Football in the parking lot

There's no course in management that could prepare you for the breadth of experiences, situations, and people you will encounter managing a public library. I could do this job for the next fifty years and still be faced with an utterly new and surprising challenge every week. This tale is merely this month's.

As I have said before, I manage a library in the most urban/economically disadvantaged neighborhood in Anchorage. We share a parking lot with a middle school; technically there are four separate parking lots but you drive through the school's lot to get to ours. It's also extremely ethnically diverse. Now you're up to speed.

This has been an almost ridiculously mild winter for Anchorage. The snowfall is light (especially compared to last year's record snowfalls) and we have not had any long lasting or severe cold snaps. So everyone, including the teens, are outside more. Yesterday it was 35F and blazing sunny when I took my lunch break; I might have been the only person in Anchorage wearing a coat and I was overheating.

In the last few weeks, the teens (I call them the teens, they're the 11 to 14 year-olds from the middle school who are occasionally joined by a few older or younger kids from other local schools) have taken to playing a football game everyday afterschool. For Anchorage kids, 20-25 is warm enough for an outside pick up game, anything over freezing is warm enough to play shirts versus skins.

Unfortunately this is still Anchorage and there is still snow everywhere. The local park is 2 to 3 feet deep and as it melts and refreezes it becomes a sloppy, icy mess. The field for the school is as problematic as the park with the added complication of being off limits during afterschool hours to casual games. The gym at the local community center/boys and girls club is exclusively used for basketball. There is a complete dearth of cleared, playable spaces for a pickup game of football in this neighborhood.

However there is a great sized, mostly empty parking lot right outside the library. (Our parking lot is split in two that don't connect and are accessed from different streets of our corner lot.) It's close enough to school and library security that older young adults don't hang around recruiting for gangs and selling drugs like other places in the area. And so every day for about a week and a half, 10 to 20 teens were playing football in the parking lot.

I'm completely torn over this. It's a great wholesome activity. With the growing obesity epidemic, I applaud every kid or teen who chooses to get out and play. (Link is to an official state of Alaska campaign.) Plus when kids are outside playing, they burn off steam, energy, and agression before coming into the library. Quite frankly, it was making the library quieter and less chaotic.

But one of their end zones is where staff cars, including mine, are parked. And when cars enter the parking lot, the teens most often don't stop their game leaving drivers a choice of trying to push their way in risking damaging their car or the teens or to turn around and leave (hopefully not the library in good, but just for the other parking lot). Pedestrians often cut through that lot can be intimidated by walking through a football gauntlet. Liability issues abound - a kid could be hurt, a football could damage a car, etc.

So for almost two weeks I stewed on it. I talked to the kids and reminded them to stop, walk to the edge of the parking lot, hold still and hold the ball still when a car pulled in. That would work for about 5 minutes. Every car that successfully entered the lot eroded away their playing field so it was not in their best interest to allow cars in unimpeded. I made them put back on their shirts because they are on library property and library policy requires shirts. But I didn't outright forbid the game. And I fretted.

Last week, it was taken out of my hands. An assistant principal from the middle school came over and broke up the game. An announcement was made over the school intercom forbidding the game in the future. The teens wandered away. I don't know where they took their game, but I hope they found a safe place. This next week is spring break, so I suppose the true test will be if the game continues the week after.

I have mixed feelings about the entire thing. The control freak in me doesn't love the school asserting authority in the library's space. (With the proximity of the school, we've worked really hard to establish ourselves as independent in the community consciousness.) There is a regulation in Anchorage that kids are still under the authority of the school from the moment they leave the school's to the moment they walk in their own front door. And none of those kids go home before playing football in the parking lot.

The problem is solved-ish. For now. It probably is what had to be done and what I should have done two weeks ago. I kept making excuses that people could go to the other lot (which was getting quite full as people did just that), but football isn't precisely why we have library parking lots. I just wished I felt better about the solution.

Five Things on a Friday

I feel the need to be random today, or maybe today has forced randomness upon me. Plus I really like lists with five things on them.

1. The garbage was not picked up today. The recycling was which proves that the carts were in the correct place and accessible. I almost cried when I saw the full bin. Fortunately a quick call to solid waste services (during which I was polite, professional and persistent) fixed the problem within minutes.
   
   
2. We've had a bicycle in our lost and found (well in the security guard's office which is really a converted storage room) since the first week of October. I wanted to walk it across the street to the salvation army thrift store, but the library has a policy about bicycles in lost and found. So we'll be contacting APD today.
   
   
3. When I called Solid Waste Services and introduced myself, "Hello this is Elizabeth manager of the Mountain View Branch Library," the very nice man on the phone said he'd seen me on TV talking about the library and I was doing a wonderful job. He also had a fantastic Irish accent. It completely made my day. (Well that and the tempura I had for lunch - broccoli is still healthy after it's been deep fried, right? All Japanese foods are automatically healthy, right?)
   
   
4. So many of the kids and teens come into my library wearing very weather inappropriate clothing. I'm bundled up like the little brother from A Christmas Story everytime I go outside; it's Alaska, it's cold. I don't know if these kids aren't wearing appropriate clothing because their parents can't afford it or because they're middle schoolers. Both are equally likely in this neighborhood. All I know is I keep getting sympathetically cold just looking at them.
   
   
5. A few days ago a very nice elderly lady asked if it was okay if she took some books from the "Men's" cart. I thought she meant one of the men who works here who was shelving so I nodded. Except that no one was actually shelving at the time. Then I noticed that this sign had flipped upside down. (Correct first, flipped second.)
   
   So take heed. The brand new books that come in and get tossed on a cart for everyone to peruse - they're now gender specific.

Have a good weekend!

More Ranting on Garbage

Another week, another 32 emails and phone messages about garbage. We've had our issues in the past with garbage not being taken out on holidays that fall on Thursday (for Friday pickup) such as Veteran's Day or Thanksgiving. We got that worked out, mostly. And this is important because we have those silly little rolly bins. If they're full, they're full. We can't throw away more than fits in those cans. So missing a week can be a problem.

Now I know this, and I'm just a librarian. One would think that if you owned a janitorial company and were successful enough to have received the city's contract, you would definitely realize the importance of timely garbage removal, doubly so if you were in the habit of leaving notes for me complaining about the building's rodent problem. (Working on it, almost solved, haven't seen any evidence of him in weeks but I don't want to get over confident.) And yet it is not a consistent process.

For the last two weeks our garbage has not been picked up. The solid waste department has these super fancy trucks that can grab the rolling bins and dump them making the whole process more efficient. It only works if the bin is on the curb with three feet of clearance on every side. If it isn't, they leave you a little green tag explaining the problem. (I think there was one week in my neighborhood when only one person's garbage got picked up, but we learned from our mistakes.)

The week before Christmas I woke up from a dead sleep at 2am worrying about who would bring the garbage in (this is when I realized how bad the crazy was). We're closed on the "Eves" (Christmas and New Years) which fell on Friday (bring in garbage day) this year. Fortunately we have staff in the building (since our holiday pay was only good for the actual holiday, you had to take leave to get the Eves off), and they brought in the trash. Unfortunately when I checked my email from home on Christmas the staff member sent me a message letting me know we had lots of garbage and a friendly (and holiday appropriate) green tag of warning. No three feet of clearance.

I left a note for janitorial reminding them about that issue (though they'd been in the same meeting I was where the rules were explained). On New Year's Eve when I brought in the garbage, it was still full. No tag this time though. A quick call to Solid Waste (to give you a clue, I have the number of our representative on a post-it note right beside my desk) revealed the problem. The janitors were pushing the garbage can all the way back into the dumpster enclosure* and the trucks couldn't get to it.

The head of janitorial (who works for the city and oversees the contractors) showed up all on his own today. We talked through it, he called the contractor and all should be well for this week's pick up. Because the only reason we're not drowning in garbage is we had two shorts weeks due to holidays. I'll let you know how it goes on Friday if anyone is reading still by then.

*One of the reasons we didn't initially order a dumpster is we were concerned about building an enclosure around it as required by city law. We do have a dumpster pad though. One fine day I heard hammering, but I'm opening a new library and used to that. I looked outside and saw men building me a dumpster enclosure around the dumpster pad. I called the project manager and head of facilities. They were both surprised, but I have a general rule against arguing with men with power tools and so let them build away. So our library has a dumpster pad, dumpster enclosure, and no dumpster. We do however have a great place to "hide" the rolling trash bins so they never get picked up.

How Garbage Has Come to Rule My Life

Before I became a branch manager, I lived in a blissful world wherein I didn't think about garbage very much. I tried to remember when trash day was and take out the bins. Occasionally I would see a documentary or news special about filling up landfills and worry about our planet. For the most part though, trash was a very small part of my world.

Not now. Now, it is a huge part of my world. Hardly a day doesn't go by when I am not writing an email, having a phone conversation, or answering a patron complaint about garbage. And this is the story of how a nice librarian's life went to the dumps.

Before we opened the branch, there were about a thousand details to work out. Many of them I expected, the librarian type things (shelf end signs, ordering book ends and book carts) and those I dispatched with grace and professional surety. Some of the others took me by surprise. (Don't get me started on the weekly emails from the electricians with technical reports that appeared to have been written in Greek. I've saved them in case anyone ever asks me about the electrical system in this building). And that is how I found myself one day having a meeting about garbage pick up.

The meeting had all the usual suspects: the head of facilities for the library, the solid waste removal representative, the project manager for the building construction, and the head of janitorial services for the city. Oh yeah and me, the librarian. Binders were laid out and options were explained. I nodded like I understood. And then came the killer moment where everyone stared at me.

I stared back. "Great!" I said with cheerfulness, "So which one are we getting?"

"It's up to you," explained the head of facilities for the library.

And then we all stared at each other in complete confusion as it dawned on me that these four men, all specialists in buildings, maintenance, and garbage, expected me, a specialist in books, to make this decision. I had thought (well, really I had hoped) that this was merely an informational meeting, not an Elizabeth-make-12-rapid-fire-decisions meeting. (Opening a branch requires rather a lot of the second type of meetings.)

So there were choices. We could have a dumpster. We had a paved pad to put a dumpster on. But we would have to build an enclosure around it due to the new city ordinance and there was a lot of concern that people would come by and fill up our dumpster with their household trash. Or we could have those large rolling bins for trash and recycle and put them out on trash pick up day.

I carefully reviewed my choices. I reflected on that if you told me the square footage of the building and the demographic make up of the community (all information I had), I could tell you how many books you needed and what type of collection to build. Cheerfully I would rattle off number of children's books versus adult materials, media materials and computer needs, seating and furniture needs. How big should your meeting room be, your staff areas, etc. All of this would require some thought, but I knew how to work that out. I had a master's degree and everything to prove it. Garbage? I had no idea how much garbage this building I had just designed would be.

Desperately, I did what all good librarians do, I sought more information. By that, of course, I mean I tried to pressure one of the facility/janitorial/building type guys to make this decision for me. No go. They were wily and resisted all my efforts to get them to even commit to recommending one over the other. Eventually someone finally said that they thought rolling bins would be a better choice because of the aforementioned issue with dumpsters getting filled.

Aha! This is true. People do illegally fill up dumpsters not their own. Rolling bins! (At that point I was willing to act on even the smallest scrap of information.) After a bit more unsuccessful wheedling for advice on sizes and quantities, I chose two of the biggest sizes (which automatically came with a recycling bin) and we were off and running. Silly naive me even thought that would be the last I'd think about the trash. I was ready to leave the meeting.

But how would the trash cans get to the curb? This was the next big point of discussion. Couldn't janitorial just take them out? Janitorial only fully cleans our building three days a week, the other two days they just do the bathrooms. Garbage day was one such day. But if they were here to do the bathrooms, how much trouble would it be for them to wheel out the trash cans as they leave? (Janitorial comes in at night after library staff has left.) Then my staff would wheel them in first thing in the morning. Eventually all agreed this was the most logical course of action.

This post is currently ridiculously long, so I will tell you further tales of garbage later. I think I need a tag for this, perhaps facility maintenance woes?