Once Upon a Time at the Library:
My employment was recently terminated with the library. I wasn't told why but I just had to suss it out based on questions I was asked. Apparently I touched a woman's hand with a piece of paper, and I was told I had gotten into a person's personal space, and I was told I said something about a heated bra. These coupled with 21 years of being periodically accused of making people feel uncomfortable by saying certain inappropriate things from time to time.
The first thing that got me fired was when a woman was sitting using a staff computer and she was resting her right hand on the desktop next to the computer. There is a phone next to that work station and I stood next to her to use it to call a teacher about a teacher's collection that was ready for her to pick up. I had a paper in my hand with the phone number on it and after I dialed and while I was waiting for the connection I lowered my hand down in kind of a nervous bouncy way and a corner of the paper was brushing her hand and when I realized I lifted my hand up. She rubbed her hand and said, "uh." And I said, "Must've felt like a spider."
She complained about this to HR. I can only surmise that she felt I had done this on purpose, which I hadn't. It was unintentional. However, complain she did and all complaints about me have always been believed and I have never been believed. I had no reason to bother this woman. She was happy and ebullient and excited to be doing her job. It was a joy to watch her work with the kids in the children's area. But it doesn't matter because I am a bad guy.
Things started going bad for me about my third year in. I had been a part-time LTA for a couple of years and done a good job of it. I interviewed for a full-time circ position which I thought I had a decent chance of getting. But I got a phone call from HR telling me that I was no longer eligible for the job because I was under investigation for sexual harassment. I was stunned. It turns out that a woman who had used to work with me had moved on to the Main library and she hated me for some reason. I barely worked with her and we didn't interact that much. She told multiple people at Main that I was a bad guy (one of the women she told came to work at Northern Lights and she told me what was happening) and she got one of her friends to come to my branch and work with me once and then that woman accused me of sexual harassment on behalf of her friend. The person from HR told me that it wasn't anyone my age, it wasn't anyone on staff at my branch, it wasn't a customer, and it was a rover who filed the complaint after the teen lockin. This meant it could only be one person. Another coworker was able to find out that this person knew the person who hated me and was badmouthing me and that was the connection. I remembered the woman who filed the complaint. We had eaten dinner together at the beginning of the lockin. We talked about where she was from, and how she had made a presentation to the library board, and we talked about the ALA Amelia Bloomer list of books for young people, and about New York libraries. Then we did the lockin. She had brought a whole bunch of beading supplies so the kids could bead bracelets and necklaces. I helped her clean up the beads later in the night. Then the next day I wrote CLASS notes for her, the other staff member from my branch, and the security officer who all had worked the lockin. She even sent me an email thanking me for the unexpected pleasure of writing her a CLASS note. Then she filed her complaint. Why was this okay? There was nothing I could do. I lost that job and I couldn't defend myself because she was believed and I was not. A fulltime job with the library would have been enough to take care of my life. I'd have enough money and insurance to fix my health problems and save for my retirement, but it wasn't meant to be. I wrote something about this on the library online community board: "Is it detrimental to a smoothly functioning workplace when coworkers egregiously spread negative gossip, rumors, innuendos, and otherwise spend years denigrating and badmouthing some of their colleagues simply because they didn't like each other? Oh, won't somebody please save us from the quotidian vicissitudes of quidnuncs?" Then a manager called my manager and complained that I had written this—as if it was wrong for me to say it was wrong for people to say bad things about other people. I have maintained for years that it is one thing to dislike someone but another thing entirely to actively try to hurt them.
