Roine had been up all night practicing her speech for the new hire. She had paid particular attention to her outfit as well, choosing a solid pair of gaucho pants and a red-brown floral print blouse. She normally went for a bit more whimzy in her wardrobe but today she wanted a little more of an authoritarian look.
She had even contemplated a horn-rimmed glasses look but figured that would be crossing the line to caricature land and she had quite enough with being stereotyped as some kind of hippy without adding librarian stereotypes on top of that.
Heck she had even reached out to her eldest two siblings, Reeda and Booker, to see if they had any tips for training new employees they would share. Reeda per usual just ignored her calls, the selfish bint, but Booker had been semi-helpful which was touching for him. He was normally about as useless as Reeda if at least nicer about it. Hero had called as well in the early hours to tease her about her panicking and remind her that if it worst came to worst he knew of an opening at his own Branch she could take. It was infuriating how comforting the taunting sympathy was so Roine did her best to put it out of her mind.
With all her preparations she had only managed to be fifteen minutes late which was a bit of a coup for her. Normally when her anxiety was this high she either came in two hours early and paced in the break room or she was something closer to an hour wait because she dithered around her house reorganizing things like a twit.
She had managed to get this actually fairly normal for once, something she took as a good omen and tried to use to calm her nerves. Even the customary snide look shot her way by Jo and Jane didn’t faze her a bit. She just smiled impartially and made her way to the Vault desk. She rarely actually sat there - that was Alice’s domain and she was fairly sure the old woman would be replaced when they carted her corpse out from behind the vaguely steampunk-esque desk.
Still she had consented to let Roine meet the new hire there, to get a feel for her “gumption” before hitting the back room. The girl had apparently started in a “Modern” Branch, something Alice had managed to spit out with worlds of disdain. It meant that she was from a largely functioning library that just had a separate backroom for Nexus work. They were a fairly recent formula, mixing as they did Catalogers and Non-Catalogers, and old dragons like the ones that ran The Last Bookstore disapproved of them on principal.
Roine’s two elder siblings and her father both worked in such formats so Roine personally thought they were fine. It was a good way to test for new blood so to speak and how else were they supposed to spot new hires? Acquisitions workers couldn’t do everything after all. But she was smart enough to keep her opinions to herself around her older co-workers. It was kind of amusing the women weren’t that much older than Roine herself but sometimes she swore they acted like ninety year old bitties, all cattiness and mean-spirited gossip with a health dose of ‘ in my day…’.
But like it or not they were finally being forced to give Roine a chance to climb that seniority ladder and she refused to mess up her chance. So she arrived at the desk and busied herself with putting her practice books and manuals in ruler straight lines. She didn’t know when the other woman was going to show up but she was determined to be ready to hit the ground running so to speak.
