rarely even look at you when you talk to them. They just keep doing what it is that they are doing. Which I think is incredibly rude.
Add to the mix that they have no role models, no structure, no parents around most of the time and this becomes a toxic work environment becuase of the youth. Also these kids think that they have no future, what they see around them is what they believe is going to happen to them. They see a path of least resistance and they have seemingly embraced it. They see no way out, no way of escape and so they are just going with it. Part of their attitude (in my opinion) is that they see that the rest of their lives will be like their parents and so they are trying to have a good time now at everyone else's expense.
I truly hate this attitude of being a victim, of not being able to take control of their lives and try to make a positive change and to work hard. Like the majority of society these kids are taking the path of least resistance, and well as we have seen so far this path has led us to huge social problems, environmental problems, and world peace problems.
I am egregious at the fact that my manager thinks that the library should embrace them, welcome them, try to help them, when they want nothing to do with the library aside from having internet access and a place to annoy people becuase it gives them some thrill. I am not in my career to pamper some rude youth and to take nonsense from them. I don't care how disadvantaged they are! Things were not easy for me growing up, yet I took a proactive stance at my life. I knew that I would not be their forever and I worked hard to ensure that I could go to university and that I could do more with my life than be abused by my family.
And frankly I am just waiting for these kids to start calling me homophobic names and then I will ban them. And if my manager attempts to undo these bannings I have every intention of taking her to the union and taking the library to court, as I have been told time and time again in training that the library works very hard to ensure that we have a "harassment free worlplace", but since arriving here I have see very little of that effort. In fact it seems that the majority of what is expected of me is to encourage harrassment from these kids. And well to be honest, I would just rather not.

1 Comments:

At Monday, 08 September, 2008, Blogger Brice said...

Ugh, that's awful!
I don't know how you've put up with it this long, those little shits need a good beating. Unfortunately that may not happen until Jail...

 

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