It just keeps gettin' better

I have been at work exactly 24 minutes today and here is what has happened so far:

A taxicab was just sitting in our entryway as I was trying to get into the parking lot. Had a nice little confrontation with him to explain how he was snarling up traffic and needed to find an actual parking place.

When I walked in the building a woman I have never seen before had removed stacks and stacks of things from our community information display area and had them all over the floor. I ID'd myself as the branch manager and asked if she had cleared this with the person in charge of displays. She said "No, but I'm just getting some things for my community and rearranging things better." I sicced our display person on her.

Read my email to discover major changes in upper management which of course will affect me because now I will have yet another new supervisor. I was just getting used to the last one (who is nice but not too bright) and now I'm not sure who my next new boss will be. Very unsettling.

I guess the upheaval we're experiencing at my branch, and in the library system as a whole, is reflective of what's going on in the larger society. Things are going crazy these days.

I've been thinking about how nice it would be to go on walkabout or become a hermit somewhere, away from all this madness.

Hate sucks

Every Tuesday a big stack of our local free newspaper is delivered to my library. It's a popular publication containing local entertainment news and commentary. This morning we discovered that someone had placed hate literature associating presidential candidate Barack Obama with extremist black militant groups into random copies of the newspaper. The flyer includes quotes such as, "Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy."

What kind of person would do such a thing? This is defamation of character at best, and in my opinion constitutes the worst kind of hate-mongering that frightened, small-minded people are capable of. We are sickened.

We went through the papers and pulled out (and SHREDDED!) all of the flyers we could find, hoping and praying we don't find any more. Between now and the election I am sure we will have to check these papers regularly for more of this political terrorism.

This sucks.