Tagged with cheese factory

free until they cut me down

I’m done working for the WPL and am happy about it. My last few shifts were filled with not a lot of anguish. A big chunk of that comes from my bouncing around between branches in my brief career here. I’ve left before and come back and left and returned. It’s old news. We don’t need to make a big deal out of anything (though there was cake and a card).

And Sinatra’s no longer my cat. She didn’t get in with the Siamese Rescue place so I took her to the Humane Society yesterday. Which sucked. I filled out a profile for her, about what she likes and what she doesn’t. Ideally this means she’ll get adopted by someone who’ll suit her. And if not, well, I’m not thinking about that. This is a Schrodinger’s Cat situation for me now, and I’ll let that indeterminacy prevail.

Although thinking of cats, seriously, watch the Cat Whisperer bit in this Blamimation. One of many great Cesar Millan-ish lines from it: “A cat is just a piece of living furniture. When your duvet cover acts up do you try to get help for it? No. You throw it away. You throw it in the garbage.” If you’re a cat person who doesn’t like bleak humour it might not be as funny. I love the concept of the bit, how Cesar Millan is so sensitive to dogs and has such disregard for cats. Comedy gold.

Tomorrow we hit the road for Chicago and I’m excited. I’ve been threatening people with trips to their big library, but I hadn’t realized the Field Museum has the world’s largest Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton. So that’s my vote for Saturday. And when I say “vote” I mean “thing I will have a tantrum about if I don’t get to see.” And when I say “tantrum” I mean “honest and frank exchange of ideas in a civilized manner.” (The fact that Saturday is the annual July Dinosaur Comics Check Out My Sweet Shirt, And Then Talk To Me Because I’m Awesome Day just sweetens the deal.)

And then off to China! For a month because I can. I’m bringing a whole pile of books with me for the trip. “But Justin, won’t that be heavy?” No! Because I’m doing a librarianaut experiment with an ereader. I’ve put like a hundred books (public domain, creative commons or otherwise sans-DRM) on a little Sony Reader (they recently dropped the prices on these guys) and we’ll see how well this works.

Oh, do you know about Librarianaut? That’s where I’ve shunted all my book reviews and stories about libraries to. After my disciplinary hearing I cleaned all the names out of the library stories so people like Dickie Voldemort can’t get pissed off that I’m fucking up their Google reputations. And to be fair, some of the stories I told are about people who weren’t malicious in their incompetence, so whatever. And Dickie’s weren’t even about his incompetence in specific, but the administration’s in general. But anyway. It’s over and I’ve got a fun new website. See, I can learn and grow and will be a wonderfuckingful librarian despite what clueless assholes might think! Hooray for everything!

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chun jie kuai le

I went out to buy cat food around noon today, and walking down Cumberland it smelled like China (except cold). It took me a few seconds to realize the smell was incense from the Huasing temple. There were tonnes of cars parked on the surrounding streets and people were coming out the front doors putting their sticks of incense in the cauldronnish thing out front. Happy new year.

I also went out to McNally Robinson to spend the gift certificate I received from my fellow cheese factorians, and then watched some Flames of War gaming down at Imagine before heading to the Towne for The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. I liked the movie but was also glad I didn’t spend $12 to see it at Silver City.

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jobbing along despite the demoralization

At the desk yesterday there were two separate interesting questions. One was a woman who corralled Ashleigh into helping her at the computers. Ashleigh’d already helped her find a computer that could do what she wanted, but the woman seemed needy of more help and dragged her away to the far computer bank. I could see them standing and talking and Ashleigh gave the occasional look back at the desk. When a phone call came for her it was perfectly timed so I could go rescue my coworker. I let the woman know I could help her if that wasn’t a problem.

The woman wanted to save a document to her new flash drive. Cool beans. She also wanted to talk about her theories of how the government didn’t like her and was trying to delete her work on applying for EI. I let her talk as she rooted through her belongings. I got scissors to open the flash drive packaging. We navigated to the government of Canada site and found the document she needed to fill out. Then the computer popped up a screen saying you couldn’t fill in the form and save it. You could fill it in and print it though. And thus began the explanation of how she’d filled the form out once and then it had all been wiped out so she came to the library. She was concerned that would happen again, peppering her speaking with “Woe is me” and “Isn’t that just the way it always is” kinds of statements.

So I explained how it would work on the computer she was at. She printed off a blank version of the form. She saved a blank version of the form. Then she started filling it in. I warned her that if she wasn’t done by the time the computer kicked her off to print it, otherwise all her work would disappear again.

I was on break when she came to the desk to get help printing it (which I’d hoped she wouldn’t need, as I’d showed her how to print the document when it was blank and said it would work exactly the same way). But she’d come with only 2 minutes left on her time and by the time they got back to the computer she’d been logged off and lost her data. But she would persevere. She had 30 minutes left of internet use on her card so she’d try again. This time it would be better! It wasn’t. She lost all her data again. But we’d tried our best to help her, and listened to her talk (about how her doctor was trying to kill her), so she thought us library folk were all right.

Later on in the evening a young woman came to the desk looking for videos about WalMart. Robert was helping her find the videos and said “Why are these in such different places? One’s in the 658s and the other in 382 (or whatever the specific numbers were)!” So I piped in, “The one in the 658s is about the business of WalMart, and the one in the 300s is about the social environmental whatever issues created by WalMart.” And the young woman said, “Wow, you are passionate about your job!”

“Nah, I just know a couple of things about WalMart. It comes from spending my opinion-formative years reading Adbusters.”

And it was really nice, while Bruce went off to find the actual videos this woman and I chatted about WalMart and how this business prof she has talks about the badness, and she’d never heard any of that before and was now up to researching it. Very pleasant interaction and it made me glad I work in a library, not a cheese factory.

It makes me sad how the administration’s bullshit (about what I can and can’t write on my blog on my own time, and whether I’m actually cut out to be a librarian) affects me. It shouldn’t. They’re just suits who want everyone to behave like them. But it gets to me. I hate thinking about them but I do. It saps my writing and my life in general. I wish I didn’t have to feel like shit all the time. I like being passionate about my job. I want to be, but assholes who’ve never worked with me think I’m a liar who shouldn’t continue in the job I’m pretty fucking good at. It sucks.

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this bush league psyche-out stuff

I have a meeting tomorrow morning. It was supposed to be tomorrow evening in a darkened and empty office building, but it got changed today. The person I asked to find out why it was happening in the dark of night in a building with no witnesses is the person who informed me it was happening in the daytime instead. She said it was a typo. I don’t know.

I wonder what would have happened if I’d shown up at the time these mysterious meeting organizers actually asked me to. Would I truly have had a bag tossed over my head and been driven to a quiet road on the outskirts of town and shot twice? Left to die in a snow-muffled thud? Of course I wouldn’t have. That’s not how the world works. It’s laughable to even suggest such a thing.

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fuck you 2009, i piss on your rotting corpse

The past few months have had really long days because of my frequent talking to people in places where it’s already tomorrow. I wake up and talk to Holly where she’s already had the day I just woke up to, then if we talk when I get home she’s home for lunch the next day. Keeps me falling forward in time. It’s 2010 in China.

I fucking hated the fuck out of 2009. This was the year my condo ate my life. The decision to buy was in 2008, but the badness was all this year. All the arguments and irresponsibility and hassle. The lack of sleep because of worry. The resignation to the fact that I made a really bad decision and have basically wiped out all the money left to me by all my dead relatives. Awesome. If you want to buy it, I’ll take offers way below the current asking price. Please. Let me out of here.

The best parts of 2009 predictably happened when I was far from the condo. I visited Caroline & Co (even though it was too early for Paisley to actually remember), went to Los Angeles, and of course enjoyed the hell out of my time in China (which it seems I never did write about extensively here).

I didn’t work anywhere and nothing of any interest happened at the places I didn’t work (oh right, I work in a cheese factory – forgot there for a minute) so “work life” falls neither in the good nor heart-shittingly bad parts of the year. The cheese factory did fund my escapes from the (utterly privileged) hell of thinking about the condo though.

My plans for 2010 are to feel way less responsible for this fucking condo bullshit. Also: Write something. Go to school. Watch some baseball. See friends get married.

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dasher and prancer and stitches and trauma

I never did ask about the quantity of cheese our factory produces. Someone was in Richard’s nook before me and accidentally called him Richard Marzipan. Bad scene. You would think the number of sharp implements in a cheese factory would be limited, but Marzipan is the guy who pulls foreign objects out of the vats, so yeah, he had a collection of pointy bits. Mispronouncing guy had to get a bunch of stitches and was sent home early. I just went back to work.

It’s not really very jolly around there. People don’t care about Mild Cheddar in the holiday season so our work goes on rather pointlessly. There’s one person wearing the mandatory elf hat (with bells), but I think it was more a punishment than an eruption of festive spirit. I haven’t asked. Le sigh.

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quality assured by no one

Very little happened at the cheese factory today. By that of course I mean that 1500kg of cheese was produced. Most of it cheddar avec lots of dye. Mmm dye. Come to think of it, I am fairly unaware of how much cheese our factory produces in a day. I can’t quite tell if that number is high or low. Why that wasn’t part of my training? There’s a Quality Assurance person I’m sure would know. Richard Marsisperran or something. Some name too long for the patch on his coveralls. I’ll ask tomorrow.

The thing I did learn today is that Winnipeg has a Zine library. And it’s not at Mondragon. I learned this from a stranger who thought I might be interested since I was wearing my anarchist Librarian hoodie. (I am such a poseur.) I suppose Sarah knows about this already. I will have to go. Possibly on Friday before I go see about my new tattoos. I’m planning to finally finish off my arm poems.

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sixty-nine days past the arabian nights

The alarm woke me from dreams of cheese. Anthropomorphic cheese frolicking and licking my belly. It wasn’t the worst dream I could have, and it’s not unexpected as I reek of cheese all the time. I remember a time when cheese was a luxury, but today’s my 1070th day at the cheese factory and I’d really just rather never see anything fermented ever again. Not even if it frolicked and licked.

But my alarm got me up and I’m dragging myself around the apartment before my day begins in earnest. Today, as I’ve done for the last almost three years, I’ll be going to work at the unnamed cheese factory that employs me. My job hasn’t changed in 1069 days. There a technicians who run machines and scientists who devise formulae, but my job is very simple, re-affix the labels to the sealed and wrapped blocks of mild rubbery cheddar.

I have to re-affix the labels because the machine that is supposed to put them on cannot align them properly. One corner hangs off the edge or, well, that’s usually the problem. So I peel it off and put it on straight. One would think those technicians could fix the machine, but that’s not how our cheese factory is run. It’s my job to make up for the label-affixer’s malfunction and my job it will remain. And the machine will continue its jiddery shuddering work while we all wait for it to fall apart.

Viva life.

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the first rule of library club is shh

If you’re looking for tales of the library you’re in completely the wrong place. You see, for the past three years I’ve been making up the entire thing. I never worked at any library. I was just trying to hide the boringness of my real job at the cheese factory. Though we make delicious cheese, my job is not very much to write home about. I have seen the light however, and will commence to tell the truth about my real life at the cheese factory from now onward.

So as not to confuse I got rid of all those fanciful tales of libraries and the interesting funny things that happen at them. (Or could possibly happen in them if I’d ever been behind the scenes of one. Which I haven’t. Ever. Nope. Not even that time you saw me with your own eyes. If those are your real eyes. The ones you use for lying.)

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