The Amped Librarian

Pick Your Battles

2008-10-17T08:59:00.000-07:00

A woman came into the library this week to get a library card for herself and her daughter. At the time, the clerk did not notice that the birth year the patron input as her own was 1986, and the birth year she input for her daughter’s was 1992, which would’ve made her six years old when she gave birth. This discrepancy was realized later on by a clerk, who quickly put a block on the cards to get the correct birth dates for each.

The next day the daughter showed up and wanted to check some items out, but with the block on her card she was unable to do so unless her mother came in and corrected the information in the accounts. The girl immediately got on her cell phone and called her mother, who was infuriated and stormed over to the library right away.

When the mother arrived, the situation was explained, and she should have laughed it off like a sane person, admitting that she was not actually six years old when she had her child.

Instead she began rummaging through her wallet for correct ID, and when she whipped out multiple forms of ID, including credit cards, she stopped herself and said, “Oh, wait, these are the ones I use to get Disability. Hold on.”

Continuing to rummage, she produced all new ID with a completely different name and birth date. Different, in fact, from the original application she filled out. This, she claimed, was her real identity. The clerks (including the circulation manager) shrugged and made her a card with the new information, as long as it was feasible that she could be the girl’s parent.

No report of fraudulent identification to the police. No investigation into identity theft. No concern about someone defrauding the government for free money. No one cared that this woman is running around with someone else’s identification, including credit cards, which she’s using for most of her business.

Another problem occurred when she neglected to sign her library card application and another block was put on the card, so yesterday she was confronted yet again by one of the clerks who had to have her signature.

When all was said and done, the woman laughed as she was leaving and loudly said to the person she was with, “I signed a different name on the application, too! Hahaha!”

In a strange twist of fate, this woman then whirled around at the clerk who had been dealing with her, and accused this clerk of calling her the N-word.

Witnesses all state vehemently that the N-word was never spoken, and that the accused clerk hadn’t even said a word after the woman walked away. We do believe this story, given that the accuser is likely one of the biggest liars and thieves to ever walk in our door, but the way it’s being handled is another mystery.

The clerk, who was upset that she would be accused of saying this to someone, has repeated the story to anyone who will listen, only when she tells the story, she actually says the N-word over and over, quoting the woman who accused her of using it.

Maybe I’m a paranoid white girl, though I like to think it’s just a question of respect, but I don’t think I’ve uttered the N-word, even when quoting someone, since I was a little kid and my parents explained the meaning to me. I’m sorry, but that’s a word we just cannot use, even when we’re denying that we said it. It’s offensive, even to me, and I’m one of the rare people who finds most language acceptable and most insults amusing. Call me a cunt, call me a bitch, call me a whore, call me anything you want. They’re just words and unless I care about you personally, I don’t care what names you call me. But the N-word is not even part of my vocabulary, and hearing it, even by African Americans who are taking it back, is offensive to me. I don’t believe for one second that if someone is trying to depict herself as someone who would not call another this name, she probably shouldn’t be repeating the story and the word so much to prove that she would never do that.

So, what we have here is a group of clerks who are apathetic about someone freely flaunting her identity theft, which she successfully uses to swindle free money and attempts to finance and establish herself with. They also don’t care that she tauntingly laughs about signing a false name on a binding document, and let her get away with that as well. But it’s a bit of an ethical free-for-all when the patron accuses one of them of using the N-word.

While hearing this story, excuses ran through my head. It was a full moon this week. These are under-appreciated and abused staff members. Sometimes there isn’t enough money in the world to make their job worth it. Things often get exaggerated in the retelling.

Or maybe this was all true and nothing good or right is left in the world.

Feeding Frenzy

2008-09-24T21:10:00.000-07:00

Have you ever started your day and had the expectation that it would go swimmingly, only it ended up going drowningly?

Today was such a day for me.

Trip #1 to the washroom left me in the stall staring at a creature that was staring back at me. It was a smeared handprint of a small woman or a child, about 4½ feet off the floor on the back of the stall door. The smear was composed of a dried and hardened substance that was dark brown in color. It could be mud. It could be not mud.

The thing about this smear is that I’m quite familiar with it because I’ve been staring at it for almost four weeks now. I refuse to clean it off the door, being immuno-compromised as I am, but I’m monitoring the amount of time it will take the janitors or someone else on staff to take care of it. To me, it’s quite obvious, and perhaps there are a number of other members of staff who are using the washroom and staring at this hand smear just like I am, wondering when someone will take care of it.

This is slightly worse than the used tampon shoved back into a wrapper that sat in the tray of the tampon machine for over two weeks. The abandoned tampon was not so bad because it was inside the part of the machine where you would have to insert your hand to actually touch it. The shit-print is also worse than the mystery pill that sat on the floor in one of the grout lines for three weeks not too long ago. I find it disheartening that our janitors who allegedly clean the washrooms daily went three full weeks without sweeping or mopping the floors in the washroom. Even then I’m not sure if the janitors mopped or if someone who read my blog was motivated to remove the mystery pill. I’m betting on the latter. This time I’m keeping my trap shut at work about the shit-print. We’ll see how long it stays there. I fully expect to run into Golgothan whenever I enter that washroom each day.

On my way out of the washroom, I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror and discovered that my shirt had a tear in it, which was even more obvious than the shit-print on the back of the stall door. I was wearing a sheer, black blouse with a black tank beneath, and the tear was where the sleeve connects to the back of the blouse, exposing my pasty white skin for about an inch-and-a-half. I looked like a She-Hulk in mid-transformation. Someone at Circ was kind enough to locate a sewing kit for me, but it had only white thread. I found myself back in the shit-print bathroom stall, sewing my shirt back together, and then using a Sharpie to color the white thread black. It worked, but I spent the day with my thumb and index finger dead black from the Sharpie ink, appearing as if I’d been fingerprinted. Lovely.

Some days take only a half-hour of participation before you realize that you would have been better off never having gotten out of bed.

Something evil has attacked the computers at our library and they are running so slowly that often the tasks you ask them to do time-out and freeze up the system. Our website had been down, many staff computers were shut down with debilitating viruses, and the public computers are so painfully slow that many claim they are not even worth using. Yet, they were still full all day today, with many cranky patrons complaining about the lack of speed and abundance of unloadable web pages. Welcome to the reference desk!

My first patron almost gagged me. She reeked of cigarettes so intensely, I actually tried to get a look at her hands to see if she was smoking right there at my desk. As if she was motivated to cause me the most discomfort, she also made a point of leaning on my desk to speak as close to my face as was possible without making physical contact. I leaned back, and she leaned in closer. I pushed my chair back and she moved down the desk to an indentation where she could be even nearer to me. Finally I stood up and took two steps away from my side of the desk, which made me a full foot taller than her, too. That distance was the greatest distance between her stanky breath and my nose since she’d walked up to me. I was grateful for my height more than anything at that moment.

What she was asking for kind of amused me, though.

“I need a book on MANIAC depression.” That is not a spelling error. That is what she said.

Without chuckling, I explained that I was searching for bipolar disorder and located a few books to point her to.

“Does it have pictures?”

Pictures?

“Yes, pictures. Nothing specific. Just something that shows what it’s like to be maniac depressed.”

Now I was smiling. But I covered it up by asking whether she was interested in pictures like graphs and tables of statistics or information, or photos of people who have BIPOLAR DISORDER.

“Just whatever. Pictures. Like, a happy face and a sad face. You know?”

I sent her to the Youth Department to find a children’s book on maniac depression. I wondered if it was too advanced for her.

Later I asked Leelu what she thought MANIAC depression was and she responded, “Is that what happens when you run out of people to kill?”

Must be.

My next patron was an older woman who was completely computer illiterate, but wanted to find and print out the operator manual for her lawnmower, which was made in 1950. When I say she was computer illiterate, I mean that she had confidence in using a mouse and seemed to know what she was doing until I asked her to click on something, and then she was lost. Aren’t websites just like books on a screen? You can CLICK on parts of the words and go to OTHER websites?

It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I only had to repeat my instructions to her about three times, the third time sternly, before she followed my instructions.

“Click on the green box that says ‘Manuals’.”

She’d put her cursor on a red box that said “Sitemap”.

“No, the green box that says ‘MANUALS’.”

She’d put her cursor on the yellow box that was an ad.

“No! The GREEN box that says ‘MANUALS’.”

Just as I’d start leaning over her shoulder to point it out, she’d finally do what I said. This is what happened for a full 20 minutes, guiding her through page after page, website after website, until we found the PDF where her manual was available, each time having to repeat very clear directions to her three times. The girl sitting at the computer next to her was giggling each time I repeated something. When the people nearby were starting to glare at the woman, I offered to do the search and print the manual for her myself, but she was determined to have me instruct her thrice, until she got it herself. By the time she printed it out, my throat was sore from the intense repetition, and I’d sprained my eyes by rolling them so much.

It takes a lot to sprain my eyes. They roll all day long.

There was another man sitting at a computer far in the back of the library – not his choosing, but could have been fixed if he’d been in the least bit courteous – who was taking his business calls on his cell phone every five minutes. He was polite enough to leave each time he received a phone call, but the time it took him to secure his computer and walk the length of the building to the lobby sometimes allowed him to seal a deal and hang up before he even got out of our earshot. Perhaps it might not have been so irritating if he wasn’t such a loud talker.

My senses were bleeding by then.

I’m not one to usually complain about larger women wearing skimpy clothes because trampy dress doesn’t hinge on body type to me. However, I had a young woman who was about 5 feet tall, roughly 200 pounds, wearing a skin-tight, black tube top with some wannabe gangsta propaganda all over it, written in gaudy, gold lettering. However, her boobage was too significant to be wandering around in a tube top, so this girl chose to wear a pastel pink bra under it, with the straps and tops of the bra cups protruding from the elastic rim of her tube top. It was downright disturbing. And she kept adjusting her bra, pulling her girls up to an unnatural height on her chest. It was like a train wreck. I couldn’t turn away, but I couldn’t hide my horror.

Not long after this, a man sitting at the computer nearest me started blasting music into his headphones, and for a second I wondered if I was having some kind of flashback to my younger years, when I was riding a sugar high of Pixie Stix and Smarties, because I swear I could hear the song “Centerfold” blasting from nearby. Surely the J. Giles Band has not been inflicted upon us! Who the hell would blast that stupid song 27 years after it was released?! There he was. The pathetic man who spends his days at our library, playing Tetris and listening to bad 80s music. Next on the docket was “Rock and Roll Band” by Boston. For the first time in my life, I trying to think of a place to call where I could be put on hold and listen to tragic hold music. Then I realized the worst hold music I know belongs to my very own library, and given that I can’t call myself and put myself on hold, I had to suffer through some more dreadful flashbacks via the headphones of a man with nothing better to do than torture me.

A man then approached my desk wanting to use our public fax machine. He’d prepaid at Circ as was required, and handed me a receipt showing he had two pages to send through, yet he handed me three pages.

I asked, “Do you have two pages to send, or three?”

He answered, “Well, two, but this one is a cover sheet.”

“Yes, but that’s three pages.”

“Cover pages don’t count.”

“Well, they do to us. It’s a full-page document with writing on the entire length of it. It counts as a page. You’ll have to go back to Circ and pay for the third page, or we can leave the cover sheet off, if it doesn’t matter to you.”

“That’s stupid! It’s just a cover sheet. It shouldn’t count.”

“It's three pages. One. Two. Three. We don’t discriminate based on what the pages have on them.”

“Fine. Send them through. I’ll go pay in a minute.”

I stood there looking at him. I didn’t budge. He didn’t budge either. He wasn’t going to pay and I knew it, so I continued standing there. When it was clear that we were going to have a standoff, I set his three pages on the desk, took a deep breath, and began flipping through a magazine. This caused him to throw his hands in the air in defeat and stomp off to Circ to pay for the third page. When he handed me the receipt, I sent his fax through, but not a moment sooner.

By then I was starting to feel like the patrons had it in for me. I was grinding my teeth more and counting the minutes until my shift ended.

Also, I was spasmodically paranoid that the emergency stitchery I’d done on my shirt was not going to hold, so I would feel compelled to whip my head around and check my back about every five minutes or so.

It was a stressful shift.

When I answered the phone to a man who identified himself as a Hospice nurse for one of our patrons, I expected the interaction to be a smooth one. Hospice nurse, right? That requires patience, tolerance, sympathy, intellect, and people skills.

There I go again assuming and jumping to illogical conclusions.

This man was furious with Circ, who would not allow him to pick up his patient’s interlibrary loan items. They suggested that he place all future holds on his own card so as not to breach any privacy laws protecting the patrons, but he refused. They suggested he put his patient in the homebound delivery program and just have all the items delivered right to the doorstep, but this was undignified and condescending to him because as a Hospice nurse, he was perfectly capable of picking up his patient’s library material. They could make no headway, and in desperation, Circ transferred the angry man to me. Great.

I tried to explain that my hands were even more tied, since all I could do was place holds or transfer him to the person in charge of homebound delivery. I have no power over Circ rules. He yelled his frustration at me and then hung up on me.

Why on earth he would be so insulted about the home delivery program, I don’t know. Who the hell would turn down home delivery? Clearly he was just angry about the Circ rules and wasn’t thinking about his patient’s needs, or he would’ve been grateful for the door-to-door services we offer.

Great nurse there. Pick a principle and fight it, even if it’s to the detriment of your patient.

The rest of my shift was a struggle with a single patron who felt compelled to interrupt and give bad computer instructions to people I was standing next to, giving correct instructions to.

I’d say, “If you right click on the link and choose to open it in a new window, this will allow you to—“

And suddenly Mr. Interrupter would whirl around in his chair and loudly tell my patron, “It has nothing to do with opening new windows. It’s the computers. They’re going too slow. Nobody is doing anything about it. That’s why your link isn’t working.”

After a deep breath I explained, “It’s true, the computers are going very slow today, but your problem doesn’t have to do with speed. The link isn’t loading, and we’re trying to figure out if it’s a pop-up that’s getting killed by the pop-up blocker, or if it’s a dead link. If you right click the link and tell it to open in a new window, we can see.”

She followed my instructions. The new window opened and the error screen announced that it was a dead link.

The next patron I helped wanted to print a PDF, but it wasn’t showing up at the printer.

I started to instruct her, “With PDFs, we have to use the PDF toolbar to print, rather than the IE toolbar. If you click this icon here—“

And the interrupter shouted from three computers away, “The printer here is messed up! It doesn’t matter what toolbar you use, it’s not going to work. You should just print things from home, like I do.”

This kept happening, and finally I got angry and I told him that he was wrong and to please refrain from giving bad computer advice to the patrons. I was trying to help them and he was actually making matters worse. He started to protest, saying our computers were messed up, but I interrupted him and said that the problems people were having were none of his business and he should stop disrupting the library with his outbursts. I think that by reducing his comments and advice to nothing but disruptions and outbursts he was clear that his interruptions weren’t welcome. He was quiet after that, but as he left the library, he stopped at my desk to loudly proclaim our computers to be functioning at their very worst ever.

This almost made me laugh. The worst ever? That’s pretty bad considering I can recall days on end when they were flatly dead. Slow is worse than dead?

However, I explained that we were aware of the slowness and that there was someone working on them behind the scenes as we spoke, but he turned toward the patrons at the computers and said that we CLAIM someone is working on it, but he’d been here all day and it was not improving one bit.

I snottily said, “That’s because it’s not FIXED yet! Hence me saying they’re STILL WORKING ON IT!”

He continued mumbling his complaints as he left.

When my reference shift was over, I chose to leave work early. My jaw hurt from my molars clear up to my earlobes and I could feel my face pulsating. Out of concern for the welfare of all those who crossed my path, I removed myself from the building.

Drowningly: that’s how my day went. And the patrons seemed to sense this and had a feeding frenzy.

I hate days like this.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

2008-09-21T18:35:00.000-07:00

I can sit at the desk for a half-hour flipping through new books, smiling at patrons walking in the door, and nodding when folks comment about the Indian summer, secretly wondering why they’re celebrating the weather by spending the afternoon inside the library, checking their pathetic email and MySpace pages. I surf the news for stories about the most recent psycho in my neighborhood to kill someone so I can see if they have a library card at our library. But most of all, I just reserve out computers that noisy patrons are using so that they cannot get extensions, and also so that I don’t have to confront them about what an asshole they’re being. It’s Sunday, after all. This is my day of giving people breaks. And I choose to passive-aggressively break them from their computer.

Just when I got complacent about the lazy afternoon I was spending at work, two kids walked up to me. The first was looking for information on the Banaue Rice Terraces, which is obscure enough not to have entries in any encyclopedia we own or databases we subscribe to, so I resorted to the evil and distrusted internet for this boy’s research. If his teacher has something against Wikipedia or a few dot-coms, then this boy is going to get a big, fat F on his assignment.

Yet, on the plus side, I learned about the Banaue Rice Terraces, which are fucking fascinating, and I’d love to see them before they are destroyed.

Put the Phillippines on my list, Jeeves. And stop by a gas station so I can pick up some lottery tickets, too, please.

The other boy, who waited semi-patiently, was looking for a recommendation for a good movie. That’s all he gave me to go on. I thought about telling him to watch the DVD I recently watched and loved, Earth: the Biography, but I didn’t figure he’d appreciate that. Finally I got him to share that he was looking for old, scary movies, you know, like Halloween.

Ah, yes. All those old movies are kept in a special vault in the back, where we control the temperature and pH of the environment so that they don’t turn to instant dust in the sunlight. I gave him a list of recommendations and sent him on his way.

In the meantime, the phone had been ringing and I let it go to voice mail. Once the boys were served, I checked the message and wished for some more wild goose chases by pre-teen boys to keep me busy rather than the request from this patron.

“Hi. Um, I need some information about how to get electricity to a building outside my home. Like, how do I run the wiring? Do I have to use plastic or [mumble, mumble]… so if you could just call me back and let me know how to do this, I’d appreciate it. My number is [whatever].”

No name. Just do all my electrical research for me and give me a call back when you have it.

So I called the number.

“Hi, I’m calling from the library, returning…someone’s phone call from a few minutes ago.”

The woman who answered said, “Oh, hello. Let me just put you on hold for a minute and get the person who called you.”

Oooooh, big identity secret! I get it. No names please. I don’t want to be subpoenaed when you blow up your shed!

He finally got on the phone and said, “Hi, I’m the one who called.”

What the hell is with the anonymity? Don’t they know I’m a librarian? Don’t they know I can just look them up by phone number and find out who they are? Don’t they know I have already researched their public records and know how much their house is worth, what their criminal record shows, and I’m currently trying to hack into their medical records? Don’t they know I have LexisNexis connections and I know their life story? Don’t they know that I have already stolen their identity and am currently booking a flight to Indonesia so I can see these Rice Terraces close up?????

Ahem. Anyway.

I started explaining to the caller that we have some older books on electrical codes, some do-it-yourself manuals, and a few other things that will likely cover most his questions, but for local ordinances I have no current information.

I could hear the disappointment in his voice. He was expecting a phone call with step-by-step instructions on how to electrify his backyard porn studio without him having to get up off his recliner. For something this important, particularly when there are wires, codes, laws, and electrical currents involved, you probably shouldn’t rely on a book-y librarian to give you all the information you need on this subject. It always amazes me when a man wants to do things himself, but he wants someone else to do all the digging, prepping and legwork for the projects. Glory whore.

Which is much different from a glory hole, but not by too much, so suddenly I was envisioning him constructing his porn studio with multiple rooms to accommodate all the pervy minions he serves as their Big Daddy.

Without missing a beat, I encouraged him to come into the library and do some of the research in the books I was recommending, and also to call the local village to find out about local ordinances for building ~~porn studios~~ outside structures.

He sighed and said, “I was hoping to avoid having to make a trip over there.”

I apologized and told him I simply couldn’t research his building project for him, but the books were on the shelf if he wanted me to set them aside for him.

He signed deeply again and said not to bother.

I guess building a den of sin takes more work than he anticipated. Involving the local library in this construction was an interesting thought, though. Namelessly, I should add. Perhaps if I’d been extended an invite to the grand opening, I might have been more generous. Alas, it’s in his hands now. Unless it’s somewhere else… nevermind.

About twenty minutes later, I was helping someone with a printing problem and in walks a regular patron of ours, looking quite intense.

He’s one of those holy-rolling, preachy men, who only will watch movies rated G, because PG-ratings these days let downright obscene content and language pass. Once he asked me if there was anything disgusting in the movie Big, with Tom Hanks, and I remembered enjoying that movie immensely (despite the fact that Tom Hanks was the star) and I said it was a sweet, funny movie. Later he came in and scolded me for recommending it, saying it was so offensive and sexual in content that he could not finish the entire movie. This is the man who called about the electrical wiring, who I had, without knowing it was him (because no, I hadn’t researched him and stolen his identity, which I’m starting to think I should have) assumed he was building a smokehouse for a neighborhood sausage-fest. Somehow, it all made sense.

Sunday.

To some this day means something.

To me, it’s just a day when I have to deal with the lunatics all by myself.

Quit Momming Me!

2008-08-26T22:08:00.000-07:00

For some reason, my library employs a lot of moms. I don’t just mean women who have children, but that personality flaw that causes these uterus-active ladies to treat everyone around them like they are parental to us. Thanks, but not only do I have a mom already, I have enough female bosses who are condescending, and I really don’t need people who do not have any authority over me to be treating me like they exist to guide me in the ways of being a responsible person.

One of the moms frequently sends out an inordinate number of emails making announcements about various staff members she deals with. Each email doesn’t just announce something, but it guides us in how to react to this announcement, like we’re all retards who didn’t know we should probably congratulate the recent graduates or wish a fond farewell to the departing employees.

We receive things that are worded like this:

“Today is Barbara-Ann’s last day. She will be off to college for her senior year. Please wish her well in the school year before her shift ends today.”

Maybe the momming brings out the juvenile in me, but my instant reaction is to say, “No. You can’t make me.”

Recently, one of our employees had a baby. A joyous event for her, I’m sure, but pretty much meh for me. I hardly know the woman and babies just don’t interest me at all. In fact, I regard pregnancy as a parasitic infection that results in having to care for the parasite for the remainder of your life. It really baffles me why people celebrate this, but I recognize that I’m fairly unique in my view of how very uninteresting it is when someone has a child, and I try to pretend to care when they’re around. Or I avoid them.

Anyway, there were no fewer than three greeting cards that went around for us to sign, from baby shower to birth, in addition to these patronizing emails announcing that we should sign these cards for our beloved coworker, and wish her the appropriate greetings. Why didn’t she just fill it out for us? Would I be on her shit list if I didn’t sign the card in the way she instructed? What if I signed the card and didn’t congratulate her? What if I accidentally forgot my instructions to congratulate her on her parasite, panicked, and instead wrote “Happy Birthday”? Well, I can only imagine the chastisement I’d get! Clearly more detailed instructions would follow in subsequent emails.

“Monday is Marcus’ birthday. There is a card on my desk for him. Please sign the card with only wishes of a happy birthday and do not deviate from the topic at hand. Do not take up more than three lines or use permanent marker. Do not write in another language because Marcus only speaks English. Wait for the ink to dry before closing the card again. Be respectful. Use proper spelling and grammar. Do not write with letters that would be larger than 24 font if in a document. And make sure you don’t leave any dirt or grease stains on the card of envelope. Thank you for following instructions to the letter.”

Why do these women feel compelled to give us instructions on how to be human? Are we that animalistic that they can’t possibly leave it up to our uncivilized tendencies to address important events with the right words? What the hell do these moms say about us behind our backs?

“Did you hear what so-and-so said to Mrs. Smith yesterday?”

“No, what?”

“So-and-so helped Mrs. Smith print something out, and when Mrs. Smith thanked her, instead of saying ‘you’re welcome’, she said, ‘no problem.’ How rude is that?!”

“Oh yeah? Well, I heard you-know-who today refer to a couple at a computer as ‘you guys’, and it was a man AND a woman. She called them ‘you GUYS!’ And worst of all, you should have SEEN her posture! She might as well have had a hunchback!”

“Unbelievable. Someone needs to teach these people about proper work etiquette.”

“Let’s do it! If I can potty-train my stubborn toddler, I can teach these people how to use fewer colloquialisms and actually make us proud.”

“It’s a daunting challenge. But if my teenager ever talked the way some of my coworkers do, I’d sent him right to military school.”

“But it has to be subtle, so they don’t complain. Let’s give them polite instructions in emails whenever we address something.”

“Yes, we need to guide them without it being too overt. Invite them to participate in something so they feel included, but then tell them exactly what’s expected of them, so they know how to behave.”

“Exactly. They can’t be trusted on their own at this point.”

I just want to gather up these moms and strangle them. While using bad posture. And speaking in slang. And wearing dirty underwear.

It Wasn't Even a Monday

2008-08-21T21:08:00.000-07:00

She said to me, “Aw, you don’t look pretty today. Too bad.”

Yes, that was my greeting from what I would ordinarily have considered a friendly patron.

I shouldn’t be so offended because this comes on the heels of her making such a huge deal about how pretty she said I looked the other day, when I was in a fairy costume for a program. Evidently, I should always have pink flowers in my hair, a low-cut shirt and a glittery skirt on, because otherwise the disparity compels her to tell me I’m not pretty today.

Pshaw, she should’ve seen me when I woke up this morning.

Phone Misuse

2008-08-19T21:58:00.000-07:00

A woman approached my desk and I could tell right away that she was hard of hearing. Aside from her audio assault, she required me to nearly scream back at her when I responded. These encounters drive me nuts because I hate to shout in a quiet and empty library.

She roared, “I HAVE A CALL ON MY CALLER ID FROM THE LIBRARY, BUT I’M NOT SURE WHY ANYONE CALLED ME. THE GIRL AT THE OTHER DESK SAID I DON’T HAVE ANY HOLDS IN. DO YOU KNOW WHY THEY CALLED ME?”

I answered, “We don’t usually—“

She pushed, “WHAT?!?”

I tried again, “WE DON’T USUALLY CALL PATRONS FROM THIS DESK UNLESS YOU’RE EXPECTING US TO CALL YOU WITH AN ANSWER TO A QUESTION. WERE YOU EXPECTING A CALL FROM US?”

She yelled, “I ORDERED A BOOK, BUT THEY SAY IT’S NOT IN YET. I DON’T KNOW WHY ANYONE WOULD CALL ME.”

I said, “Was there a message?”

She hollered, “WHAT?!?”

“WAS THERE A MESSAGE?”

“YES. BUT I DIDN’T CHECK IT. DO YOU THINK I SHOULD CHECK IT?”

No, ma’am, I really think it’s probably quite smart that you saw the Caller ID register a call from the library, so you got into your car, drove over, and began bellowing at every staff member you encountered about this mystery call, because there’s no better way of getting to the bottom of a Caller ID call than confronting the 50 people who might have placed that call from the public library in your neighborhood. And really, since we all don’t work at the same time, you should probably hang around and scream at each person from each shift, for at least the next few days, if not weeks, until you’ve loudly interviewed all the staff and get to the bottom of this. Voice mail exists for people who aren’t into thorough investigating like you, ma’am. Someone with as much attention to detail as yourself should be rewarded with a live and very vociferous conversation about the very same thing they already left on your voice mail. Why should you listen to a message when you can interrogate the library staff and totally disturb the entire building? Please, do us all a favor and just deactivate the voice mail so that we may have the pleasure of these intelligent and practical encounters. Please.

Once the screaming lady checked her voice mail and found out that the message was regarding something she ordered that we were unable to obtain for her, she smiled and loudly announced she had her answer and could leave now.

Bummer. I was starting to hope I’d have to yell at her all afternoon and pretend not to be irritated with her inability to use her head.

Then I was greeted with one of my least favorite patrons, Bertha. Bertha is one of those women who is sizable as well as malicious, which makes her quite intimidating and difficult to get rid of. Last week she infuriated a coworkers who is probably one of the most unflappable of our staff, all because Bertha saw her helping another patron, walked right up to her, interrupted her, and asked her to find something for her. She was in the middle of speaking, and Bertha touched her and started talking over her, to stop her so she’d answer her question instead. Well, it didn’t work, and she told Bertha to wait until she was done. Bertha was so offended that she wasn’t helped immediately, that she stood next to her with her arms crossed over he chest, sighing and shifting her weight impatiently. Bertha is not someone who takes no for an answer.

My first encounter with Bertha almost resulted in having to call the police because she would not accept that her card had fines on it and wasn’t usable until she cleared up her bills. She had her two very sizable and malicious sons with her, and the three of them were leaning on my desk, yelling at me, calling me names, telling me I was too stupid to be of any use to anyone. She was asked to leave and she had a few choice words to shout as she walked out, too.

I’m no fan of hers.

So, when she approached my desk today, I knew I was probably going to need backup.

Bertha said, “Honey, I need a phone. Where can I use a phone?”

I recommended the pay phone in the lobby, but Bertha swore she hadn’t a penny to use it. Then I suggested she make a collect phone call.

She got animated and said, “Look, I don’t have a cell phone or any money to call anyone, but I just got this email from someone about a job, and I need to call about this job so I can work! Okay? Do you understand how important this is? I can’t be calling a future boss collect! Who would hire me?”

I told her I understood, but that the telephone at my desk was strictly for library staff to use, and only in an emergency could someone else use it.

Bertha insisted, “This is an emergency! I need a job!”

I apologized and said that it was actually a personal call, not an emergency, and I couldn’t let people use my phone for their personal calls. I asked if she had a friend, family member, neighbor, or anyone who had a phone she could use, and she insisted that she had to make this phone call right that minute or risk losing this job opportunity.

This is when the battle in my head began.

Would I deny this phone use to anyone else, or is it because it’s Bertha that I’m so staunchly opposed to letting her use it?

Would it do me more good to let her use the phone and go away than to deny it and fight with her, possibly having to bring in someone else who might just let her use the phone and make me look like a vulvahead?

Am I overstepping myself and trying to teach her some kind of lesson about her expectations of limitless services offered by the library and its staff?

Would someone else let her use the phone for this reason?

When I broke it down, I figured there was SOMEONE on staff who would likely agree to let her make the phone call, so it might as well be me. And that’s what did it, surprisingly: the refusal to be overridden by someone who is a spineless pushover. So, dummy that I am, I let myself be the biggest pushover because I didn’t want to be the biggest bitch.

I sternly cautioned, “I’m going to let you do it this time, and only this time, and the call must be very brief. Don’t expect anyone else on staff to ever do anything like this for you, either, because I guarantee it won’t happen.”

She thanked me and I dialed her number.

Then I sat there and listened to a 3-minute job interview over the phone, which involved Bertha telling this man on the phone, who she repeatedly called “Honey”, “Sweetie” and “Dear,” what a wonderful worker she is. She talked up all her extensive office experience and people skills, which caused me to have to turn my back quickly so as not to laugh loudly enough for her interviewer to hear. She didn’t even set up a real interview with the man. It seemed she had overreacted to the email and called right away to thank him for responding to her. He must have said he’d contact her to set up an interview, and she assured him that the phone number she provided belonged to her nephew, but that he would relay any message to her quickly. She thanked him and called him a pet name again.

As she was ending the phone call, she said, “I really look forward to hearing from you. I think it would be so wonderful to work at O’Hare Airport and I hope you call soon.”

Yeah, she’s exactly the type of person we need at O’Hare. The unfriendly skies are about to get unfriendlier, I fear. Between the craziness of all the reports of family members who PICK UP or DROP OFF a traveler to be required to have all of their proper immigration papers on them just for stepping into the airport itself, and ridiculous rules about nail clippers and three ounces of fluid, with constant flashing signs about the terrorism alert levels being high, why the hell not hire Bertha to work there too? It’s not like traveling by plane is a pleasant experience anyway. Why not just require passengers to hack off an appendage so that they are duly miserable during their flight? Break a rib, voluntarily sodomize yourself with a rolled up newspaper, or deal with Bertha in some capacity on your way to your destination – it’s all the same. Bertha could actually cut out some body fluid cleanup by just inflicting herself on people, and then more people would hate to fly. That sounds like a fabulous idea. That’s what the airlines are trying to do, right? Yeah, Bertha will fit right in.

In a year, Chicago will be the Leader of Staycations.

Saturday, Bloody Saturday

2008-08-17T09:56:00.000-07:00

It was one of those Saturdays when the library could have run itself. Maybe 40 patrons wandered in and out of the building throughout the day, but only five approached a staff member for help, while the rest were self-sufficient. Eight hours of sitting in an uncomfortable chair, looking up enthusiastically at each and every face that approached the desk, only to greeted with a smile as everyone rounded toward the public computers or found their own material. It was suitably a day when I worried about job security and the obsolescence of my position. On top of that, there were two of us sitting there for those eight hours, trying very hard to stay awake.

It’s days like this that I think the little things are going to make me lose my mind.

One of the first people through the door that morning was a young man of about 19 who frequently parks himself in front of a public computer for most of the day, and it was no different yesterday. However, either he had a cold or ragweed season has officially plunged him into runny-nose misery, because the silence of a Saturday morning library was interrupted every five seconds by his thick, mucus-y sniffling. He was using the back of his own hand to wipe snot from his nose at regular intervals, after a handful of viscous sniffles, and the chorus of nasal activity was starting to develop a pattern. This went on for an hour and a half before I had to excuse myself from the desk to escape the maddening desire to bean him with a box of Kleenex.

I strolled out to the circulation desk and told my tale of sniffly woes to the clerks, who trumped me straight away, as usual.

A woman had just walked up to one of the clerks with her library card in her mouth, and then plucked the contaminated device from her dark, wet, germ-hole to hand to the clerk.

This is so common an occurrence that each clerk has his/her their own way of dealing with it. Some try hard to touch the card only where it wasn’t touched by the mouth, and others will just suggest the patron set the card down on the desk, whereupon any library card number can be read and typed into the computer by hand. The clerk who received the mouth card yesterday morning was so sick of people doing this to her that she reached around behind her and grabbed a tissue, which she used to hold the card.

The patron was not embarrassed by the position she put the clerk in -- she was actually offended that the clerk would refuse to touch her wet card.

“What are you doing that for?” she demanded.

The clerk replied, “Well, you had it in your mouth, and I didn’t really want to touch it.”

The indignant patron then shocked everyone by saying, “So what? I’m just going to put it into my wallet and pull it back out next week, and you think it’s going to get clean between now and then? No. I’m going to hand it to you, and it will still have been in my mouth a few days earlier, and you think you’re going to be any safer if you didn’t see me put it in there?”

These are the patrons you wish to put some kind of flag on their accounts so that others will know to put on biohazard suits before dealing with them, but the rub is that you have to touch and scan their cards before you will reach the flag on the account.

No one knew quite what to say to this rude patron, who happened to be right, because we all know disgusting people are, with little or no regard for the rest of the world.

After lunch, two of our regulars paid us a visit. They are the quintessential embodiment of what you would picture if siblings had sex and produced offspring. 21-year-old twin girls, with some mental, physical and maturity handicaps, dirt poor, uncouth, uneducated, unwashed, and unaware that we call them The Beasts.

They asked for two computers, and because they owe the library so much in fines, I had to put them on the temporary computers five feet from the reference desk. With so few other patrons in the building, they were able to use these computers for about two hours before we finally booted them off. What caused us to boot them off had nothing to do with demand for the machines, either.

Somehow, they always have money for snacks, and they bring bags of candy and potato chips, along with their preferred soda brand out to the computers. The twin nearest our desk was grazing steadily from the moment she arrived, and each time she took a swig of her pop, she let out this manly, vulgar belch, and then promptly said, “Excuse me.” It was as if she’d given herself license to behave in any ill-mannered way in public, as long as she excused herself afterward. In a library where patrons were scarce and the loudest noise we could hear was the hum of the air conditioning, the frequent burping was starting to get on my nerves.

I have a relatively short fuse when it comes to the little things, but I can deal with a huge crisis in a state of calm and clear-headedness, and never worry I’m going to have a meltdown. The Beasts were by no means a crisis, but I could feel my tension building as I looked around for some office supplies I could maim them with.

My partner at the desk, who sat closer to them than I did, sent me a quick email stating that he’d had enough of them, that he found their behavior to be so fucking disgusting that he was kicking them off the computers. I wrote back and thanked him for acting, explaining that I was worried they were only driving me nuts and no one else. He jotted an email back that said he could smell the odor every time Beast #1 burped, and it was making him sick.

With that, he put reserves on their computers that would time-out their sessions in just a few minutes, and he announced he had to step away from the desk for a few minutes. I told him to take his time, and then proceeded to turn on the fan, because the most recent burp’s odor was wafting my way now.
The Beasts were oblivious to the offense they caused, and when their computers ran out of time, they simply left.

I swear, for the remainder of the day I still smelled the stench of their post-chewed food, mixed with gastric juice, belched up and shared with the world.

Saturdays like these are uncommon, and given that school starts on Monday, I’m assuming we won’t see another for about ten months.

Good riddance!

You Can Smell the School Year Starting Soon

2008-08-11T21:22:00.000-07:00

Last week I found a 7-year-old using one of the unfiltered computers in the adult department.

I approached him and said, “Hi there. Can I ask you a question? How old are you?”

He said, “Seven.”

I shook my head knowingly and said, “I’m sorry, but you have to be 14 to use the computers here. You can use the computers in the youth area, though, even if you don’t have a library card with you.”

He said, “Aw hell! I can’t just use this computer?”

“No, sorry. When you’re 14 you can.”

“Shiiiiiiiiiit.”

This was when I noticed he had a tattoo. Seriously, a big black anchor tattooed on his neck. It started at the bottom of his neck, spread out down across his collarbones, and the tip dipped down into his little-boy chest. This was no lick-on tattoo, nor was it a sketch with a Sharpie. It was perfect, and a professional did it, and it actually was drawn so that the tiny lumps of his collarbones didn’t distort the image. I was in disbelief: this boy had a fucking tattoo on his neck, and on top of that, he used language as bad as my own.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that he was with a group of teens and not a parent. The teens were so irritating to me that I was considering kicking them out, even though they hadn’t done anything truly disruptive or dangerous. One girl had a horrible habit of laughing in this explosive way. It seemed she’d start off biting her lips to try to keep from making the outburst, but it would burst out anyway, and sound like BUH-haaaaaaaaaaah! Each time she did it, I asked her to keep her voice down and she would look right at me and deny doing it, even though I watched her do it. And they were runners. Excitable kids who felt the need to constantly run from one to the other, and when I told them to walk, they’d slow down to a walk, and on the return, would be sprinting past again. It was nothing overtly belligerent, just extremely irritating, and I could feel my blood pressure rising.

Not long after I announced to my partner that I was about to throw the group out, they started screaming threats to fight with another group of teens, who were quietly sitting at a computer, holding a baby. My partner called the police and I made sure the obnoxious group with the tattooed little boy left the building and did not return.

Teens with babies in the library. Other teens with a younger sibling, tattooed on his neck. Fights. Police. And it’s still summer vacation.

How do you prevent the school year from starting?

Scissor Thief

2008-08-03T20:25:00.000-07:00

There are days when people rub me wrong, for reasons that aren’t necessarily in some kind of written etiquette guide.

For instance, recently I was at the reference desk cutting out images for a display, and a man walked past the desk, saw me using the scissors, and immediately asked if he could use them.

Does he not see that I’m in the middle of using them? No, he sees. Does he think that I’m supposed to stop mid-cut and hand him my scissors because he’s suddenly struck by the idea that he needs to borrow them for something he wasn’t even approaching me for? Yep.

This caused me to freeze and stare at him, eyes wide, scissors open and in the middle of splaying a sheet of paper. My hesitation caused him to reach across the desk, without waiting for me to respond by handing him the very utensils I was in the middle of using, without question. If my partner at the desk hadn’t reached into the drawer to offer up a different pair of scissors, I firmly believe this man would have peeled my fingers off the handle and taken the instrument from me, with me sitting there silently, slack-jawed, unable to react.

Even children know to ask if they can borrow something when I’m finished using them, or ask if I have a spare pair of scissors. This makes me wonder just how far people will go with their I-come-first demands from us.

Would they ask for the glasses off my face if their pair broke and they needed to see something?

If they spilled something on their shirt, would they ask for mine?

Could I expect someone to peel the Band-aid off my finger to place on their own in the event that they receive a papercut?

These might sound extreme, even creepy, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

I’ve had complete strangers ask if they can have a drink from my bottle of pop because they’re thirsty, or ask me for money, or for a ride somewhere. They have no qualms about violating my personal space or asking for inappropriate favors or services. Not just that, but they have actually asked me to not only break rules for them, but commit what I would consider a crime by pretending I found something on the shelf so I can waive their fines, or asking if I’d give them an item and pretend like it was damaged enough to withdraw it and give it away. They frequently ask if they can just copy a cassette or CD from another library’s set, to replace the piece they lost from an audiobook. We’re not talking about the people who take CDs home just to burn them, but people who are trying to get out of paying for damage by illegally making copies to cover it up. As if no one would notice the solitary, silver Memorex CD among eight others, with human scrawl declaring it part of the set. Why not? More than once we’ve received torn books returned to us with DUCT TAPE holding the pages together, as if this was some kind of reasonable way to mend a book without us noticing.

Just last week one of the clerks had a patron screaming at her for so long that she ended up in tears because this patron insisted vehemently that she returned an audiobook. Everyone knew she didn’t because she had so often used this tactic before, and then found the item she swore she returned, and had to fess up and pay her fine. So when the woman came into the library a few days later and was visibly hiding something and looking around suspiciously, one of the clerks followed her out to the stacks, where she was witnessed putting an audiobook onto the shelf. The clerk could see it was the very audiobook that had caused such a ruckus just a few days before, and she swiped it back off the shelf to confront the patron. The woman had scurried off to the circulation desk to demand someone check the shelves again, but the cynical clerk rounded the corner with the audiobook in hand, quick to confront her about the deception. Even though she’d been followed and someone witnessed her putting the item on the shelf, she stood there denying it, accusing the clerk of waiting for her to come in again so they could frame her like this. It’s scary what people will say and do to our employees to avoid responsibility. If three people hadn’t been involved in watching her, with one following her, I wonder if management might have actually believed this patron.

Another woman claimed that the fines on her account were not her own, but those of her bad twin sister who fraudulently used her card.

At one point last week, there was a mother and adult daughter pair who came into the library claiming they’d never lived in the area and wanted to obtain new library cards. A quick search turned up records on them from a few years earlier, with the daughter owing over $80 and the mother owing $30. Due to the hefty amount, every effort was made to verify that these were in fact the same people. The birthdays matched, the parent name in the daughter’s account matched, and the names matched, down to the unusual spelling. One of the pair had a mugshot still in the system from her last card, and the picture even matched. Still this pair claimed to have never lived in the area and to not owe anything on existing accounts. For reasons that were unclear, this pair put up such a huge fuss, screaming, swearing, demanding management, and totally disrupting the entire building, yet no one asked them to leave. They eventually left on their own, only to return shortly thereafter with a police officer. The officer wasn’t quite sure why his presence was required, and in no uncertain terms told the women that he had no authority over our records and alleged library fines, but his presence was still a bit comforting to the staff, who thought these women were nuts. For even more elusive reasons, they issued a new card to the mother only, and this pair then checked out a heap of material. Later, when the manager had all the information, she barred the new account laid down the law about these two being responsible for their previous fines.

While all these assaults are clearly serious signs of something being wrong with mankind, I do believe the man who was ready to pry my scissors out of my hand for his own personal use is somehow a greater offense. Screaming, shouting and lying are almost more normal and expected than someone who would take the very item out of your hand, without your approval. I’m not quite sure why, but that’s one of the most shocking and offensive things I’ve experienced in the library. More so than the poo. More so than the stalkers. And more so than raving lunatics.

Thankfully my partner was there to rescue us both by providing this man with his own scissors to use.

He might not have tried this if he knew about all the deaths I’ve plotted with office supplies.

Skanky Fungal is Not So Fun

2008-07-21T20:50:00.000-07:00

At my library, when someone asks you if you noticed “that skanky girl”, you have to wait, because there must be more information to accompany that, otherwise the possibilities are endless.

It could’ve been the African American girl who used to be pretty until she hit puberty, and now she wears shorts that go straight up her rectum. It must take a while to wedge the denim in there, but she is devoted. She also has a relatively small chest compared with her larger hips, but this does not stop her from walking with her back so arched that she does a better job of pushing her ribs out where her boobies are lacking. I bet her back aches by the end of the day. Today she had on a purple T-shirt that was so small, both vertically and horizontally, that I suspected she stole the shirt from a baby sister. (Emphasis on the baby.) I’m not even going to talk about all the lavender, glitter makeup.

Or it could’ve been the young woman in the pink, rhinestone-studded T-shirt, which, thankfully, was longer than the purple T-shirt of the other girl. “Thankfully” because her jeans were so tight and hung so low, that her muffin-top turned into a muffin-landslide. She had muffin overflowing in places I didn’t know muffins grew. I’m telling you, these pants were tight. I noticed her because she had about 30 keychains on the spiked belt that seemed to facilitate the valiant attempt to keep these pants on her body. They were not built for her. They were not built for someone 30 pounds lighter than her (and she wasn’t overweight). They were built for someone probably 8 years younger than her. She was a prime example of why stretch denim should be outlawed. This fabric does not make it okay to buy clothes six sizes too small.

Or it could have been the motherly woman with a tank top that was far too large, over a bra that was far too small. Or maybe the pre-teen girl with the summer dress that just barely clears her butt cheeks. How young is too young to wear thong underwear, by the way?

So, when my coworker approached me and asked, “Did you see that skanky girl earlier? The one with the pink T-shirt and the spiked belt?” I knew which skanky girl she was talking about.

Unfortunately, the good news ended there.

My coworker continued, “Did you see the ringworm sores all over her arms?”

I made a noise that started off as a scream, which I tried to mute into a gasp, then the air got caught in my intake valve caused me to choke, and the sound resembled that which a squeaky screen door makes when it’s flung open and allowed to slam. Not pretty. That alone could’ve killed me.

My incredulity ruled and I began grilling her about what the sores looked like and if she was familiar enough with ringworm to confidently identify the markings. She described them perfectly.

DAMMIT! We’ve been fungied!

When I was a young lass, my mom contracted ringworm while visiting a friend, who had just bought a new Doberman from a puppy breeder. Clearly this was not a good breeder because the dog was diagnosed with ringworm the very next day, and my mother developed a case so bad that the fungus is still in her, rendering her feet unsuitable for public display, and her big toenail had to be permanently removed. Ringworm is something that has long caused suffering for my mom, and I spent months having to check my body for the sores and avoid contact with my mom.

I do not like ringworm. Ringworm is bad. It is creepy. It is disgusting. It gave me the heebie-jeebies so bad that I could hardly sit still.

My coworker elaborated that there were many sores on this woman’s arms, and she was scratching them like mad when she was speaking with her.

Quickly we did a mental regression to try to remember where we’d seen her, what we thought she might have touched, and then set about to disinfect the area. With gloves, wet wipes and Lysol in hand (not knowing if any of that would work on ringworm), we attacked the OPACs, the doors, the counters and anything else she might have casually touched while she browsed in our library for about an hour. Thankfully, she wasn’t able to get online because she owed too much in fines (which she attributed to her “bad twin”, I kid you not), so we didn’t have to evacuate the computer area. What she was doing in the library for so long, we don’t know. She couldn’t check anything out, either. Clearly, she was just infecting things. Lots of things. Things I don’t even want to know about.

At the end of the night, I had to pee so bad that it actually hurt, and I announced to my desk partner that I’d be right back.

She shouted to me, “You might want to wipe the bathroom down before you go in there.”

OH SHIT! Ringworm Girl might have used the bathroom on her way out! I considered holding it until I got home or running all the way to the staff lounge, but my bladder would not wait or tolerate bounding down stairs. I grabbed a handful of wet wipes and wiped down every surface before I touched it, including the toilet seat and bowl, just in case my clothes brushed them. I was so thoroughly grossed out about cleaning the bathroom, which is notorious for being the recipient of biological graffiti, that I actually held my breath, figuring the rest of my body was thoroughly cootified when I stirred up the germs, that I would not inhale any of the newly launched airborne particles.

When I got out, I said to my partner, “I don’t know if Ringworm Girl used the bathroom, but I think I just came into contact with about 1,000 more germs by cleaning the bathroom, that are probably 1,000 times more dangerous. I should have just peed my pants.”

Sometimes it’s better when you don’t know and don’t take measures to avoid things. Swerving to avoid an accident can lead to bigger accidents.

Ringworm: it’s not the worst thing lurking in the library.

It's My Library & I'll Cry If I Want To

2008-07-16T22:10:00.000-07:00

A young couple and their baby have become new and frequent users of our library, which ordinarily would not necessitate a blog post, but they are no ordinary family.

The young couple initially came into the library with the baby in a carrier, and they sat in a remote corner while they each read their books. This made the couple happy. This did not make the baby happy. The tiny baby cried pretty much nonstop for three hours. I don’t know babies – they are creatures I avoid – but this one could not have been a full year old. Each time I walked past the couple, I eyed them disapprovingly, hoping they’d take the hint and try to do something with the baby. It seemed that by the time my patience and tolerance ran out, they inevitably were packing up to leave. This happened a couple times when, on their exit, the mother approached me with all smiles and quietly asked me if it was possible to use one of the tutor rooms the next time they came in, so that the crying baby wouldn’t disturb as many people.

There was a huge part of me that wanted to ask, “Why don’t you actually DO SOMETHING about the crying baby, like take care of it, rather than hide in a closed room?” Alas, I did not. I simply pointed her to the proper authorities who could give her information about the tutor room.

This week they returned. They returned and were locked away in the tutor room, which may seem to be a soundproof room, but it is made of glass and drywall, so it merely muffles the sound slightly.

Slightly.

I walked past the room, looking in glaringly, and the parents sat there in the dark, reading their books, ignoring the crying baby.

A while later, after I decided the crying had to stop or they had to leave, I was going to go back and say something to them, but a coworker approached my desk with a question. As I answered her question, the couple and their now quiet baby passed my desk, and when they were out of eyeshot, I rolled my eyes at my coworker. She looked at the couple and then looked back at me knowingly.

“What? Were there books on the kid’s head?” she asked.

“WHAT?!” I wasn’t even quiet, I just yelled it right at the reference desk. What the heck did she mean?

“Well, they came to the check-out desk the other day with the baby in the carrier and they set books and movies all over the baby in the carrier, so they wouldn’t have to hold the books separate from the baby. I didn’t even know there was a baby in there until they loaded all the books and DVDs. She had like three DVDs on her head!”

I demanded, “Are you serious?”

She concurred. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Why we offer computer classes, when these patrons have lived this long without computers and will continue to live without them, yet we get ignorant, young parents who come into the library and have NO CLUE how to be parents, and clearly the most important lessons we could offer our community have more to do with life lessons than cyber lessons. While we’re at it, some classes in common courtesy and how to drive would be useful to our community as well. Perhaps a seminar on gratitude and how to wipe your ass after you use the toilet might be fortuitous.

Yet, I can’t get so high and mighty without mentioning that I helped one of our circ clerks the other day, who needed to scan a few pictures and email them to her daughter. This is a woman who has a computer at home, uses a computer all day at work, communicates with our Outlook email as much as the rest of us, but has no clue what the Internet is all about. Once she had scanned her photos, I told her to go to her email account and I’d show her how to send an attachment. She opened an Explorer window and then started typing the address in the address bar, only instead of typing “yahoo.com”, she typed her entire email address in the address bar. Error. I suggested she first go to Yahoo.com and then sign into her account. She had no idea what I was telling her to do. I showed her and typed it in myself, bringing me to Yahoo’s homepage, and she still had no idea what to do from there. Then she had no idea what her password was. I asked how often she uses her home email and she admitted it was only once in a while, and she just saved all her passwords on her computer so that she didn’t have to remember anything.

So, I suppose if we’re going to start teaching people and playing holier-than-thou, we should probably make sure we have equipped ourselves first with all the skills we hope to offer the public. If everyone on staff passes the Wipe Your Ass class, we’ll move on to the How To Send Email class. I’m wondering if we have more than two people on staff qualified to contribute to a How To Behave With Your Baby In Public class.

What a Day!

2008-07-10T00:08:00.000-07:00

It was one of those days.

I took a phone call from a man who was looking for travel videos, specifically DVDs, on obscure National Parks. Not just a DVD about national parks that include some of these lesser-known parks, but he wanted a movie that was devoted to each park, and it had to be on DVD. Not surprisingly, there are none available on the parks he was requesting. One had a VHS movie in some far-away library that I could have requested, but he refused the obsolete media. Finally, he expanded his interests to include some areas that are actually a little more popular, and there were libraries in the area, which could readily loan the videos to us.

“All I need is your library card number and I’ll process the hold for you,” I stated.

He stammered, “OK, let me find it. Um, it’s in my wallet, I think. Uh, hang on.”

After much ruckus, he got frustrated and blurted out, “You know, I’m not sure where my card is, but my wife is on the library board. She’s actually the president!”

Aaaaaaaaaaand I’m supposed to care about that, why? Perhaps congratulate you? Oh, wait a minute! The president’s husband? Isn’t the president of our library board the woman who donated a free facial wax for anyone who signed up for a new library card during National Library Card Month? Uh-huh. She’s a winner. I have a friend who is also on the library board, and I do believe she has described your wife, sir, as self-important, and one of the many members of the board who routinely does not read any of the board packet material ahead of time, which is part of her damn job as a trustee, and she regularly shows up to meetings completely unprepared and ignorant of the topics on the agenda. Oh yes, I’m familiar with her. The woman who volunteers two mere hours a month to use her lack of knowledge about how to run a library to make decisions that run our library. Yes, I do know of her, sir, and if you’re going to name-drop with me, you really should pick someone who might positively reflect upon you.

If only you were married to Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears. THEN I might look up your card number for you. HOWEVER, I would probably *accidentally* not place the travel videos on hold, but maybe some self-help books. That would make me feel better about the entire situation, sir, but as it stands, you telling me you’re married to the board president isn’t doing a damn thing for you.

“Sorry, but I really do need that card NUMBER to process the hold,” I said.

Eventually he found it, and much to my extreme pleasure, it was blocked with a nasty message that he had to see Circulation about a problem with his account. Oh yeah!

You see, the only thing worse than a self-important board member who expects special service because she is part of the team who doesn’t want to give us COLA raises each year, is some idiot spouse of a self-important board member, who has NOTHING to do with our library, yet expects some sort of in-law special services because he married a woman who passes policies for our library, that actually contradict the ALA’s philosophies of providing access to information without censorship.

So, about 30 minutes later, there was a tiny, scruffy-faced man with a buzz cut standing before me, and all I could think about was that his entire head was covered in stubble. Strange.

He identified himself as the caller from before, needing the travel videos.

OH! Yeah, the board-president-in-law! Right!

As irritated as I was to now have his disheveled little self standing before me, I found myself in a compromising situation. In the middle of speaking with him about what video to order now that his account had been cleared, a one-eyed man wandered over to my desk and interrupted us.

He wasn’t really one-eyed, but he had one eye that couldn’t possibly have any vision because the entire iris and pupil were covered in a cloudy film. I looked into his “good” eye, sympathizing with his ailment but not welcoming his rude interruption.

He said, “Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me! I need help with my computer!”

I froze, apologized with irritation to the board-president-in-law, and asked the one-eyed man what he needed.

“I need a new computer! Mine is going too slow. The page won’t load and I need to fill something out online today!” He was a little over 6 feet tall, thin, totally unkempt, and a little intoxicated.

“Well, if the website is going slow, I can’t speed anything up. Every computer runs off the same network, so if it’s slow at one computer, it’s going to be slow at the others. Maybe it’s the website that’s slow or overloaded with visitors,” I suggested.

“No, it can’t be! I need another computer!” he demanded.

I took a deep breath and told him that I would help him with his computer problem when I was finished with the patron who was ahead of him. The one-eyed man sighed and started pacing clumsily nearby, while the board-president-in-law seemed pleased that I made this man wait his turn, as if I somehow defended him and his imperative travel movie needs.

It’s a very strange feeling to hate a man who is name-dropping to get the rules bent to his needs, and then find myself longing to be back helping him because another patron comes along who irritates me more. And in the process of doing the right thing and triaging the situation, I somehow make the self-important bastard I don’t like very much feel even more self-important, while making the disruptive guy wait, which makes his disruptive behavior continue.

Some days my job pains me.

When my shift ended, I took a jog to the washroom for a quick bladder dump. I went into the first stall and found dark yellow poo staining the toilet seat. It looked dry and hard, not fresh, and I wondered how many people had touched this seat covered with poo and not known they were wiping someone else’s intestinal bacteria on their bum. Backing out of the stall, I opted to use the second one. There I found more copious amounts of dark yellow poo on this toilet seat. Someone shat upon both toilet seats in the washroom! What the hell kind of maniac would do something like that?

While I know that we are expected to clean up such messes when we find them, I was only there to pee quickly before going to lunch, and I feared that if I had to chisel dried poo off of two toilet seats, I’d also be cleaning up my own vomit, and additionally have absolutely no appetite, thereby wasting the 30 minutes I was going to get docked for lunch regardless of what I did or didn’t eat. It seemed unfair and a physical request that exceeds reasonable expectations of this employee.

The responsible thing would have been to report it to another staff member, who might find someone with a stronger constitution to do the clean-up. Being the irresponsible twit that I am, I decided to wash my hands and go to lunch. When I returned, I’d warn the people on staff who I like about the poo-encrusted toilet seats so that they too may avoid the liability issue of She Who Finds It, Cleans It. If you never found it, you can’t be expected to clean it.

The remainder of the evening I spent sitting cross-legged and trying not to stand up for any length of time. Holding your pee for an entire day is not easy. Thankfully, our patrons aren’t remotely funny or there might have been an accident I couldn’t avoid taking responsibility for.

It was reported later, by another librarian, that a man was sitting at a public computer, looking at softcore porn and fondling himself. Although he wasn’t exposing his naughty bits, he was definitely getting quite friendly with them through his jeans. A patron saw him and reported it. As it turns out, this fondler is a patron who is a frequent visitor at our library, and he is clearly suffering from some degree of retardation, which is easily ascertained in the briefest of conversations with him, so it’s a bit difficult to make him feel like a humiliated pervert and drive him out with our moral whip and steed, decrying him as a social leper we have no need of serving. Not that I’ve ever done such a thing, but others have. My point is that when you have someone with such severe disabilities, it is difficult to figure out what kind of talk you should have with him about the inappropriate behavior. Precisely how it was handled, I don’t know. Yet, I thank my lucky stars that I only had to deal with the board-president-in-law, the one-eyed computer-user, and the poo-encrusted toilet seats.

I’m never sure whether to feel overwhelmed by the relief that my freaks didn’t equal the freakitude others had to deal with, or more disappointed for the fate of mankind, given the sampling of members of the general public I crossed paths with. My glass is neither half-full or half-empty. It’s just a glass with a gaping hole in it, and the liquid is draining constantly.

Run. As Fast As You Can.

2008-07-01T19:47:00.000-07:00

Today there was some sort of cosmic conspiracy that resulted in huge amounts of interference from forces greater than me, coming together to create a shift at the reference desk that will go down in history as Freak Fest, 2008.

Aside from the fax machine having repeated strokes and refusing to do its job, computers were freezing into a white screen more frequently than I could get to them for a reboot. Eventually I just announced to our patrons that if their computer froze, they could hard boot them down on their own. Files weren’t accessible one second, and then they were. Some documents successfully made it to the network printers while others were lost in oblivion. Fortunately, the patrons did not rise up and decide to lynch me; they felt sorry for me and did their best to try to fix their own problems.

Like I said, this was not a normal day.

One man tried to use the scanner on his library card’s barcode, but he thought he had to run the scanner up the length of the barcode. When this didn’t work, he tried it slower and faster, assuming that it was the speed he was moving the scanner up the card and not that he was somehow misusing the scanner. I was never aware that a red, horizontal laser line that appears under a scanner would present a situation too complicated to figure out where the barcode should go. You have no idea how many people try to feed their card into the floppy drive of the computer. If they can’t figure this out, I don’t think they should be using our computers.

Another man approached me with an open bag of potato chips, and as I asked him how I could help him, he shoveled a handful of potato chips into his mouth. I fully expected him to chew his mouthful before asking me his question, but this was not to be the case. Through shards of potato chips, he mumbled his question, which was computer related, so I followed him to his computer, with the hopes that he’d swallow the food in his mouth and then be able to communicate with me properly. When we arrived at his computer, he sat down in the seat. He put his finger up to indicate that he needed a moment, then proceeded to scoop another fistful of chips into his mouth. With his mouth full again, he began mumbling about wanting to know how to control the volume. I was so irritated that I didn’t want to stand there and wait for him to finish chewing before I issued instructions to him. I told him to use the mouse to click here to find the slider that controls the volume, and that’s when I realized his hand was full of crumbs. He made no attempt to wipe his hand off and immediately began mousing. There was nothing I could say. I turned around and walked away, disgusted.

A woman approached my desk, and I tried not to stare at her, but it was nearly impossible. She’d pulled all her hair from the back, sides and top of her head into a ponytail where her bangs are. Her hair was actually short and thick, so you could see how most of the back of her hair had fallen throughout the day, but the top and sides remained as a bushy fountain spewing like a unicorn horn out of the center of the top of her head. How do you not stare at that?

She had her husband’s resume that needed to be faxed to a business. The resume was wrinkled, dirty and had a grease stain on it, which might or might not translate through the fax. I said nothing about the condition of the paper, but I silently wondered if all this debris and chemicals feeding through the fax would somehow damage it.

As the fax was progressing, I turned to the patron and said it was going through just fine.

She responded, “I hope I get my period.”

Is this a reference question? How am I supposed to respond to this?

I kind of looked around, then back at her, and drawled out an “okaaaaaaaaaay” that ran me out of breath before I blinked again.

She continued, “I’m late. And I’m really bloated.”

I blinked a few times and then I offered up the only thing I could think to say, something to the effect that the fax would take a few minutes to transmit, and she could come back to see me in about five minutes to receive her confirmation.

She said, “I need to pee. Again. I pee a lot.”

Again I blinked. Quite a bit. Suddenly the ponytail coming out the top of her head wasn’t the weirdest thing about her.

What’s really bizarre is that there didn’t seem to be retardation or anything cognitively wrong with her, but as someone I know likes to describe a person who gives out way too much information to complete strangers, this woman was socially promiscuous.

That’s right: she was a verbal whore.

With a bad hair-do.

Perhaps that was her freak flag flying high.

Maybe I’m the idiot because I didn’t recognize all the warning signs and run.

Whatever is going on in the universe that’s making the freakiest of people flock to me, I hope it subsides very soon. If this is a month-long, some-planet is in my house of some-zodiac-sign, or whatever phase of the moon we’re in that will last until the next one, I’m going to have to drive to the middle of nowhere so that I can avoid the freaky people for the rest of this cycle.

Just...Why?

2008-06-25T21:23:00.000-07:00

There are many things in life that I don’t understand.

For instance, why are we the only creatures in the universe that wear clothing? Even the people who have been abducted and probed by aliens have not reported any of them in attire, fashionable or not. Animals, even the most intelligent dolphins and chimps, feel no inclination to cover their body with fabric. Now, I’m not saying that people should run around naked! But I just don’t understand why we don’t.

Also, where do all my socks go? I have an entire drawer full of socks without a match because I’m afraid that if I throw them out, the counterpart will show up and I’ll have essentially ruined a perfectly good pair of socks. But where is the counterpart right now? We may live in and acknowledge three dimensions, but there must be a sock dimension that we cannot comprehend, where they exist when they don’t come out of the dryer with their twin.

However, what’s bothering me lately is why do libraries teach computer classes? Libraries pick this one technological advance in society and feel compelled to give organized instruction in using it, which is utterly unprecedented. I understand that the bulk of their questions have, for quite a few years, revolved around how to use a computer and it was sensible to do something about that, but I still don’t get why we have bitten off this societal responsibility for ourselves. We are a gateway to knowledge, not a choreographer of the social misfits with two mental left feet.

We have not offered classes about programming your VCR, how to drive, or even the applicable library skills like literacy and using the less-than-forthright catalog to find something on your own. Nope. Occasionally we’ve offered programs where we paid a speaker to teach about gardening concepts, genealogy, specific cooking techniques or financial planning, but because the public never showed up, these programs didn’t repeat. Why did we bite off the responsibility to give technophobes computer instruction from the very rudimentary tasks of what a mouse is, right on up to two-part classes on individual Office programs? Why? And if you take a look around at other libraries, they’re all offering these classes, yet many (if not most) are bringing in outside instructors for these classes. What makes us so stupid?

Perhaps I could get behind it if what we offered was useful and I believed the people who took the classes were going to use what they learned, but time and time again people feel overwhelmed by what there is to learn, how little time we have allotted to teach them, and they give up. We give them 90 minutes to learn what we have to teach about the Internet or Word. Of course, we emphasize that practice is essential, but more people disappear and surrender to a computerless existence than actually pursuing improving on what we offer. We have certain patrons who take the classes over and over and over, but nothing sinks in. We’ve had people who show up drunk, people who have mental disabilities and aren’t capable of learning what we have to teach, and others who are staunchly against computers. These are the unteachable members of our community, and yet we put an extraordinary amount of time and effort into offering them classes that I don’t think we have any business offering, repeatedly.

My suggestions fall on deaf ears. I have tried to teach more advanced classes about using particular websites or particular web utilities, hoping that the people who register for my classes would actually care and practice what I was teaching because they already know how to turn on a computer and where to put a CD. Largely, the results have been favorable and many of my students have come to me later to proudly say that they have continued with what I taught them, which is what I think we should be striving for. Yet, not many people take the classes. I also suggested we invest in take-home computer instruction software, of which we have next to nothing in our collection. No one thinks this will work. I suggested we set up one or two workstations specifically designated as computer practice terminals, with the software already installed so we can get them started and they can follow along. This, also, received almost no acknowledgement.

And I go in to work now and discuss with my department how we’re going to organize the classes in the fall, right back to the same old thing we’ve always done, which leads to negligible student advancement.

Much of library work is like shooting yourself in the foot. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the collection, and I’d venture a guess that half of what we purchase is dead weight and uninteresting to our patron base. We put up displays that no one pays attention to. We offer programs that no one attends. So much of our effort is for naught, but at least we try new things. Not so with computer classes. We teach the same crude things over and over, with most of the registered students blowing off the class, and the rest being unteachable, so sitting around and trying to plan out the identical classes we’ve always offered leave me feeling angered. Why can we not just let go of the computer classes and focus more on books that our patrons won’t read, which will save time and money?

When did libraries become the cornerstone of offering free computer classes to people who think “computer” is a bad word?

We are true gluttons for punishment.

Saturday Morning Breath

2008-06-21T21:56:00.000-07:00

Her breath smelled like diarrhea.

More precisely, it was like bad morning breath and sour coffee mixed with stomach acid, which made sense because she burped about every 10 seconds, and each belch brought the pungent odor up and out of her, aimed directly at my nose as she conversed with me. Each time she burped I had to hold my breath, and I found myself ready to pass out rather quickly because she was burping often.

I’m guessing she had reflux, but I’d just like to rent a billboard and make a gigantic sign that asks people with heartburn to chew gum, suck on mints, or brush their teeth more frequently, because I really don’t want to smell what they had for their last meal, mixed with bile and rotting cells from their esophagus. As someone who has had heartburn in my life, I have been inordinately conscientious about making sure my agony isn’t shared with others. Has no one else’s face ever melted when she speaks to them? I cannot be the first.

Of course, she had a very detailed project she and her husband were working on, so I had to spend an enormous amount of time with them. Taking steps back just caused them to take steps forward. Short of asking her not to speak (or burp) in my direction, there wasn’t much more I could do to thwart the odor from invading my vulnerable olfactory neurons. It’s times like these that make me believe I short-change some of our patrons because I just cannot tolerate their smell. I soul-searched after I sent them away empty-handed, wondering if her breath had been less offensive, would I have given her different service. Hopefully not, but I know for a fact that I was desperate to get away from her. How much hot diarrhea breath being burped up multiple times a minute can one person be expected to take?

There are times when I think Michael Jackson’s public masks aren’t quite as foolish as I once thought.

Why do people skip brushing their teeth if they drink coffee in the morning? Coffee is not a substitute for scrubbing the old food and bacteria from your mouth. This is a frequent occurrence on Saturday mornings. It’s as if they need their coffee first thing, and then decide that the hot acidic drink has flushed the foulness from their mouth. Nay! It has not! Coffee only cooks the bad stuff and makes it riper!

Another billboard I need to make: Coffee doesn’t cure your bad breath – it ripens it.

Do you think people know this and do it purposefully?

Warning: This Blog Has Been Hijacked!

2008-06-04T23:11:00.000-07:00

Hi.

I am a frequent patron of the liberry, and I have hijacked this blog to get a message to all you liberrians out there who make it so hard for patrons to use the liberry. Your service is so poor that you can’t possibly be aware that you suck so much. I’m here to tell you what you need to do to make the liberry better.

First, the liberry needs software that will tell me what movie I’m thinking of when I don’t know the title, don’t know what it’s about, don’t know any of the actors in it, don’t know when it was made, and don’t know where I heard about it. You should be able to search for stuff with nothing to go on. Someone needs to make computers to help me when I’m looking for something like this. You’re all computer-y people. Why can’t you do this?

If I call the reference desk during a moment of sobriety between my lengthy fugue states (as Dr. Lang likes to call them) and ask you to hold that movie I finally remembered, holding it for only three days for me is not long enough. There’s no telling how long it will be before I’ll remember to come to the liberry, and then I won’t remember why, so until I can remember how to get to the library, what I need from it, and if I have some kind of I.D. with me when I get there, you should have that movie waiting for me. Even if it’s been three years. It’s not like you have other patrons who might want it, and even if you do, I’m more important.

There should be some kind of list you can print out of all the items I’ve checked out. This should be available so that I can consult my records and figure out if I’m checking out an item I have already checked out before. Do you have any idea how irritating it is to drive all the way to the library, search the shelves without any clue as to what I’m looking for, guess, check it out for free, drive all the way home, and then realize this is a book I’ve read before? It pisses me off! I am willing to admit that there isn’t a good way for the library to know if I actually read the book that I checked out, but for now, just handing me a list of all my checkouts each time I enter would be great.

Without having a printout of all the items I’ve ever checked out (throughout my life, I should add), you should at least provide some kind of list for me to check off the items I’ve already had. A list of books and a list of movies would be great. I realize you have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of movies, and that list would be really long, but if you could separate it by types of movies I like, that is what I really want. Basically, if you could make a list of what each of your patrons likes so that they know what to look for when they come in, that would make me happy.

These are things you need to work on.

But I know change is difficult. I bet some of your staff might not want to provide all of this service. But you need to look long and hard at these liberrians, like the one who looked at me like I’d lost my mother-fucking-mind when I suggested these things. Her attitude was not open as it should be. Telling me it’s my responsibility to keep track of items I checked out, if that’s important to me, is mean. She did not need to laugh at my ideas, tell me that I was wrong for expecting you to read minds, and walk away when I told her that my demands weren’t that hard if she was interested in providing good customer service. She should attend some kind of seminar that teaches the American value system of the Customer is Always Right.

Another of your librarians treated me with a little more manners when she asked me not to shout my demands across the building while I was sitting in one of your comfortable chairs and didn’t want to get up to ask her to find things for me. I realize that barking at people 50 feet away is not polite, but if you’re going to make the furniture comfortable, it should have wheels so that I can slide over to her and talk quieter. That’s another good idea you should work on.

And while I’m at it, why can’t you just deliver all of this to my house so that I don’t have to carry it all to my car? Do you know how heavy books can be? Do you know how much gas costs? You shouldn’t make me drive five whole blocks to the building so that I can get reading material for my children. I see you all sitting at your desks, typing at your computers, and I know you’re not doing anything important. You should be delivering my books. Or you should be putting wheels on the chairs and couches. Or you should be making computers to do all of the things I want it to do.

Please get to work on this. I pay a ton of money in taxes and I’d really like to see my tax dollars going to a better cause than a building full of stuff that I don’t know if I’ve checked out before or not.

Thank you.

I return this blog to its usual writer, who I did not deal with on my recent visit, but I’m sure she’s just as lame as her coworkers.

"Best" Friends vs. True Friends

2008-06-03T23:53:00.000-07:00

Friday night is Girls Night Out for my coworkers and me. Well, you know, the cool ones. The unmarried, no-kids girls who still keep Friday nights open to go out drinking and having fun, despite the fact that most of us work Saturday morning. Of course, we’re female librarians and we’re the unmarried ones without kids, so we get the shitty shifts. What else is new? But we still make it work because Girls Night Out is important. It reconnects us.

Of course, these wild, anti-stereotype librarians are only going to Baker’s Square, but that’s beside the point. We’re librarians, so we’re a bunch of broke-ass bitches who can’t usually afford alcohol unless it’s a special occasion, and we’d much rather fill our bellies with food and pie while spending hours talking and giggling and having a good time.

On Friday afternoon, I’m going to have my hair redone in that awesome color that my best friend disapproves of so strongly, which I’ve come to realize makes it a little more endearing to me. Why I like her disapproval was a bit elusive to me until tonight during a phone conversation.

First she gave me a hard time for my hair color, comparing it with little old ladies and telling me that all I needed was an up-do and a housedress and I was officially ancient. I bit my tongue and forced a laugh, insisting that I’d yet to see a little old lady with hair like mine. She insisted that having a stripe of an unnatural color wasn’t even a fad in our youth, and she had no idea why I was reaching back further into the annals of fashion history to do this to my head. She just couldn’t understand the desire to be a little different.

Then she started laughing at our Girls Night Out at Baker’s Square, which didn’t make logical sense to her because Baker’s Square is a restaurant she doesn’t go to anymore now that she’s a grown up, and here we were planning a get together around it. Hardy-har-har, what a bunch of silly girls who refuse to accept their age and upgrade their taste and priorities. I was grinding my teeth by the time she finished.

When she asked me about work, I gave her a vague answer that it was okay, but I’m not sure I finished my reply before she started complaining about the library where I work and how much she hates it. Twice she’s called and been hung up on, twice they’ve screwed up her reservation for a private meeting room which she needs to do her contract work in, and she just cannot deal with the fact that she can’t trust anyone to do their jobs properly and not make her job harder. I agreed, suggested she speak with someone’s manager, even gave a name and extension number, but she refused to call because she said it wouldn’t change anything. She was much more content just hating the library and condemning it at every opportunity, as well as all the people who work there. I could not help but wonder how much of her rant was exaggerated.

She calls my friends The Scooby Gang, and though she hasn’t said it outright, I suspect, based on her attitude, that it’s because we all seem so juvenile to her.

No, we don’t make $150K per year, even if you added up all our salaries combined. No, we don’t think about installing track lighting throughout our homes to emphasize the artwork featured on the walls of our living room and hallways. No, we don’t record every Oprah show to watch over and over for all the excellent recommendations each show contains. No, we don’t have stock portfolios and mutual funds and our retirement funds are laughable because we will likely be even poorer when we retire than we are now.

So, no, she and I don’t pretend to understand one another anymore, but I always expect there to be a little consideration and respect, if not support. And lately, I can’t even get that.

This was when I thought that though we came from the same place in our youth, we ended up on opposite sides of the world but only 10 minutes away from one another. How could she have gotten to be so snotty and suburbanized in such a short amount of time? If she wasn’t in a teaching field and a minority race, I’d be waiting for the day she joined the Republican Party.

Then she told me she’s joined a group of canasta players in her neighborhood. I almost choked. Was she serious? Was she actually part of a club of parlor game players? Who is this woman and what happened to my best friend??!

Oh yes, canasta is all the rage in her subdivision, and the monthly parties are quite elaborate. The last party had a Hawaiian theme, and people came in grass skirts and leis were handed out to each lady in attendance. An elaborate buffet of foods made from scratch was available, and it was as much to show off baking skills as it was for culinary enjoyment. The women were all a bit older than her, having kids in high school and beyond, and right away I thought to myself that it was because my best friend is unusually wealthy and successful for her age, with a house worth about $400,000, yet she’s barely 34 years old. While that’s probably something I should be proud of her for accomplishing, it’s still a huge wedge between us because she cannot understand my lack of financial security, which she attributes to a lack of ambition. If I wanted a $400K house, I’d have one if I just had the drive. Anyway, she sees these canasta women as her equals and since the canasta game was a lot of fun, she intends to stick with this group of women and their “parties”. It’s a great form of entertainment and an opportunity to socialize. I suppose in her own way she’s doing the same as me with the Girls Night Out, just in a different universe.

We talked about the canasta because she said that coming from a middle-class white family, she expected me to have all kinds of canasta experience in my family tree. Um, no. I wasn’t even sure that it was played with cards until she told me. And for that matter, only by warped, college financial aid standards did my family qualify as middle-class when I was a kid, because we barely scraped by, had no money for new clothes, and ate a lot of junk food like spam and mac & cheese because they were cheap, but my dad’s income was more than $20,000 per year (though not by much), so I didn’t qualify for financial aid going to college. Middle-class my ass! We were poor. Maybe not homeless poor, but I spent my childhood being morbidly embarrassed about how poor my family was. Canasta was like something from another planet.

So, given how brutal she had been with me earlier, I lit into her about canasta. I told her it was very white-picket-fence-like to be a part of a neighborhood canasta group, and she had truly become a part of suburban Americana now. Jokingly, I asked if she even knew what Guitar Hero is, but didn’t give her a chance to answer. Congratulations followed, with a reminder that it was a straight trip to the retirement home and games of bingo and bridge would quickly follow. She laughed, but I could tell it was as strained as the one I’d given her just a half-hour before. She tried to regain some ground and say the canasta parties reminded her of a backroom scene of a bunch of mobsters sitting around tables gambling, but that’s when my genuine laugh came out a little too loud and a little too strong. It wasn’t long before she was telling me that this is a group that does many types of parties, not just canasta, and she had recently attended a candle party as well.

I didn’t say it, but all I could think was that the whole concept of candle parties being called a “party” was ludicrous. Who has a “party” where you all sit around handling products available for purchase, with inflated prices and questionable quality, and are then pressured into buying? Who considers this a “party”? And even more coercion is used to get you to have a “party” of your own! These are not “parties”, people! These are in-home infomercials. Anyone who thinks of them as parties is unclear on the concept! I don’t care if the topic is sex toys or Tupperware – that is not a party!

So, here I have my best friend, who is a housewife with a part-time job, PTA-member, classroom volunteer, Oprah-worshipping, canasta-playing, suburbanite woman, amassing a collection of cookie-cutter friends and she doesn’t remotely resemble the person I knew 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago. She thinks my job is a joke. She thinks my life is a joke. She even thinks I look like a joke. And she has no qualms about telling me as much. She’s not a competitive person, and I myself have absolutely no competitive spirit in me, but she looks down on me, and that I don’t like. While I feel like I try to understand her, I try to be a part of her world, it’s been over 10 years since she’s been to my house, and it’s even rarer for her leave the comfort of her own home to go have dinner with me or watch a movie. I make an effort to talk to her and she insults me, trying to inspire me to aim higher in my life, but her point is often lost in the critique of who I am and what I do. We have both lost touch with each other, even though we communicate frequently. I love her, I really do, and I wish we could be as close as we once were, but I don’t fit into her eerily nondescript life. Truthfully, I suspect she’s miserable, but she would never admit it to me.

And then I think about my fellow librarians. I think about The Girls and our Girls Night Out events, and I’m grateful to have people in my life who understand me, who don’t judge me, who don’t insult me, and who would never ever ask me to join a canasta group, watch Oprah with them, or tell me that I need to do something more with my life because what I’ve done isn’t good enough. The Girls, they’re all very different, too. We have a devout Catholic who attends Mass almost daily, an agnostic, an atheist, a Catholic who doesn’t attend church at all, and another who is undefined. We have one vegetarian and one recovering anorexic. Although we’re all practicing heterosexuals, we also have a former girl-kisser. We have three living at home with their parents still, four in long-term relationships, two in their thirties and three in their twenties, and our hair colors and styles range from tame to fairly wild. We all look like polar opposites and have incredibly differing personalities and tastes. But our differences don’t matter because there is a common denominator of love and respect. I find this a rare commodity among friends these days.

What cracks me up a little is that another close friend in a distant state started a conversation with me today by asking what was the kinkiest thing I’d ever done. That’s funny, and I’d much rather talk about that kind of stuff than what Dr. Phil said on this show today. I don’t fear her judgment and I answered her honestly. For a moment I thought about the day many years ago when I sat around a dinner table with my best friend, her husband, and a couple who are mutual friends of ours, and someone asked me who I was currently dating. Before I could answer, my best friend’s husband got preachy and started lecturing me about not giving away the milk for free, or no one would want to buy the cow. Seriously, these are the words he used. The discussion wasn’t about whom I was sleeping with or how many men were in my life. Simply, I was asked who, if anyone, was I interested in because I was the only unmarried person in the room, and the only one without even a boyfriend to bring to the gathering. Yet I was subjected to a male-delivered speech about promiscuity and my inability to see this as a guarantee of life as a spinster. Because I was 28 and I was not a virgin. Oh, the scandal! Fast-forward to today, and much relief is found in the giggling and revealing conversation two friends have about one another’s history and sexuality, with mutual acceptance and a lack of judgment. Sometimes it’s not your “best” friend who is truly among the best friends in your life.

I can’t help but wonder if librarians are better people than the rest of the world.

Certainly the ones I surround myself by are superior.

Toilet Training My Community

2008-06-02T21:06:00.000-07:00

Someone pooped. Someone pooped on the floor. It was a big poop. It didn’t seem to have come from a child, but who are we to judge just how much poop can come out of a child with a great, big push?

Did anyone confess to making such a big poop? Did anyone offer to help clean it up? Did anyone even offer up a suspect whose anus was likely still recovering from such an exodus?

No. No. And no.

There was only one child of diaper age present, and that child sat with his mother at a computer, making the rest of the staff eye him suspiciously in case he was the pooper and he had more in him. Since everyone just stood around watching the staff clean up the semi-soft poop, it could’ve been any of them.

Sincerely, if you work at my library long enough, you start looking at every patron as a possible suspect of depositing poop in inappropriate places.

Is he someone who would poop in the middle of the computer area? Could that lady pinch a loaf over in the romance books and just walk away? What about the teenager who is apprehensively pacing in the Anime collection – is he trying to spread his diarrhea all around?

I know that everyone poops because I read about it, but why do they keep pooping all over my library?

Old Yellers and Young Yellers

2008-05-27T20:45:00.001-07:00

Today I was yelled at by two different patrons.

The first one I fielded a complaint against because he was blatantly perusing porn sites with kids running all around, and he wasn't being discreet at all. I asked him to be aware that this is a public building and there are kids who can plainly see what he's viewing, so to behave in a more responsible manner. He huffed at me. I don't like being huffed at, and you know what? I have the power to make him miserable, so I decided to look into this matter a little closer.

It turns out that the person logged into this computer was a 55-year-old woman. No, not by a long shot. I suspected this was his mother's card, so I searched the phone number to figure out if she had a son who was this kid's age. Surprise, surprise. She has a 15-year-old son with mondo fines on his account, rendering his card unusable to check items out or to use the computer to peruse porn sites. Tsk, tsk.

I shut his computer down, but I prefaced it with an instant message letting him know that I was ending his turn because he was using someone else's card, which we don't allow.

Little shit. If he hadn't been such a pain in my ass, he might have coasted on this, but because he drew attention to himself and then gave me attitude, there was no leniency.

It's really amusing when 15-year-old boys who want to look at porn get all defensive when I tell them they can't use their mommy's card to do it.

We went round and round about why you can't use someone else's card, even when it's your mommy's. He had the nerve to proudly claim to be of a righteous age to be using the unfiltered, adult computers and tried to tell me I couldn't take his computer away. HAH! Watch me. I don't care how old you are and how well you think you know our policies, but if I catch you using someone else's card, I will put a stop to it. His voice started getting louder as he argued with me, and I was preparing to ask him to leave when he asked me a question that almost made me laugh out loud.

He asked a loaded question about if I'd let him use her card if she was there.

I said sure, if your mom wants to sit with you at the computer and watch what it is you're working on, then yes, the two of you can use the card together.

Wouldn't that be sweet? Mommy and son porn viewing? Isn't that its own little fetish anyway?

His pimply, indignant face turned bright red and he stomped off. I fully expected him to stop off at another staff area to report me for denying him his god-given right to view porn using his mommy's library card, but he walked right into the washroom instead.

I don't think for one second that he was jerking off in there because I think I did an ample job of killing his good time, but I do think he might have been close to tears.

Teens. Don't they understand they don't have the wits and reasoning to talk themselves out of their misdeeds?

On the other end of the age spectrum was an old man who wanted to check out our copy of the Chase's Calendar of Events. Sorry, but that's a reference book, which we actually keep at our desk because only we end up using it. He insisted we should have a copy he could check out. I explained we did own two copies, one for Youth and one for Adult, but they were both reference copies and he was welcome to make copies out of it if need be. He got this look of intensity on his face and he just stared at me, as if he could mentally will me to give him the book. Not to be intimidated, I started right back at him.

Finally he started name dropping. He asked if one of the other ladies in our department was around. Lucky for me, she's on vacation, and when I told him this he went right back to staring at me. Eventually he started telling me about how she once gave him an older copy of a Chase's, a 2005 he though he recalled, because he is associated with her through an organization they both participate in. Okay. That's nice for you. When I explained that that was a very generous thing she had done, that it was not our policy to hold or save out-of-date books for any individual or organization, and our 2007 copy was long ago discarded, he went back to staring intensely at me.

It was right around then that his level of animation skyrocketed and he began wildly announcing that we shouldn't keep a book like this in reference, that people like him needed it and couldn't continually be making copies out of it, and we weren't being fair.

I took a deep breath and reminded him that since he was looking for handouts of an older copy anyway, he would likely find a decent used copy on Amazon if he was willing to pay a reduced cost for it.

Guess what. He wasn't willing to pay for a used copy. Looking it up shows me they have used copies of the 2007 Chase's for as little as $2.

It's crazy what people seem to think they're entitled to. You give someone a few services for free (book lending, computer access) and they think there should be no end to the generosity of a library's services.

Some days I feel like my seat at the reference desk is viewed by the patrons as their personal dunk tank.

There is a tiny bit of satisfaction I get, though, when they throw that bullseye pitch at the target and I don't get dunked -- they do.

Okay, it's more than a tiny bit of satisfaction. It's what makes my day's worthwhile.

The Little Things

2007-06-28T01:24:00.000-07:00

If someone were to gauge my strength at handling calamities, I’d probably be rated around an 8 or 9 on the Mohs Hardness Scale. Tell me I have a serious illness and I’m focused, clear, and concise when discussing options and prognoses; I might even make jokes. Tell me my father is on life support but my mother wants to pull the plug because he signed a DNR and it’s time to let him die, then I’m the only one in the room not crying, but holding my mother and brother as they do. However, paper-cuts send me into a fit of wailing, and having my ears pierced in January was one of the most painful, irritating things I have suffered, and continue to deal with on a daily basis.

The same principle applies to the trials at work. If the roof caved in, I would not be the one standing in the middle of the rubble, screaming like a banshee and crying for someone to save me. In my weakest moments I have never called out for my mommy, although, if you met my mom you would probably know why. My reactions are to pause, figure out what to do, and do it. I have trained myself well in the art of hiding my emotions and dealing with them privately. It’s the way of the warrior.

I am a warrior.

BUT…

A few things will derail me completely. By “derail” I mean come unhinged with anger.

Those few things that might derail me are often things that others would scoff at.

At work, we have a security alarm that protects our building while we aren’t around. Until recently, there weren’t many people on staff who knew what to do with it, even though it only involves having your own four-digit code and being able to read. Everyone has a personal code number. Almost everyone is petrified of the damn thing.

At one time, I had become so irritated with the sheer number of people who are far too intimidated to set the alarm at the end of the night, that I became the one who set it every single night. It became part of the routine. People got lazy and made me do it each night, which ultimately forced me to be the last person to leave the building and the only one who knew what to do if it went off. Two years ago, when I went on vacation, there were problems. It became evident that no one on staff had a clue what to do with the security alarm and I was forbidden to touch it at the end of the day with the hopes that this would force the rest of the staff to learn this part of their job. It worked for a while. If by “worked” it means that the alarm was set off with such frequency that the police started fining us for each incident, and sometimes we’d receive two to three fines per week. Administration put it high on the list of priorities for everyone to learn their fucking codes. It’s not hard! Four numbers! Put in your code and press the button that activates the alarm or deactivates the alarm. EASY! Five total key punches! Why these people resisted and screwed it up day in and day out, I’ll never know. If you can’t press five keys to enter and leave the building, you probably aren’t smart enough to be working at our library. That should be part of the proficiency for every position on staff. But it isn’t. If it was, we’d lose a huge chunk of our personnel.

Then we hired janitors who arrived each night as we closed, so people got comfortable not ever touching the security alarm again. They eagerly unlearned what they had been forced to learn, thinking they’d never need it again. The security alarm was something they evolved above, like a tailbone. Or so they thought.

About two months ago, a new team of janitors started cleaning our building, but the major difference with the new team is that they don’t arrive until midnight, which means that the staff has to close the building each night.

And turn the terrifying alarm on when they leave.

You should see these people!

The folks in circulation, with the exception of one person, race out the back door at the end of the night. They should have flames painted down their sides and parachutes that shoot out of their rectums when they reach the safety of the parking lot. Many times I have checked for skid marks in the shape of gym shoes on the staff side of the lot. I think that when the closing announcement is made, it is the equivalent of a starter pistol being shot. I don’t even see them move around behind the circulation desk, but five minutes after we close, they have Machu-Pichued the area. They leave all the lights on in the building, sometimes their own area fans, the fish tank, the bathroom lights, and I’ve heard that a few times they even left the cash register drawer in the register for anyone to have access to. These folks are in a hurry not to be the last ones out of the building. They don’t tell anyone else that they are leaving. They don’t offer to help others who still have closing procedures to complete. They bolt! They leave the building like they’re afraid they’ll lose their commercial sponsorship if they don’t cross some invisible finish line first. I don’t know if there really is a prize for the first closers out the door – I’m never out first – but there could very well be. That prize might just be that you make a clean getaway, which is a highly-coveted reward.

The youth department is much better and they, at least, check in with us to see if we need help or if we plan to stay later. That’s nice. We try to do the same for them if we finish first. However, it’s no less obvious that they want to leave in a group so that someone else will take responsibility for the alarm as well.

If you discount the UFO-like disappearance of the circ crew, and the well-intentioned cooperation of the youth crew, the problem really falls on the shoulders of one person.

We have one coworker who cannot keep track of her schedule, her obligations, her responsibilities, her overflowing email inbox, and, of course, won’t have anything to do with the security alarm. She claims she doesn’t have a code, but it’s as easy as just saying as much to receive one. Which she has received. And she has forgotten. It wouldn’t be a big deal if she wasn’t spending her desk shift preoccupied with her personal endeavors and she didn’t start cleaning up and shutting things down until well after the library has closed. With the janitors in the building, she could take her sweet time and leave whenever she wanted. However, now she has to hustle to get her closing procedures done so that she doesn’t have to be the last one in the building. This happens on nights when she’s being considerate. There are many, many nights when the group of us will be standing at the back door waiting for her, unable to leave because we can’t leave her alone in the building. If she can’t set the alarm, we have to wait for her. It’s getting really fucking old.

She is a manager.

Whose turn is it to baby-sit her tonight, we ask one another. Someone go check to see if you can speed her up.

Inevitably, she’s sitting somewhere sending out an email or printing a calendar and there is more waiting involved that no one can hasten. When she finally gets to the back door, you better have said a prayer that she didn’t forget anything, too, because it’s really hard to get blood out of drywall when you try to speed up time by slamming your head into the wall. I have actually been stuck at work until 8:30 because we waited for her for 20 minutes, got all the way out to our cars and were going to drive away before she remembered that her cell phone was still inside. This means someone has park, turn off their car, go back into the building, deactivate the alarm, let her go from the second floor NW corner of the building to the first floor SE corner of the building to retrieve her cell, return to you at the back door, then reactivate the alarm so you can leave. Again. And burn fucking rubber out of the lot before she changes her mind. Again.

This, I think, is why the circulation department breaks the sound barrier each night trying to leave. While it irritates the hell out of me that it’s like a reenactment of the Jamestown Colony disappearance on some nights within minutes of the library closing, with staff abandoning the building with frightening suddenness, I do prefer this to the member of our team who forces the rest of us to baby her. Not because she’s incapable of doing the alarm, but because she’s afraid of it and cannot for the life of her remember her code.

And if she had an ounce of wits about her, she’d request an easy code that consisted of her birth date or home phone number to make it easy.

Then again, that method might have been tried and failed as well.

I would rather deal with nightly knifings, gunfire and weather disasters than this.

Yes, I realize that it isn’t logical to prefer death and destruction to a bit of an irritant, but that’s how I am. It does not stress me out so much that I have $4 in my bank account, 9 pennies in my wallet and enormous medical bills that I owe, and will continue to owe because my health is only improving in tiny increments. It does not stress me out as much when I’m working at the desk alone and there are 8 people standing in line for help with the phone ringing and a policeman in need of some security camera footage of a bike being stolen. I can handle that. But the manager on our staff who forces us to stay late and wait for her, no matter what the hell she’s working on, just because she’s too flaky to remember her alarm code, makes me want to take a sledgehammer to the place.

If ever I go postal, let this be my manifesto that it wasn’t the Big Picture that broke me. Oh no. It was the miniscule bullshit. It was the fact that it’s routinely about 5-10º above comfortable in our office, despite having at least one fan going at all times; it was the innumerable pages made by one staff member seeking another staff member and roaring it into a microphone so often each day that I have developed a nervous tick and ringing in my ears; it was because of the repliers-to-all, who respond to an email and think the entire library should know that they agree with a primary (and arbitrary) email; it was due to the price of Coke in the vending machine going up to $1.25; and because I had to wait 10 extra minutes for the same person, night after night, who refused to learn how to use the security system that is easy enough for a child to use, not even as a courtesy to me, the only one who will always, always, always wait for her, no matter what.

By the way, what does get blood out of drywall when you beat your own head into the wall frequently?

Tenured, I'm Sure

2007-06-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

She caused me to have to speak in short, succinct sentences because I was afraid her brain would explode otherwise, so when I talk about her or write about her, my words come out that way again.

She was a teacher. I know because she mentioned it in the conversation about eight times.

Her library card had expired. Ten years ago.

She wanted to know where our paperback section was. When I explained that we don’t separate books by hardcover and paperback, she was horrified. Why not? However do we organize things if not by the density of its cover?

She didn’t know the difference between fiction and nonfiction. Even after I described it twice.

She refused to use the computer to look up her books. She claimed to have never touched a computer in her life and wasn’t about to start now.

Fortunately, she did know how to write. Very badly, but I could make out her words. She wrote down two titles she wanted me to look up. She wrote them down because she didn’t think I could remember them if she just said them aloud. Perhaps I’d never heard of them.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

The Color Purple

I might have been insulted that she thought I’d never heard of them except for the fact that she seemed to be retarded. I’ve made a point of trying to be more gracious to people who are retarded and don’t know it.

The only thing that impressed me was that she spelled the words right. That surprised me. She had one skill. I wasn’t going to test it because I felt better about the local public school system thinking that she could at least spell.

She insisted I locate copies of these books in paperback and not hardcover. She said that they were for her niece, not herself, and her niece prefers paperbacks because they are more portable. We had copies on the shelf, thankfully.

I wrote the call numbers down and tried to explain that the fiction is arranged alphabetically by the author’s last name.

She stared blankly at me.

This book, The Color Purple, was written by Alice WALKER.

Walker is her last name.

The books are alphabetized by the author’s last name.

Walker is going to be in the W area.

That’s near the end of the alphabet.

You’ll have to look for the “WAL” on the call number.

The call number is on the spine of the book.

She nodded like she understood. She studied the scrap of paper I handed to her with the author’s names next to the titles she wrote down. If I hadn’t been alone at the desk with two patrons waiting, I’d have walked her to each book and plucked them from the shelf, but I had to trust that those keen spelling skills would kick in and she’d find the books herself.

She walked off looking disheartened.

I helped the next two patrons and when I finished, she was walking past my desk to leave.

I asked if she found the books. She said she had, after much searching, but decided not to get them.

She reminded me that she had never touched a computer before and would soon be retiring from teaching. She wondered if she should learn now or just finish out her life without ever having touched a computer.

I gave her that look of false contemplation I give to everyone who asks a question I haven’t the nerve to answer truthfully.

She asked if it’s always this crowded in the evenings. I explained that, yes, it’s always this crowded or more so.

She mused that she had no idea the young people were so studious.

Without wanting to completely pop the bubble she was living in, I said that they are mostly computer-users.

She said that she tells her students to NEVER EVER go to the library for personal needs. ONLY use the library for assignments and research. It’s not there for fun. She hoped that they were all working on projects while they were on the computer.

I looked around to see if she had antennae coming out of her head. If she did, they were well hidden. Perhaps the mother ship will be taking her back shortly.

I clarified that the library is not just for research, and it is widely used for recreation, which we encourage. Even if the children were using the computers for fun, they were still strengthening computer skills, which they will need for the rest of their lives if they want to function in the world.

(Unlike her.)

She said she understood that computers could be helpful and she was glad they were learning. She nodded her approval and left.

I’m guessing that her students learn more screwing around on our computers after school than they do in her classroom on any day of the week.

I’ve never been a proponent of home schooling, but I can understand it when I have conversations with people like this woman.

When Will It Snow?

2007-06-18T21:09:00.000-07:00

It rained today. It was a much-needed reprieve from the stifling heat of late, but it hit with the kind of suddenness that you experience in a car accident (i.e., cruising along, scream, crash, scream some more, pee your pants a little, curse).

The thermometers were indicating we were around 90º with oppressive humidity and the sun was blazing down and giving me an instant headache just walking to my car. We needed rain.

The heat and humidity held out until it disappeared one second and thunder crashed the next.

Was that really thunder? Are kids firing off some early firecrackers?

Another rumble answered the question and within seconds the rain was pounding so hard on our metal roof, it seemed as if it might cave in.

People wandered into the library with that what-the-fuck look on their faces, as if they had been strolling happily from their car to our front door, and a large tub of water was dumped on them as they neared the sidewalk.

Sure, the weathermen warned of storms. Sure, the thunderstorm watches were in effect. Sure, it was something we all thought MIGHT happen today. But after our “Storm of the Century” a week ago, not too many people gave the rain a second thought.

RAIN-SCHMAIN! I’ll believe it when I see it.

Well, weren’t we surprised?

On cue, the Park District next door promptly sounded the get-the-fuck-out-of-the-pool-because-there’s-lightning-somewhere-in-the-county alarm and evicted a large public pool full of teens and preteens onto the streets. Gee, I wonder where they’re going to go.

With the rain came the teens.

We’re not just talking about a bunch of boisterous kids with excess energy to burn. We’re talking about boisterous kids with excess energy to bury, sopping wet, running around the library in their swimsuits.

There were two girls who couldn’t have been more than 15 years old who walked into the library wearing flip-flops and a bikini. Oh, and a wet towel flung carelessly over the shoulder. A bikini. They were old enough to have some curves to fill in the bikini, but not old enough to have any sense of time and place for the appropriate setting for this bikini.

There’s nothing like some underage girls in bikinis to make the seniors reading their newspaper grab hold of their pacemaker through their chest and hope it does its job.

Grandpa doesn’t need to see that, Ashley! That’s why they make those cute cover ups. SO YOU’LL COVER THE HELL UP!

This was a bit much. Everyone was oogling them; man, woman, adult, child.

I cautiously threw an email to my boss before I told these girls that we required clothes for admittance into the library.

I wrote the following:

For many days now, we've all observed many a patron coming into the library wearing only a wet bathing suit and wet towel, and we've longed for the days when there was signage saying that we did not allow you to come in with your wet pool clothes on. Is this still a policy minus a sign, or are we allowing sopping and chlorinated patrons to come in and sit on our furniture? Should I send them to the Quiet Room to dry off? :)

(The Quiet Room is our new service, which probably would float in communities where the patron majority was of legal age, but here, having a quiet room in the back of the library, with weak lighting and soft, comfy chairs, some of us think is the equivalent of inviting the teens to have world-record-breaking orgies. We are SOOOO going to get sued when someone’s parents find out their daughter banged three guys in the Quiet Room.)

My boss strolled out to have a look at the library’s swimsuit edition, and he skeptically scanned the horizon for offenders, whereupon the harmless summer clothing turned nightmareishly into pedophile paradise.

His eyes sprang out of his head with an audible boi-yoi-yoi-yoing, and he assessed the view with increasing concern.

“Oh… OH! OOOOHHHH!”

With typical efficiency I have come to expect, he went a-lookin’ for some administrative-ish folks.

No director. Assistant director missing in action.

My boss made the error of walking into the meeting room where a Red Cross blood drive was going on. Like ravenous vampires they descended upon him, wanting to start the preparatory interview work of making sure his blood was pure and sweet enough. He quickly fled. I like to imagine that the big, manly guy screamed like a little girl and ran out with his hands waving in the air wildly, calling for his mommy, but I’m sure it didn’t happen. It just makes me smile to imagine it.

Rattled from nearly losing his life, or worse, his soul, he decided the swimsuit question could wait.

Thus, all afternoon, I sat listening to the rain, the squeals of teenage delight upon seeing one another after the eternal waiting period of less than 24 hours, and gasps of adults who caught glimpses of the girls in bikinis.

It’s going to be a LONG summer.

When Does the Cesspool Close?

2007-06-16T16:18:00.000-07:00

Phone rings.

Me: Adult Reference Desk. How may I help you?

Caller: I’m calling to say that Enid and Sophie won’t be coming today.

Me: Oh. Okay.

Do other libraries take attendance? How do you keep track of what patron is supposed to be present on what day? Seriously. How do you know? Because if I knew what days certain patrons were coming, I’d rearrange my schedule or (*cough*) come down with an ailment.

Me: Were they meeting someone here?

Caller: No, they were signed up for a program today!

Me: OH! But we don’t have any programs today that required registration.

Caller: I don’t know! I’m just the grandma and their mother told me to take them for a program today, but I’m not going to!

Me: Okay, that’s fine. Thanks for call--

The caller hung up on me.

Sometimes I wish we had Caller ID so that I could call back this grandma and finish my sentence.

It’s fair if they can call the library and say something stupid like, “Yeah, I got a phone call from the library, but I don’t have voice mail so they couldn’t leave a message and I was wondering who called and what it was about. Caller ID says it came from this number.” How am I supposed to know who in my building called you and why? Dude, get an answering machine before you get Caller ID! It’s much more helpful!

* * *

Phone rings.

Me: Adult Reference Desk. How may I help you?

Caller: What time does the pool close today?

The pool? You mean the library’s pool? Well, our pool is private and only for staff. You can’t play in our pool. Imagine the crud and filth that we’d have to clean up if we let the patrons use our pool. For that matter, I’m not quite sure why we let them borrow our books, computers, movies and CDs. Have you smelled a popular library book lately? Egad!

CLEARLY you’re asking for the hours of the pool at the PARK DISTRICT, which is NOT a part of the library. NOT A PART OF THE LIBRARY! Who ever heard of a library that had a pool? That’s like a library with an open bonfire in the middle of it! What stupid concept!

If you want me to look it up for you, ask me to look it up for you! DO NOT assume that I have the hours to every local business on a handy-dandy spreadsheet. I do not. And no, that is not a good idea.

Oh, wait! Maybe the pool you were asking about is the cesspool that is a majority of the community I serve! Oh, well, that, m’dear, is open 24 hours!

* * *

Patron: I have a book that someone gave me, but I have no use for it. I was wondering if you take donations.

Me: Sure. If we didn’t add it to the collection, we’d likely sell it in the annual book sale.

Patron: Why don’t you take software?

Me: Well, that’s a little fuzzier, what with registration and copyrights. Books are fine, though.

Patron: Yeah, I had a copy of Linux that I wanted to donate to the library and I talked to the guy who is your computer guy… I can’t remember his name…

Me: Yeah, he doesn’t accept equipment or software donations.

Patron: That’s really silly. You could’ve made money on it if you wanted to. I mean, it wasn’t an original CD or anything, so you couldn’t have charged a lot, but it was a genuine burned copy of an original. I can vouch for that! It’s worth money. But you guys just turned down the money. So sad.

Me, shrugging: Eh, whaddaya gonna do?

Personally, I think the loss was worth it. For instance, we might have made $1 on the sale, if that, but the jail time, attorney fees, court fees, penalties and blow to our reputation might be a little more than $1 worth. That’s just a guess, though. I don’t actually know anyone stupid enough to try to sell illegally copied software in an open forum like that. Although, sir, you might be the first. Go ahead and give it a try. I think eBay has a special eJail for offenders like you. And if you sell it quickly enough, it might cover your eBail.

On second thought, we really don’t want that donated book. It was probably stolen and we’d get in trouble for possession of stolen property. Just go. Go now. And don’t come back. Ever.

Rule #2: Quit Insisting You're Right -- Because You're Not!

2007-06-12T23:28:00.000-07:00

A woman approached my desk and asked for a book called Two Patriot Generals.

I thought to myself that it was a lame title, and one I was not familiar with, so I went fishing around in my catalog and at Amazon. No hits.

She was positive it was called Two Patriot Generals, though she was not sure whether it was Two, Too, or To. There was no way she was wrong about the words Patriot and Generals, though. She wrote it down!

Still no help.

She couldn't remember what it was about or who wrote it, for she heard about it on a radio show and not much was shared about the book.

WHY, pray tell, did it inspire you to seek it out, then?!

No hits were made with "Patriot Generals" in my search terms either, but a curious title popped up on Amazon called Young Patriots, about Madison and Hamilton, and the US Constitution.

I can see how that would be so hard to remember, being the highly forgettable subject matter of the Constitution and all.

She said she must have blocked out the word "young" from the title because everyone was young back then.

They were? Even the old people were young? Because in the late 1700s, people only lived to be about 20, and then they died of young age, right? It's redundant to call them "young" patriots, because back then, everyone was young.

Right. Good excuse.

Where "generals" came from, I don't know. Alexander Hamilton never made general and James Madison had very little military experience. She just made that up.

Thankfully Amazon was able to decipher this woman's insistence on the wrong title of a book. I have never doubted that Amazon is smarter than me, but I just never knew it could make sense of nonsense.

Another woman paid a visit to our library tonight and asked me for the book Little Hurricanes. My search again rendered zip.

Long story made short is that she was in two weeks earlier and found the book, but didn't want it at the time. She did not write the title down, but was absolutely certain of two things: the cover had a picture of the ocean on it, and the word "little" was in the title. While she wasn't absolutely certain the title contained "hurricanes," she was in the 90 percentile range of certainty. However, she had no clue what it was about, who wrote it, or whether it was a newer book or an older book.

Uh-huh. I suspected it might be Little Earthquakes, but when I showed her this book, she insisted it was not right because the cover should have had an ocean on it.

No explanation about how books are routinely published with different covers would persuade her to let go of her insistence that the book had an ocean on the cover, or the fact that it almost certainly had "hurricanes" in the title along with the word she was 100% sure of, "little."

I showed her the search results in my catalog, the results I Googled, and the results in Amazon. Nothing! If Amazon can't figure it out, you're wrong, bitch!

Finally she admitted she might be wrong about the word "hurricanes." She was now only sure that the book had an ocean on the cover and the title contained the word "little."

Since we don't yet classify books based on their color or cover art, I had but one option.

Little.

For a word that means such a small amount, it's amazing to know just how many pieces of material our library alone owns which contain that word.

1,800 items.

I looked at her.

She looked at me.

Then she admitted that maybe she should do some of her own research on her own time.

I know damn well she was thinking of Little Earthquakes, but that's one thing she's going to have to figure out on her own, after hours and hours of sifting through our 1,800 items with the word "little" in the title.

Then again, since the cover of that book was not issued with a picture of the ocean on it, she might never admit she was wrong about all of it. Nor will she ever read the book she seeks.

My only consolation is that it will probably drive her completely nuts.

And that gives me a little earthquakes of pleasure.

Our Role In Society

2007-06-11T23:55:00.000-07:00

Recently, a colleague of mine went to a daylong seminar on a variety of topics about our jobs in the library.

I chose not to attend because I’d really rather not get up at 5 am to meet my carpoolers at the library at 6:30, drive an hour and a half to an 8-hour gathering of strangers, where I’ll have to sit and listen to speakers I don’t know, talk about things I don’t care about. I can do that from the comfort of my own library, with a computer in front of me that doubles as a toy to play with while they’re blathering on and on. AND I can sleep in. Until 7:30, that is.

So, when my colleague returned the next day, I asked her how the seminar went.

Note to self: next time, don’t ask.

Not only did she love the seminar, but she said one of the speakers in particular rejuvenated her interest in her own career.

Wow. That’s a powerful speaker. I was wondering if it’s possible that she might have been sitting in the far back and misunderstood the actual spoken words. She assured me she did not.

What she did say was that this speaker likened our jobs to saving the world.

I kid you not.

The phrase used was “perpetuate society”, in that we provide answers and pathways to answers that improve the civilized world we live in. We assist doctors diagnosing patients, we assist scientists in finding discoveries, we assist students in learning and going on to do any number of immeasurable things, and on top of that, we provide endless opportunities for education and entertainment to the masses.

Lofty words. Too bad it’s a bunch of crap.

I’m all for pride in our jobs, but this is so blatantly condescending that I can hardly swallow it, and that’s not just because I’m bitter and jaded. It’s because this speaker obviously hadn’t worked a reference shift in a long, long time.

We perpetuate society? Okay, let’s examine this.

Last week I helped a woman find legal information about giving up custody of her teenage daughter, which she whispered to me with her teenage daughter standing five feet away, looking terrified. Specifically, she wanted to find out how to make her daughter a ward of the state temporarily, until she had more money, and then she’d take her daughter back. There were three younger kids bouncing around her feet, calling her “Mama”, but she made no mention of giving up the younger kids. Now, I’m sure that society is going to be much better off if this woman has fewer children, but the damage to the younger kids who would think their mother might one day get rid of them too is tragic, not to mention the destruction to the teen daughter who would somehow have to live her fragile life knowing that her mother gave her up, but not her younger siblings. That can only be good for society, yes? Oh, I was proud to take part in that debacle. What exactly do you hope for?

I spent two days assisting a lady I despise (because she had the balls to protest a poster we had up that contained Spanish words on it, even though it was mostly English) print off idiotic Internet jokes people had emailed to her, because she didn’t know how to highlight, cut and paste them into a document. These jokes were very funny to her and she wanted to print one of them and frame it. Yes, this too is an excellent example of perpetuating the mindless society we have become.

The humpback whales that swam into a whale-free zone in California and nearly died inspired another encounter. One of our regular pests came in with two pages of questions she wanted answered about the whales, such as “Why did they go there?”, “Was the mother protecting the baby from a predator?”, “Did they know they were lost?”, and my favorite, “Were they hoping for human help getting them back on course?” With as little sarcasm as I could muster, I said, “I’m not really sure the whales would answer if we asked them these questions.” She did not get it. She wanted me to contact the people in charge of the whales and ask them. The people in charge of the whales? I gave her a few phone numbers, printed about five articles about whale behavior and the known facts surrounding this particular event, and tried again to explain that there were probably no answers to her questions because there was no way to know. It took about a half-hour to make her understand that there weren’t going to be answers about what the whales were thinking or how they felt. She was greatly disappointed. I’m quite certain that if I had made a gigantic load of shit up about the whales, she would’ve been quite pleased. For instance, I might have said that I discovered an article that claimed a rogue band of seals were harassing and tormenting the whales, chasing them clear up the Baja Peninsula to the San Francisco Bay, where they finally found safety in the fresh water. The crowds of humans, which the whales were hoping for, scared off the marauding seals, and when it was safe to return to the ocean, the whales slipped back and eluded the gang of seals. Our crazy patron would’ve been quite happy with this story. Instead I told the truth and she went away upset. This, I’m sure, improved the very state of our world because crazy ladies who are curious about whales must be silenced.

A very malodorous old man visits often, notably last week, wanting access to a computer so that he can research his family tree, only what he does is search the online listed phone records of everyone in the country with his last name. I have no idea if he goes home and calls them all, wanting to know if he’s related to them, but why else would he compile this information? Each visit is to target another geographical area, and he’ll ask me to help him search for all of the people with the last name Bianchi in Washington. It takes him hours to print out the list of names, but he does it and takes them home. I’m guessing that there are hundreds of people with his last name (or variants of the spelling of his last name) who have been pissed off with a rambling and uninvited phone call from a strange guy on the other side of the country, wondering if they’re related just because their last names are the same. Yes, I’m sure that improves the quality of many lives and to have participated is a high point in my career.

And while I’m sure that crafts and cookbooks make people happy, it certainly doesn’t take a PhD to hand out knitting books, place a hold for Sylvia Browne’s latest farce, or finding how-to home repair books with lots of pictures for the guy who is illiterate. My only proud moments last week occurred when I helped a man in a wheelchair find movies on learning to play guitar, and a middle-aged woman who needed a few sex aid manuals. Those are the only two I can tenuously say were positive experiences and might have contributed to some enlightenment.

Do I believe I provide a service to the community? You bet.

Do I believe it requires skill or higher education? Absolutely not.

Do I do it because I need to feel like I’m somehow important, riding on the coattails of people who actually accomplish great things? Hell no.

I do it because it’s fun. People amuse me. Sometimes I get to be creative, and other times I get to spend lots of other people’s money on books I want to read and add to our collection. Perhaps if you are a librarian in a medical library or a university library, things might be a bit different. My library, which is a medium-sized suburban public library, has never owned the kind of collection that could one day lead someone to the cure for Parkinson’s Disease or cancer. Anyone who actually buys into the concept that we can somehow take credit for all the great that happens in the world today is delusional. Perhaps one librarian in a million might contribute to something great, but if we’re sitting around trying to validate our jobs using concepts so lofty as this, then we really do belong in another field.

This post isn’t to diminish the egos of librarians everywhere, or to shatter some illusion the world has about the place of librarians in society. Our patrons determine our place in their world, and in a way that does perpetuates society, but it’s not always for the better.

Sometimes it’s just to give MySpace a larger extended network of users, or to give an out-of-work simpleton a place to spend his time until his Unemployment benefits run out.

Sometimes it’s to provide recipes, driving directions, needlework patterns, popular fiction novels, and the entire first season of “Gray’s Anatomy” to average joes.

And that’s good enough for me.

Self Love

2007-06-08T20:35:00.000-07:00

I walked from my office to pick something up from the shelf and found myself about 10 feet behind a man who was seemingly headed in the same direction as me. He was familiar, but I didn’t know if he was just a regular patron or possibly someone I might know outside of the library. Hopefully it was just the former.

About three steps into our synchronized stride, I heard a flubbery squeak that was fairly loud. It did rather sound like a fart, but many things make fart noises around our library, including the carts, my shoes, and the gerbils running on their wheels inside all the computers.

Note to self: we really must upgrade to mice, which are smaller and have more energy.

In front of me, the familiar man reached behind himself and, through his nylon shorts, firmly grasped his left buttock in his left hand. With the bun secured, he pulled the cheek away from the other and the same flubbery squeak emanated from the gap his hand had created.

My face contorted into some kind of mixture of horror and disgust. My feet stopped walking, but I didn’t remember telling them to stop.

Unfortunately, the familiar man also stopped, still 10 feet ahead of me, and this time, instead of clearing the way for another gaseous expulsion to exit without speed bumps, he dug his hand between his cheeks and seemed to be scratching or massaging the orifice through his shorts.

At first I gagged and made a turn to avoid hitting the odoriffic cloud that he’d let loose on the planet just a moment ago, and also to avoid touching anything that he might touch before me.

Then it dawned on me – this man, however socially challenged and intestinally free he was, had absolutely no qualms about his bodily functions. He welcomed his farts into this world with cheeks widespread, and he rewarded his anus with a nice rub afterward. That’s someone who loves his body. That’s someone who believes his body can do no wrong. That’s someone with more confidence than I will ever have.

And, dare I say, I was a little turned on.

They say you have to love yourself before you can love anyone else, and I believe it. If this guy loves his bowels this much, imagine how much he might love the more lovable parts on someone else. It was titillating just thinking of the possibilities. Those hands were accustomed to accommodating the needs of his own body. What might he do to someone else? And no one ever need be humiliated if some playful activity leads to their own escaping squeakers because this guy is likely to hold your cheeks apart and beckon them into the world, possibly give you a little rub of a reward after.

Yea, I say! I’m downright intrigued with this man! Perhaps we could all stand to be a little freer with our bodies!

As I rounded the corner and caught up with him, I realized where I knew him from the second I saw that same hand that had so recently been giving himself a nice post-fart stroke was shoving a finger so far up his nose, I thought it might come out his eye socket. Yes. Now I remember. This is the mentally handicapped man who visits the library with his mother. Years ago he used to follow me around in the stacks in the opposite aisle and peek at me through the holes in the books, which inevitably would scare the mother-fucking-shit out of me and I’d almost crack a tooth from clenching my jaw in an attempt not to scream bloody murder.

It was suddenly all so clear.

And now that I’ve amused myself and repulsed all of you, let’s all take a break and have a group vomit! Wheeee!

Rule #1: Do Not Touch the Librarian

2007-06-07T23:12:00.000-07:00

He completely creeps me out with all his religious tattoos up and down his arms, the pop-bottle glasses, the straw hat, and sly way he seems to emphasize his southern drawl. Once you cross the Mason-Dixon line, chewing on toothpicks and wearing a fringy, suede vest makes you a bit laughable here in these parts.

He is not charming. He is not sexy. I wish he’d leave me alone.

Yet, he frequents the library often and always makes a point of visiting with me.

Often there is nowhere to run.

It becomes increasingly difficult to hide my horror when I see him walk in the door, though I try to be civilized and professional.

He always asks me out for coffee. I tell him I don’t drink coffee. He then asks me out for whatever I drink.

I have come very close to giving up all beverages because of him.

Instead I explain that my boyfriend wouldn’t appreciate such a meeting.

He smiles sinisterly and says that his wife would not either, but as long as we behave, there is no harm.

Vomit. Bile. Last week’s digested meals. Bits of my own broken down digestive tract. Chunks of my reproductive system self destructing and rising in the eruption of insides wanting to become outsides.

The misbehavior I am inspired with when he is around is not the kind he’s thinking of, unless he’s imagining himself rolled up in an area rug and run over with a bulldozer before being buried semi-alive in a shallow grave somewhere near a fire ant hill.

I withdraw when he’s near. I pull my hands off the desk and push my chair back, keeping my distance because whenever he comes in, he tries to touch me. Not in a molesting way, but in an overtly desperate need to make contact way. It bothers me. The contact doesn’t bother me, but I follow his eyes, and I watch his behavior because he baits me to expose a part of myself that he can touch, and that bothers me. It’s the manipulation and it’s the fact that he thinks he has some kind of right to touch me.

He asks for books on blackjack tournaments, which is a creature unknown to me. Poker, yes. Blackjack -- never thought it could turn into a tournament.

This requires me to take my hands out of my lap, move forward a bit, and use the mouse and keyboard. He watches my hands move up to the desk and he stares openly at the movements.

We have no material on blackjack tournaments and strategy guides to help you win them. I tell him I cannot find any in existence, but the truth is I’m not looking all that hard because each time I move my hand to mouse something, his eyes follow and it creeps me out more.

He’s going to touch my hand, I can just tell.

My arm twitches at the thought. I look around for another patron, another staff member, anyone I can make eye contact with and somehow indicate that I need to be rescued, but no one is nearby.

He says, “Now that’s just the purtiest ring you got there,” and before I can yank my hand away, he’s holding it in both of his, turning my ring so that the ruby faces him.

I thank him coldly and pull my hand away.

He seems a little bit shocked at my shortness and dislike of his handling. He then thanks me for my help, accepts that there are no books on the topic he is asking about (as if he never really cared anyway), and bids me farewell.

If he wasn’t a foot shorter than me and in his late 50s or early 60s, I’d be concerned that he might be a serial killer or other dangerous deviant.

Clearly he has a hand fetish.

Then again, if he catches me wandering around the library without my protective desk between us, he will touch my shoulder, my back or any part of me that is within reach.

It really creeps me out.

Sometimes he sings to me. This is easy enough to curtail since it is a library.

He’s invited me to his many performances at nursing homes around the area, where he plays gospel songs for the residents. I think that if he and I were in a place where death is a fairly common occurrence, it would inspire me.

How many ways can one murder another with an acoustic guitar?

On that pleasant though, I shall venture off into dreamland.

...strangulation with guitar strings...impaled with fretboard...beat about the head with entire instrument...zzzzzzz...

The Mouth-Breather

2007-06-06T21:08:00.000-07:00

We call her that for obvious reasons. When your mommy and daddy have relatives in common, something happens in the embryonic stage that prevents the offspring from developing proper nasal breathing passages. You can hear an inbred coming if you listen for the mouth-breathing.

She asked one of the youth librarians for "another book catalog."

A what? Like, an online public access computer? A card catalog? And "another" one? Where did the first one come from?

After much snotty explaining on her part, she managed to inform the librarian that she sought a second list on which to document the books she's read to her kids for the reading club. (Our supposition is that someone else is doing the reading, unless picture books count.)

The poor youth librarian didn't have her Mouth-Breather to English dictionary handy. There was no hope for understanding without translation.

Then the woman somehow found her way to the adult area, where she and her son stood in an aisle I needed to get into. In fact, it was the aisle that leads to my office, and her son was pounding his little fists hard against the glass of my office door.

She did nothing.

I said, "Excuse me, I have to get in there." I was hoping she'd move herself, her kid and the stroller with her baby away from the entrance to my door, but all she did instead was instruct the boy to get out of the way. She didn't budge an inch.

This forced me to squeeze between her and the wall while stretching my arm sideways to unlock the door, but I still wasn't able to get into the office because of the stroller.

She still did nothing.

She left me with no other recourse. I had to move her baby in the stroller myself.

She still did nothing.

After I managed to squirm into my office, I began closing the door as I stared with loathing at the back of Mouth-Breather's head. She turned around and I paused for a fraction of a second and thought to erase the look on my face as our eyes met, just before the door touched the frame, but I decided against it. She deserved to know just how much of an ass I thought she was.

She still did nothing.

Fast forward three days and she returned with her two children.

The boy is about four years old and I learned his name today, not because he told me, but because Mouth-Breather shouted it so often that it sounded like a broken record echoing in my skull.

Jonah! Jonah! Jonah! Jonah! Jonah! Jonah!

JONAH!

Jonah! Jonah!

Jonah-Jonah-Jonah-Jonah-Jonah!

Jonah, another mouth-breather, clearly suffers from ADHD, and possibly a little bit of a hearing impairment because nothing anyone said to him seemed to penetrate his childish ears.

He was on his way up to the third tier of an empty bookshelf as he ascended what must have been the kiddie version of a rock-climbing wall, before one of my coworkers stopped him.

It went something like this.

Coworker runs to save Jonah's life.

Mouth-Breather does nothing.

Coworker puts her hands on Jonah so that he doesn't let go of the shelves and plummet to the ground.

Mouth-Breather shouts, "Jonah!"

Coworker says to the boy, "Jonah, you cannot climb the shelves in the library. Feet are better off on the ground, where you cannot hurt yourself as much."

Mouth-Breather, who can see the entire event unfold, shouts, "Jonah! If you don't get over here, I'm leaving without you."

Coworker eases Jonah off the shelves.

Mouth-Breather, now looking at me, shouts, "Jonah!"

Coworker watches as Jonah runs off to join his mother 10 feet away.

Mouth-Breather shouts, "Jonah! That's it. We're leaving!"

No apology. No discipline. Nothing.

From the looks of it, she's pregnant again, too.

Who knew her own brother would be available to procreate three separate times with her?

Then again, I imagine mouth-breathers don't get to do much kissing. They'd pass out.

Introduction

2007-06-06T21:01:00.000-07:00

Surely this makes the 2,945,371st library blog in the mix.

At least I'm in good company.

On with the bitching!