“Just when I think God couldn’t screw me any further, He gets out the ol’ Black & Decker and twists a little harder!”

To properly appreciate my tragedy, I must first present you with some brief background: we are going to get new carpeting in the library at the end of the month. For reasons I don’t really get (and aren’t important here anyways), the bottom slats on all the shelving have to be removed in order for this to happen. (The bottom framework of the shelf is still there, so I don’t see how removing just the shelf slat itself is going to help any — but it’s, again, besides the point.)

What this means for us librarians is that all the books on bottom shelves, throughout the entire top floor of the library, have to be taken off. And, since the carpet isn’t coming until the end of the month, we can’t just box the books and shove them into a back storage area somewhere; everything has to be shifted so that the books on the bottom shelf can be worked into the rest of the upper levels of shelving.

So.

I was wandering round the library yesterday on some or another mission, either trying to get ready for Summer Reading (which starts June 2) or the Big-Ass Program From Hell (taking place in a week and a half, and which I’m actually looking forward to, but which I am terrified will only attract a dozen or so kids, which would be disastrous, considering how much time and money I’ve sunk into it). And one of our pages comes up to me, holding a book with a label destining it for the teen room. She’s obviously been trying to reshelve it and run into a problem.

“What’s with the teen room?” she asks me.

Oh, _Gawd_.

“What do you mean?” I ask, not suspecting anything in particular but already pre-horror-struck.

She takes me back into the teen room. You can tell, just at a glance, that something is wrong, but it’s not immediately apparent what. The books are all on the shelves, but they look stuffed in, all haphazard, without an empty spot to be found.

I have to get closer to work it out, but then I see it. I get it.

Many places in the library already don’t have books on their bottom shelves, because it’s more aesthetically pleasing to leave them empty (it’s also easier on both patrons and pages, to not have to reach that far down to pick up or place back a book). But the teen room has always been pressed for space, so I have made good use of my bottom shelving.

But the bottom shelves are all empty now.

Now, our janitor could have talked to me. Our janitor could have asked me to shift the books so that the bottom shelving was empty for him to remove the bottom slatting. The rug installation doesn’t start until the end of the month, and I could have had all the books shifted, working by myself, in probably an hour, two at most, leaving our janitor free to remove the slats. Instead, what our janitor had chosen to do was to take all the books on the bottom shelves — ALL the bottom shelves, in the entire teen section — and jam said tomes into whatever empty spaces were available on the remaining shelves. Few, if any, shelves in the teen room had been completely filled; you never completely fill a shelf if you can help it, because you want to leave room for books that patrons will return later. So many of the shelves had (and I do mean had) room left on them towards the end; most had been only 2/3rds or 3/4ths filled.

Now they’re all filled, because the janitor has stuffed bottom-shelf books onto those empty gaps however they would fit. And I do mean however — books from the M’s have been shoved onto the A-B shelf, non-fiction books have been stuffed into the paperback section, and some leftover random titles had been mixed together and stood atop the shelves ringing the walls.

The entire room — which is now 80 shelves, with a hundred shelves’ worth of books shoved on them completely out of order — have to be reorganized. By me. Me and whatever pages have time to help me out.

At one point yesterday, somebody, trying (I assume) to make me feel better, offered, “Maybe he didn’t realize that they were in any kind of order.”

“THEY’RE ALPHABETIZED!” I sputtered. “HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW ‘ALPHABET’??!?”

I can’t figure it. I visited a middle school on Tuesday and sat outside the cafeteria for three lunch periods to pass out flyers and bookmarks advertising the Big-Ass Program From Hell, and a school janitor came out to yell at me for giving the kids papers that they were going to then trash the school with. Perhaps the school janitor is in league with our janitor, in some sort of city-wide janitor cult, a la something you’d see in Scrubs, and the punishment devised for me was to completely and utterly trash my own work world. If that was the intention, all I can really say to them is: Well done, ladies and gentlemen. Well done.

The ironic punchline is that, directly after discovering the Shelving Fiasco, yesterday went _downhill_ from there.