today we all paid for the easy day we had yesterday. the place was rockin' and the freaks were upon us. full moon today...a wolf moon, i think. i made myself sick downing pain pill after pain pill and eating 3 chocolate cupcakes that a cocircworker made. on the saturdays when my team works, we try to do it up...and it's usually somebody's birthday so we have some sort of cake. we also ordered out (had it delivered), had homemade chexmix, curly-doodle things, chocolate chip cookies, veggies and dip, ginger ale and juice to make punch, Twix candy bars and Tums. we are pigs at the trough. god, i love the place.
we had a talk about 'birthday parties' at work. see, there are little cliques in this library. some people have their birthdays celebrated by other staff. they get cake with candles and the Happy Birthday song sung to them, plenty of presents and an extra long, additional break, along with everyone who is in the backroom celebrating. all the while, one of us is alone in the library, working at circ (because circ is the only desk that may NOT EVER be left unmanned). there are several of us who think this is inappropriate. we believe if you celebrate one birthday, you should celebrate all of them. for example, while one of the reference librarians has her birthday celebrated, the other does not. this leads to very hurt feelings. i used to be part of the clique until i realized that some people were just plain snubbed and i no longer wanted to be part of the snubbers. i realized i was hurting some of my coworkers and i didn't like it. this is the only place where i have worked that allowed this to happen. this is a breeding ground for bad feelings.
if you work in a library, how do you handle birthdays?
another thing that happens far too often in this library is: collecting money for someone-or-another's "special" event. for instance, the part time children's room assistant was pregnant (she has since had her baby) and some of the staff felt bad for her because she had no family in the area, so they decided to throw her a baby shower. money for presents and cake. then they collect money for funeral flowers, flowers for excoworkers who are in the hospital, money for cake for the director (who HAS to have an ice cream cake), money for her christmas present, money for the assistant director's christmas present, money for this and money for that. we used to have a sunshine club where we each put in 3 bucks a month and that money was used for flowers and presents and stuff. but, i think that's gone. i am not a cheapskate but i had to stop contributing because a) like the baby-shower, we were just told they (clique) were throwing a shower b) the same people (clique and clique relatives and friends) were the only people receiving these things. it was decided by the clique that 'this should be' and up goes the envelope to collect the cash. it can get very expensive. i know what kind of money we make and you know what? i do not want my coworkers to spend their cash on me! shit. jsut be a good coworker. that's the best thing anyone could ask for.
3 comments:
It USED TO BE that we would contribute $5 per year to a fund and birthday/sympathy/congratulations cards were purchased for staff. I liked that. Don't make a big deal about my special days! It's work!
NOW we have each department take turns throwing a monthy party for whatever events fall within that month. Those in attendance from that department are to bring some kind of food thing. Everyone ON THE DAY STAFF gets to enjoy it since it's usually held around lunchtime, and the rest of us hear tales about it later. I hate it. I wish we would just stop wasting time and money on this. We're not children. Cards are fine!
I would be much happier with the policy at the pharmacy I used to work for, that gave their employees their birthday off... PAID. Man, I miss that!
oh, we have been trying to get our birthdays off, paid or unpaid (without having to use vacation time), but it isn't happening. that would be the best present of all.
The sunshine fund works best--then no one is left out. Where I work now, it's a very small staff, so we have a cake that everyone can enjoy on a day that there's overlap of schedules and we're all there. The best part is that we pay for it out of petty cash--we also have pizza at our monthly staff meetings. Morale is important!
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