A more personal post

The university I work at had some layoffs a few weeks ago. My library managed to escape without any losses, but that's mostly because we're already understaffed - one person got a job someplace else, one of our librarians passed away, and we've just plain been understaffed for a couple years now, even though not everyone's willing to admit it.

I knew there was a chance I could lose my job, but I figured there was more of chance I'd lose my relatively new employee. I was grateful that neither of those things happened (this time around, anyway - we've all been warned there's a good chance there will be more layoffs in the future), but the work situation is taking a rapid turn for the worse. Our director is retiring, and after weeks of being told that her boss would be taking over as interim director, it was just announced that someone completely different would be doing the job instead.

The news was a gut punch, because that particular person is one of the reasons we're understaffed in certain areas and have high turnover in others. I know for a fact that several incidents this person was involved in have been documented, reported, and/or witnessed by lot of people. At the moment, it's only an interim position, so hopefully the person can behave themselves for a bit and not act abusively towards others (I'm not holding my breath considering what the last couple weeks have been like), but interim positions sometimes become permanent.

I've known for years that my workplace wasn't healthy, but I didn't think it was irredeemable. Now I'm not so sure. Well, I'm crossing my fingers that the next few months are survivable and hoping that there really is a search committee for a new director (we haven't gotten any updates and no one seems to know who's on it, so I'm doubtful). And in the meantime I guess I'll start preparing to abandon ship. My anxiety is going to be an issue, but hopefully I can push through it.

In the meantime, there might be a higher than usual number of reviews of things I dislike, as I try to gradually downsize my collection. Or no reviews at all, if the stress at work gets to be too much and I end up in a reviewing slump.