"Label me Pissed" (L is for Lazy Week: Day 2)

It's pretty much been confirmed that the origin of nearly every problem we have with Ms. S can be traced back to her extreme laziness. She will actually do phenomenal amounts of work to get out of doing only a little work.

For instance, a few weeks back Mrs. C and Mrs. B went through our entire biography section to check which books had been inconsistently spine-labled with "BIO" instead of Dewey "92" by previous catalogers. They then printed new spine labels to replace the faulty ones. As Ms. S is ostensibly responsible for order in the nonfiction shelves (BWAH HA ha aha ahaaaah!), the task of affixing those new labels was given to her. It took her DAYS to accomplish this, because she insisted on cutting out each individual spine label from the two and a half larger computer generated sheets of printed spine labels. She left the wax-paper backing on each label so they could remain loose and not stick to anything, then arranged them pleasantly across the surface of one of our tables before even attempting to look for books on which to affix them. These extra steps, you see, allowed her the maximum amount of time for her ass to remain planted in a chair rather than pacing the bio wall, simply cutting the labels off the larger pages and affixing them to the spines with a bit of book tape, as needed. I was sent up to help her, at one point, and blew through an uncut page of labels in under an hour.

Even after Ms. S finished those label pages, we discovered that not all the incorrectly labeled books had been present and accounted for when Mrs.es C and B did their original survey. It became Ms. S's task to type up more labels for the missing books, which she was told to do using our typewriter and some of the narrow sheets of labels we normally use to do spine labels. Of course, after she'd typed some of them, she found it gave her more chair time to cut all of those labels out too, wax-backing and all. This gave her neat little loose labels, but left holes in the overall label sheets, rendering the blank labels left there unusable because they were then incapable of being fed back into the typewriter without gumming up the whole works. She tried anyway, of course, and then left a note to explain that the reason she hadn't finished all of her labels, nor affixed any of them to actual books, was because the typewriter was utterly jammed up and she couldn't get the labels sheet out no matter what she tried.

The following morning, Mrs. C was fuming about this. It was just one more log of poop on the fragrant pile of excuses Ms. S has used to get out of doing her job. Mrs. C marched right over to the typewriter and, with barely a tug, retrieved the allegedly utterly jammed sheet of labels with almost no effort. She then gathered them up, along with all the biographies to be relabeled, and left the whole towering pile of them for Ms. S to do. (We'd like to think Ms. S is quickly learning that the jobs she is assigned do not go away just because she manages not to do them immediately, but we too have long since learned from history.)

When Ms. S returned, a day later, she eventually noticed her pile of books and the instructions taped to them. "How'd they get the labels out of the typewriter?" she asked me.

"I'm not sure," I said. Then I spied Mrs. C coming into the room. "How did you get the labels out of the typewriter, again?" I asked her.

"Just pulled them out," she said. "Yep, they came right out. Riiiight. On. Out. Just gave `em a tug, really, and they came out. No problem. Easy. Right out."

Ms. S mumbled something about them being utterly stuck when she'd tried it, but she decided to drop the subject. After all, she had a dozen freshly typed labels to cut out of the paper. We told her to stop doing that because it gums up the typewriter. We also had to explain to her YET AFRIGGINGAIN that the spine labels are actually supposed to be placed on the SPINES of the book, rather than on the front cover of the book where no one can see them without pulling the book off the shelf, further tempting patrons to reshelve it incorrectly.

"Oh, but I was just--"

"No, no. They go on the spine."