-If you are hoping to take the last couple weeks of the year off for the winter holidays, you need to put that in a year in advance. This is not an exaggeration. If you do that it's still not guaranteed you'll get it depending on how many years you have with CPL. Seniority rules all to a fault in that, and this was something I had to worry about even after 5 years there--it can feel hopeless ever getting enough seniority to do anything like that dependably because of how many people stay there for ages (whether they deserve to stay or not).
-Related to that, most people on the ground at CPL are of fantastic caliber as I noted, but some are definitely balls and chains. More than one person I've worked with would chat on the work phone for over an hour on a daily basis, sometimes while they were on a circulation desk (thus forcing more of the fast-paced work on me and anyone else who took their job seriously), and that's just one example. It is essentially impossible to fire anyone with tenure at CPL, and that can be a great thing or a really, really bad thing, depending on who you are.
-Evenings and weekends are of course part of the deal. You know that going in but it gets old--and if you need a weekend off that's another thing you have to deal with seniority for. Typically that much works out but it still causes anxiety that shouldn't have to exist.
-There are problem patrons. That's a fact of public service. There are fewer problems than great ones, but there are problems.
-Short staffing is chronic, and worse, easily solvable--SM just won't move to place willing people on successful candidate lists for reasons we won't ever be informed about. For me, this didn't seem like a big problem until, well, it was. When you have to staff a reference desk, provide programming, and maintain dependable circulation for a physically large branch for all of the 12 hours the branch is open in a day and "you" is eight people, you feel those absences.
-SM is by far the biggest problem and why I ultimately left. First off, too many day-to-day decisions rely on people who are never there--for instance, the decision some branches just don't need the staff any more (all of them do). A personal one for me is a massive misunderstanding that happened one of the first days of my last CPL position (I don't want to go into details for the sake of privacy--suffice it to say I butted in and I shouldn't have, and it was only a few weeks into the position so I didn't know). What could have been resolved through a one-on-one conversation was taken to a disciplinary meeting by someone with a still-unclear preexisting grudge, and with SM--once again, they were not there or even in the building and did not see what happened--being the final arbiter of what actions were taken with which person, I was chosen as the guilty party (there shouldn't have been a guilty party in this situation as it was a mistake and a misunderstanding). As a result, I was bullied by that co-worker day-to-day for three years and couldn't do a thing about it because I'd been judged as in the wrong for an honest accident. The final straw after that was interviewing for a full-time position, receiving word I was successful, and the position subsequently disappearing, with nearly a year going by without a word said about it.
