I come to you today as the newly elected president of the staff association of my library. I'll allow you a moment to take in the importance of that, and give you a few more seconds to begin changing your mindset so that you can address me with all the importance and respect that I now deserve.

Ahem.

No, I did not run for this office. This is how you get "elected" to this committee (they call it an association, I call it a mandatory assignment):

1. You get hired.
2. The previous year's members round you up with anyone else that has been hired since they took office and say: "Decide which position on the Association you want to be."
   

That's it. I am now the president. The Official Handing Over of the Notebook (our version of the Oath of Office) took place yesterday, along with the tour of White House ( a couple of shelves in the back of the storage area on the second floor of periodicals). My worldly goods now include three old (fake!) Christmas trees with decorations, two boxes of Halloween decorations, a couple of cans of cranberry sauce and more plastic cups than you can make punch to fill. There's also a very nice punch bowl with cups - but I was told that these are never used. There's a box with some very nice coffee cups and saucers, but those don't ever come out of the box.
{Beware of the wicked gleam coming to my eye}
Think I should shake things up this year and fix punch in the bowl and serve it in the cups?

The most important part of my new inventory, though: the two large coffee makers; you know, the kind that are always in meetings that hold about three pots of coffe in the stainless steel and black contraption with the little spigot at the bottom? Well, we have two of them. One of which is ONLY supposed to be used for hot water, not coffee. This is so that when we have parties, we can serve coffee in one and hot water in the other for people to make tea with (but I don't think we actually provide the hot tea bags). So where's The Controversy, you ask?

Last year's committee members didn't know which was which, because the boxes aren't marked. So they aren't able to tell me which one is for the hot water, and which one is for the coffee. This was a problem last year, because they think they gave the wrong one to a group in the library that used it for a baby shower. Since the expectant mother couldn't drink caffeine, they specifically requested the urn that is ONLY used for hot water. I wasn't at work the day of the shower, but the rumors tell me that the results of the coffee urn mix up weren't pleasant.
A month later, it was discovered that both of the urns smell like coffee. I can just picture three or four librarians standing around sniffing empty coffee urns and comparing notes, cataloging the scents that are wafting through their noses.

The result of all of this, though, is that I have two coffee urns that smell like coffee, and that is just wrong. It must be corrected at once! My first duty as President will be to figure my way out of this mess. I hope that the Master's Degree I paid all that money for will come in handy when I sit down to work through this problem.