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.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
It's My Library & I'll Cry If I Want To
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.
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.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
What a Day!
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Run. As Fast As You Can.
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Just...Why?
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.
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, June 21, 2008
Saturday Morning Breath
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?
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?
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
**Warning: This Blog Has Been Hijacked!**
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
"Best" Friends vs. True Friends
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.
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.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Toilet Training My Community
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?
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?
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Old Yellers and Young Yellers
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 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.
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