I got to meet our new library director today. Not to put too fine a point on it, but she is The Worst. Defensive, incurious, unempathetic, without a shred of self-awareness, humility, or creativity.

In a meet and greet she, herself, initiated, she shot down every question with a dismissive, "I don't know the answer to that and, to be honest, that's not my job," chided my boss when she attempted to break the tension with further discussion of a topic, expected my boss' boss to jump in with his own answers, and when I attempted to clarify the library's plan for employees in light of our state's new law about obscene materials, she lectured me on how to soothe my anxiety and tutted in disappointment that I didn't know all about the city's legal assessment of that law, something that hasn't even been announced yet.

We have had some pretty bad directors and interim directors over the decade and a half that I've worked for the library, but none of them coincided with the kind of political climate we're dealing with now. It's bad enough to feel your director poisoning the culture of your workplace with their self-involved tyranny, but when the entire state and federal government are also leaning into self-involved tyranny, can a library, as either idea or institution, even survive?

I'm trying not to get caught up in anticipating futures that cannot be predicted, but I have to admit, that's a lot harder when I can't stop thinking about how much I dislike this terrible director, and how infuriating it is that we employees can't just fire her, already.