A woman came into the library this week to get a library card for herself and her daughter. At the time, the clerk did not notice that the birth year the patron input as her own was 1986, and the birth year she input for her daughter’s was 1992, which would’ve made her six years old when she gave birth. This discrepancy was realized later on by a clerk, who quickly put a block on the cards to get the correct birth dates for each.
The next day the daughter showed up and wanted to check some items out, but with the block on her card she was unable to do so unless her mother came in and corrected the information in the accounts. The girl immediately got on her cell phone and called her mother, who was infuriated and stormed over to the library right away.
When the mother arrived, the situation was explained, and she should have laughed it off like a sane person, admitting that she was not actually six years old when she had her child.
Instead she began rummaging through her wallet for correct ID, and when she whipped out multiple forms of ID, including credit cards, she stopped herself and said, “Oh, wait, these are the ones I use to get Disability. Hold on.”
Continuing to rummage, she produced all new ID with a completely different name and birth date. Different, in fact, from the original application she filled out. This, she claimed, was her real identity. The clerks (including the circulation manager) shrugged and made her a card with the new information, as long as it was feasible that she could be the girl’s parent.
No report of fraudulent identification to the police. No investigation into identity theft. No concern about someone defrauding the government for free money. No one cared that this woman is running around with someone else’s identification, including credit cards, which she’s using for most of her business.
Another problem occurred when she neglected to sign her library card application and another block was put on the card, so yesterday she was confronted yet again by one of the clerks who had to have her signature.
When all was said and done, the woman laughed as she was leaving and loudly said to the person she was with, “I signed a different name on the application, too! Hahaha!”
In a strange twist of fate, this woman then whirled around at the clerk who had been dealing with her, and accused this clerk of calling her the N-word.
Witnesses all state vehemently that the N-word was never spoken, and that the accused clerk hadn’t even said a word after the woman walked away. We do believe this story, given that the accuser is likely one of the biggest liars and thieves to ever walk in our door, but the way it’s being handled is another mystery.
The clerk, who was upset that she would be accused of saying this to someone, has repeated the story to anyone who will listen, only when she tells the story, she actually says the N-word over and over, quoting the woman who accused her of using it.
Maybe I’m a paranoid white girl, though I like to think it’s just a question of respect, but I don’t think I’ve uttered the N-word, even when quoting someone, since I was a little kid and my parents explained the meaning to me. I’m sorry, but that’s a word we just cannot use, even when we’re denying that we said it. It’s offensive, even to me, and I’m one of the rare people who finds most language acceptable and most insults amusing. Call me a cunt, call me a bitch, call me a whore, call me anything you want. They’re just words and unless I care about you personally, I don’t care what names you call me. But the N-word is not even part of my vocabulary, and hearing it, even by African Americans who are taking it back, is offensive to me. I don’t believe for one second that if someone is trying to depict herself as someone who would not call another this name, she probably shouldn’t be repeating the story and the word so much to prove that she would never do that.
So, what we have here is a group of clerks who are apathetic about someone freely flaunting her identity theft, which she successfully uses to swindle free money and attempts to finance and establish herself with. They also don’t care that she tauntingly laughs about signing a false name on a binding document, and let her get away with that as well. But it’s a bit of an ethical free-for-all when the patron accuses one of them of using the N-word.
While hearing this story, excuses ran through my head. It was a full moon this week. These are under-appreciated and abused staff members. Sometimes there isn’t enough money in the world to make their job worth it. Things often get exaggerated in the retelling.
Or maybe this was all true and nothing good or right is left in the world.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Feeding Frenzy
Have you ever started your day and had the expectation that it would go swimmingly, only it ended up going drowningly?
Today was such a day for me.
Trip #1 to the washroom left me in the stall staring at a creature that was staring back at me. It was a smeared handprint of a small woman or a child, about 4½ feet off the floor on the back of the stall door. The smear was composed of a dried and hardened substance that was dark brown in color. It could be mud. It could be not mud.
The thing about this smear is that I’m quite familiar with it because I’ve been staring at it for almost four weeks now. I refuse to clean it off the door, being immuno-compromised as I am, but I’m monitoring the amount of time it will take the janitors or someone else on staff to take care of it. To me, it’s quite obvious, and perhaps there are a number of other members of staff who are using the washroom and staring at this hand smear just like I am, wondering when someone will take care of it.
This is slightly worse than the used tampon shoved back into a wrapper that sat in the tray of the tampon machine for over two weeks. The abandoned tampon was not so bad because it was inside the part of the machine where you would have to insert your hand to actually touch it. The shit-print is also worse than the mystery pill that sat on the floor in one of the grout lines for three weeks not too long ago. I find it disheartening that our janitors who allegedly clean the washrooms daily went three full weeks without sweeping or mopping the floors in the washroom. Even then I’m not sure if the janitors mopped or if someone who read my blog was motivated to remove the mystery pill. I’m betting on the latter. This time I’m keeping my trap shut at work about the shit-print. We’ll see how long it stays there. I fully expect to run into Golgothan whenever I enter that washroom each day.
On my way out of the washroom, I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror and discovered that my shirt had a tear in it, which was even more obvious than the shit-print on the back of the stall door. I was wearing a sheer, black blouse with a black tank beneath, and the tear was where the sleeve connects to the back of the blouse, exposing my pasty white skin for about an inch-and-a-half. I looked like a She-Hulk in mid-transformation. Someone at Circ was kind enough to locate a sewing kit for me, but it had only white thread. I found myself back in the shit-print bathroom stall, sewing my shirt back together, and then using a Sharpie to color the white thread black. It worked, but I spent the day with my thumb and index finger dead black from the Sharpie ink, appearing as if I’d been fingerprinted. Lovely.
Some days take only a half-hour of participation before you realize that you would have been better off never having gotten out of bed.
Something evil has attacked the computers at our library and they are running so slowly that often the tasks you ask them to do time-out and freeze up the system. Our website had been down, many staff computers were shut down with debilitating viruses, and the public computers are so painfully slow that many claim they are not even worth using. Yet, they were still full all day today, with many cranky patrons complaining about the lack of speed and abundance of unloadable web pages. Welcome to the reference desk!
My first patron almost gagged me. She reeked of cigarettes so intensely, I actually tried to get a look at her hands to see if she was smoking right there at my desk. As if she was motivated to cause me the most discomfort, she also made a point of leaning on my desk to speak as close to my face as was possible without making physical contact. I leaned back, and she leaned in closer. I pushed my chair back and she moved down the desk to an indentation where she could be even nearer to me. Finally I stood up and took two steps away from my side of the desk, which made me a full foot taller than her, too. That distance was the greatest distance between her stanky breath and my nose since she’d walked up to me. I was grateful for my height more than anything at that moment.
What she was asking for kind of amused me, though.
“I need a book on MANIAC depression.” That is not a spelling error. That is what she said.
Without chuckling, I explained that I was searching for bipolar disorder and located a few books to point her to.
“Does it have pictures?”
Pictures?
“Yes, pictures. Nothing specific. Just something that shows what it’s like to be maniac depressed.”
Now I was smiling. But I covered it up by asking whether she was interested in pictures like graphs and tables of statistics or information, or photos of people who have BIPOLAR DISORDER.
“Just whatever. Pictures. Like, a happy face and a sad face. You know?”
I sent her to the Youth Department to find a children’s book on maniac depression. I wondered if it was too advanced for her.
Later I asked Leelu what she thought MANIAC depression was and she responded, “Is that what happens when you run out of people to kill?”
Must be.
My next patron was an older woman who was completely computer illiterate, but wanted to find and print out the operator manual for her lawnmower, which was made in 1950. When I say she was computer illiterate, I mean that she had confidence in using a mouse and seemed to know what she was doing until I asked her to click on something, and then she was lost. Aren’t websites just like books on a screen? You can CLICK on parts of the words and go to OTHER websites?
It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I only had to repeat my instructions to her about three times, the third time sternly, before she followed my instructions.
“Click on the green box that says ‘Manuals’.”
She’d put her cursor on a red box that said “Sitemap”.
“No, the green box that says ‘MANUALS’.”
She’d put her cursor on the yellow box that was an ad.
“No! The GREEN box that says ‘MANUALS’.”
Just as I’d start leaning over her shoulder to point it out, she’d finally do what I said. This is what happened for a full 20 minutes, guiding her through page after page, website after website, until we found the PDF where her manual was available, each time having to repeat very clear directions to her three times. The girl sitting at the computer next to her was giggling each time I repeated something. When the people nearby were starting to glare at the woman, I offered to do the search and print the manual for her myself, but she was determined to have me instruct her thrice, until she got it herself. By the time she printed it out, my throat was sore from the intense repetition, and I’d sprained my eyes by rolling them so much.
It takes a lot to sprain my eyes. They roll all day long.
There was another man sitting at a computer far in the back of the library – not his choosing, but could have been fixed if he’d been in the least bit courteous – who was taking his business calls on his cell phone every five minutes. He was polite enough to leave each time he received a phone call, but the time it took him to secure his computer and walk the length of the building to the lobby sometimes allowed him to seal a deal and hang up before he even got out of our earshot. Perhaps it might not have been so irritating if he wasn’t such a loud talker.
My senses were bleeding by then.
I’m not one to usually complain about larger women wearing skimpy clothes because trampy dress doesn’t hinge on body type to me. However, I had a young woman who was about 5 feet tall, roughly 200 pounds, wearing a skin-tight, black tube top with some wannabe gangsta propaganda all over it, written in gaudy, gold lettering. However, her boobage was too significant to be wandering around in a tube top, so this girl chose to wear a pastel pink bra under it, with the straps and tops of the bra cups protruding from the elastic rim of her tube top. It was downright disturbing. And she kept adjusting her bra, pulling her girls up to an unnatural height on her chest. It was like a train wreck. I couldn’t turn away, but I couldn’t hide my horror.
Not long after this, a man sitting at the computer nearest me started blasting music into his headphones, and for a second I wondered if I was having some kind of flashback to my younger years, when I was riding a sugar high of Pixie Stix and Smarties, because I swear I could hear the song “Centerfold” blasting from nearby. Surely the J. Giles Band has not been inflicted upon us! Who the hell would blast that stupid song 27 years after it was released?! There he was. The pathetic man who spends his days at our library, playing Tetris and listening to bad 80s music. Next on the docket was “Rock and Roll Band” by Boston. For the first time in my life, I trying to think of a place to call where I could be put on hold and listen to tragic hold music. Then I realized the worst hold music I know belongs to my very own library, and given that I can’t call myself and put myself on hold, I had to suffer through some more dreadful flashbacks via the headphones of a man with nothing better to do than torture me.
A man then approached my desk wanting to use our public fax machine. He’d prepaid at Circ as was required, and handed me a receipt showing he had two pages to send through, yet he handed me three pages.
I asked, “Do you have two pages to send, or three?”
He answered, “Well, two, but this one is a cover sheet.”
“Yes, but that’s three pages.”
“Cover pages don’t count.”
“Well, they do to us. It’s a full-page document with writing on the entire length of it. It counts as a page. You’ll have to go back to Circ and pay for the third page, or we can leave the cover sheet off, if it doesn’t matter to you.”
“That’s stupid! It’s just a cover sheet. It shouldn’t count.”
“It's three pages. One. Two. Three. We don’t discriminate based on what the pages have on them.”
“Fine. Send them through. I’ll go pay in a minute.”
I stood there looking at him. I didn’t budge. He didn’t budge either. He wasn’t going to pay and I knew it, so I continued standing there. When it was clear that we were going to have a standoff, I set his three pages on the desk, took a deep breath, and began flipping through a magazine. This caused him to throw his hands in the air in defeat and stomp off to Circ to pay for the third page. When he handed me the receipt, I sent his fax through, but not a moment sooner.
By then I was starting to feel like the patrons had it in for me. I was grinding my teeth more and counting the minutes until my shift ended.
Also, I was spasmodically paranoid that the emergency stitchery I’d done on my shirt was not going to hold, so I would feel compelled to whip my head around and check my back about every five minutes or so.
It was a stressful shift.
When I answered the phone to a man who identified himself as a Hospice nurse for one of our patrons, I expected the interaction to be a smooth one. Hospice nurse, right? That requires patience, tolerance, sympathy, intellect, and people skills.
There I go again assuming and jumping to illogical conclusions.
This man was furious with Circ, who would not allow him to pick up his patient’s interlibrary loan items. They suggested that he place all future holds on his own card so as not to breach any privacy laws protecting the patrons, but he refused. They suggested he put his patient in the homebound delivery program and just have all the items delivered right to the doorstep, but this was undignified and condescending to him because as a Hospice nurse, he was perfectly capable of picking up his patient’s library material. They could make no headway, and in desperation, Circ transferred the angry man to me. Great.
I tried to explain that my hands were even more tied, since all I could do was place holds or transfer him to the person in charge of homebound delivery. I have no power over Circ rules. He yelled his frustration at me and then hung up on me.
Why on earth he would be so insulted about the home delivery program, I don’t know. Who the hell would turn down home delivery? Clearly he was just angry about the Circ rules and wasn’t thinking about his patient’s needs, or he would’ve been grateful for the door-to-door services we offer.
Great nurse there. Pick a principle and fight it, even if it’s to the detriment of your patient.
The rest of my shift was a struggle with a single patron who felt compelled to interrupt and give bad computer instructions to people I was standing next to, giving correct instructions to.
I’d say, “If you right click on the link and choose to open it in a new window, this will allow you to—“
And suddenly Mr. Interrupter would whirl around in his chair and loudly tell my patron, “It has nothing to do with opening new windows. It’s the computers. They’re going too slow. Nobody is doing anything about it. That’s why your link isn’t working.”
After a deep breath I explained, “It’s true, the computers are going very slow today, but your problem doesn’t have to do with speed. The link isn’t loading, and we’re trying to figure out if it’s a pop-up that’s getting killed by the pop-up blocker, or if it’s a dead link. If you right click the link and tell it to open in a new window, we can see.”
She followed my instructions. The new window opened and the error screen announced that it was a dead link.
The next patron I helped wanted to print a PDF, but it wasn’t showing up at the printer.
I started to instruct her, “With PDFs, we have to use the PDF toolbar to print, rather than the IE toolbar. If you click this icon here—“
And the interrupter shouted from three computers away, “The printer here is messed up! It doesn’t matter what toolbar you use, it’s not going to work. You should just print things from home, like I do.”
This kept happening, and finally I got angry and I told him that he was wrong and to please refrain from giving bad computer advice to the patrons. I was trying to help them and he was actually making matters worse. He started to protest, saying our computers were messed up, but I interrupted him and said that the problems people were having were none of his business and he should stop disrupting the library with his outbursts. I think that by reducing his comments and advice to nothing but disruptions and outbursts he was clear that his interruptions weren’t welcome. He was quiet after that, but as he left the library, he stopped at my desk to loudly proclaim our computers to be functioning at their very worst ever.
This almost made me laugh. The worst ever? That’s pretty bad considering I can recall days on end when they were flatly dead. Slow is worse than dead?
However, I explained that we were aware of the slowness and that there was someone working on them behind the scenes as we spoke, but he turned toward the patrons at the computers and said that we CLAIM someone is working on it, but he’d been here all day and it was not improving one bit.
I snottily said, “That’s because it’s not FIXED yet! Hence me saying they’re STILL WORKING ON IT!”
He continued mumbling his complaints as he left.
When my reference shift was over, I chose to leave work early. My jaw hurt from my molars clear up to my earlobes and I could feel my face pulsating. Out of concern for the welfare of all those who crossed my path, I removed myself from the building.
Drowningly: that’s how my day went. And the patrons seemed to sense this and had a feeding frenzy.
I hate days like this.
Today was such a day for me.
Trip #1 to the washroom left me in the stall staring at a creature that was staring back at me. It was a smeared handprint of a small woman or a child, about 4½ feet off the floor on the back of the stall door. The smear was composed of a dried and hardened substance that was dark brown in color. It could be mud. It could be not mud.
The thing about this smear is that I’m quite familiar with it because I’ve been staring at it for almost four weeks now. I refuse to clean it off the door, being immuno-compromised as I am, but I’m monitoring the amount of time it will take the janitors or someone else on staff to take care of it. To me, it’s quite obvious, and perhaps there are a number of other members of staff who are using the washroom and staring at this hand smear just like I am, wondering when someone will take care of it.
This is slightly worse than the used tampon shoved back into a wrapper that sat in the tray of the tampon machine for over two weeks. The abandoned tampon was not so bad because it was inside the part of the machine where you would have to insert your hand to actually touch it. The shit-print is also worse than the mystery pill that sat on the floor in one of the grout lines for three weeks not too long ago. I find it disheartening that our janitors who allegedly clean the washrooms daily went three full weeks without sweeping or mopping the floors in the washroom. Even then I’m not sure if the janitors mopped or if someone who read my blog was motivated to remove the mystery pill. I’m betting on the latter. This time I’m keeping my trap shut at work about the shit-print. We’ll see how long it stays there. I fully expect to run into Golgothan whenever I enter that washroom each day.
On my way out of the washroom, I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror and discovered that my shirt had a tear in it, which was even more obvious than the shit-print on the back of the stall door. I was wearing a sheer, black blouse with a black tank beneath, and the tear was where the sleeve connects to the back of the blouse, exposing my pasty white skin for about an inch-and-a-half. I looked like a She-Hulk in mid-transformation. Someone at Circ was kind enough to locate a sewing kit for me, but it had only white thread. I found myself back in the shit-print bathroom stall, sewing my shirt back together, and then using a Sharpie to color the white thread black. It worked, but I spent the day with my thumb and index finger dead black from the Sharpie ink, appearing as if I’d been fingerprinted. Lovely.
Some days take only a half-hour of participation before you realize that you would have been better off never having gotten out of bed.
Something evil has attacked the computers at our library and they are running so slowly that often the tasks you ask them to do time-out and freeze up the system. Our website had been down, many staff computers were shut down with debilitating viruses, and the public computers are so painfully slow that many claim they are not even worth using. Yet, they were still full all day today, with many cranky patrons complaining about the lack of speed and abundance of unloadable web pages. Welcome to the reference desk!
My first patron almost gagged me. She reeked of cigarettes so intensely, I actually tried to get a look at her hands to see if she was smoking right there at my desk. As if she was motivated to cause me the most discomfort, she also made a point of leaning on my desk to speak as close to my face as was possible without making physical contact. I leaned back, and she leaned in closer. I pushed my chair back and she moved down the desk to an indentation where she could be even nearer to me. Finally I stood up and took two steps away from my side of the desk, which made me a full foot taller than her, too. That distance was the greatest distance between her stanky breath and my nose since she’d walked up to me. I was grateful for my height more than anything at that moment.
What she was asking for kind of amused me, though.
“I need a book on MANIAC depression.” That is not a spelling error. That is what she said.
Without chuckling, I explained that I was searching for bipolar disorder and located a few books to point her to.
“Does it have pictures?”
Pictures?
“Yes, pictures. Nothing specific. Just something that shows what it’s like to be maniac depressed.”
Now I was smiling. But I covered it up by asking whether she was interested in pictures like graphs and tables of statistics or information, or photos of people who have BIPOLAR DISORDER.
“Just whatever. Pictures. Like, a happy face and a sad face. You know?”
I sent her to the Youth Department to find a children’s book on maniac depression. I wondered if it was too advanced for her.
Later I asked Leelu what she thought MANIAC depression was and she responded, “Is that what happens when you run out of people to kill?”
Must be.
My next patron was an older woman who was completely computer illiterate, but wanted to find and print out the operator manual for her lawnmower, which was made in 1950. When I say she was computer illiterate, I mean that she had confidence in using a mouse and seemed to know what she was doing until I asked her to click on something, and then she was lost. Aren’t websites just like books on a screen? You can CLICK on parts of the words and go to OTHER websites?
It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I only had to repeat my instructions to her about three times, the third time sternly, before she followed my instructions.
“Click on the green box that says ‘Manuals’.”
She’d put her cursor on a red box that said “Sitemap”.
“No, the green box that says ‘MANUALS’.”
She’d put her cursor on the yellow box that was an ad.
“No! The GREEN box that says ‘MANUALS’.”
Just as I’d start leaning over her shoulder to point it out, she’d finally do what I said. This is what happened for a full 20 minutes, guiding her through page after page, website after website, until we found the PDF where her manual was available, each time having to repeat very clear directions to her three times. The girl sitting at the computer next to her was giggling each time I repeated something. When the people nearby were starting to glare at the woman, I offered to do the search and print the manual for her myself, but she was determined to have me instruct her thrice, until she got it herself. By the time she printed it out, my throat was sore from the intense repetition, and I’d sprained my eyes by rolling them so much.
It takes a lot to sprain my eyes. They roll all day long.
There was another man sitting at a computer far in the back of the library – not his choosing, but could have been fixed if he’d been in the least bit courteous – who was taking his business calls on his cell phone every five minutes. He was polite enough to leave each time he received a phone call, but the time it took him to secure his computer and walk the length of the building to the lobby sometimes allowed him to seal a deal and hang up before he even got out of our earshot. Perhaps it might not have been so irritating if he wasn’t such a loud talker.
My senses were bleeding by then.
I’m not one to usually complain about larger women wearing skimpy clothes because trampy dress doesn’t hinge on body type to me. However, I had a young woman who was about 5 feet tall, roughly 200 pounds, wearing a skin-tight, black tube top with some wannabe gangsta propaganda all over it, written in gaudy, gold lettering. However, her boobage was too significant to be wandering around in a tube top, so this girl chose to wear a pastel pink bra under it, with the straps and tops of the bra cups protruding from the elastic rim of her tube top. It was downright disturbing. And she kept adjusting her bra, pulling her girls up to an unnatural height on her chest. It was like a train wreck. I couldn’t turn away, but I couldn’t hide my horror.
Not long after this, a man sitting at the computer nearest me started blasting music into his headphones, and for a second I wondered if I was having some kind of flashback to my younger years, when I was riding a sugar high of Pixie Stix and Smarties, because I swear I could hear the song “Centerfold” blasting from nearby. Surely the J. Giles Band has not been inflicted upon us! Who the hell would blast that stupid song 27 years after it was released?! There he was. The pathetic man who spends his days at our library, playing Tetris and listening to bad 80s music. Next on the docket was “Rock and Roll Band” by Boston. For the first time in my life, I trying to think of a place to call where I could be put on hold and listen to tragic hold music. Then I realized the worst hold music I know belongs to my very own library, and given that I can’t call myself and put myself on hold, I had to suffer through some more dreadful flashbacks via the headphones of a man with nothing better to do than torture me.
A man then approached my desk wanting to use our public fax machine. He’d prepaid at Circ as was required, and handed me a receipt showing he had two pages to send through, yet he handed me three pages.
I asked, “Do you have two pages to send, or three?”
He answered, “Well, two, but this one is a cover sheet.”
“Yes, but that’s three pages.”
“Cover pages don’t count.”
“Well, they do to us. It’s a full-page document with writing on the entire length of it. It counts as a page. You’ll have to go back to Circ and pay for the third page, or we can leave the cover sheet off, if it doesn’t matter to you.”
“That’s stupid! It’s just a cover sheet. It shouldn’t count.”
“It's three pages. One. Two. Three. We don’t discriminate based on what the pages have on them.”
“Fine. Send them through. I’ll go pay in a minute.”
I stood there looking at him. I didn’t budge. He didn’t budge either. He wasn’t going to pay and I knew it, so I continued standing there. When it was clear that we were going to have a standoff, I set his three pages on the desk, took a deep breath, and began flipping through a magazine. This caused him to throw his hands in the air in defeat and stomp off to Circ to pay for the third page. When he handed me the receipt, I sent his fax through, but not a moment sooner.
By then I was starting to feel like the patrons had it in for me. I was grinding my teeth more and counting the minutes until my shift ended.
Also, I was spasmodically paranoid that the emergency stitchery I’d done on my shirt was not going to hold, so I would feel compelled to whip my head around and check my back about every five minutes or so.
It was a stressful shift.
When I answered the phone to a man who identified himself as a Hospice nurse for one of our patrons, I expected the interaction to be a smooth one. Hospice nurse, right? That requires patience, tolerance, sympathy, intellect, and people skills.
There I go again assuming and jumping to illogical conclusions.
This man was furious with Circ, who would not allow him to pick up his patient’s interlibrary loan items. They suggested that he place all future holds on his own card so as not to breach any privacy laws protecting the patrons, but he refused. They suggested he put his patient in the homebound delivery program and just have all the items delivered right to the doorstep, but this was undignified and condescending to him because as a Hospice nurse, he was perfectly capable of picking up his patient’s library material. They could make no headway, and in desperation, Circ transferred the angry man to me. Great.
I tried to explain that my hands were even more tied, since all I could do was place holds or transfer him to the person in charge of homebound delivery. I have no power over Circ rules. He yelled his frustration at me and then hung up on me.
Why on earth he would be so insulted about the home delivery program, I don’t know. Who the hell would turn down home delivery? Clearly he was just angry about the Circ rules and wasn’t thinking about his patient’s needs, or he would’ve been grateful for the door-to-door services we offer.
Great nurse there. Pick a principle and fight it, even if it’s to the detriment of your patient.
The rest of my shift was a struggle with a single patron who felt compelled to interrupt and give bad computer instructions to people I was standing next to, giving correct instructions to.
I’d say, “If you right click on the link and choose to open it in a new window, this will allow you to—“
And suddenly Mr. Interrupter would whirl around in his chair and loudly tell my patron, “It has nothing to do with opening new windows. It’s the computers. They’re going too slow. Nobody is doing anything about it. That’s why your link isn’t working.”
After a deep breath I explained, “It’s true, the computers are going very slow today, but your problem doesn’t have to do with speed. The link isn’t loading, and we’re trying to figure out if it’s a pop-up that’s getting killed by the pop-up blocker, or if it’s a dead link. If you right click the link and tell it to open in a new window, we can see.”
She followed my instructions. The new window opened and the error screen announced that it was a dead link.
The next patron I helped wanted to print a PDF, but it wasn’t showing up at the printer.
I started to instruct her, “With PDFs, we have to use the PDF toolbar to print, rather than the IE toolbar. If you click this icon here—“
And the interrupter shouted from three computers away, “The printer here is messed up! It doesn’t matter what toolbar you use, it’s not going to work. You should just print things from home, like I do.”
This kept happening, and finally I got angry and I told him that he was wrong and to please refrain from giving bad computer advice to the patrons. I was trying to help them and he was actually making matters worse. He started to protest, saying our computers were messed up, but I interrupted him and said that the problems people were having were none of his business and he should stop disrupting the library with his outbursts. I think that by reducing his comments and advice to nothing but disruptions and outbursts he was clear that his interruptions weren’t welcome. He was quiet after that, but as he left the library, he stopped at my desk to loudly proclaim our computers to be functioning at their very worst ever.
This almost made me laugh. The worst ever? That’s pretty bad considering I can recall days on end when they were flatly dead. Slow is worse than dead?
However, I explained that we were aware of the slowness and that there was someone working on them behind the scenes as we spoke, but he turned toward the patrons at the computers and said that we CLAIM someone is working on it, but he’d been here all day and it was not improving one bit.
I snottily said, “That’s because it’s not FIXED yet! Hence me saying they’re STILL WORKING ON IT!”
He continued mumbling his complaints as he left.
When my reference shift was over, I chose to leave work early. My jaw hurt from my molars clear up to my earlobes and I could feel my face pulsating. Out of concern for the welfare of all those who crossed my path, I removed myself from the building.
Drowningly: that’s how my day went. And the patrons seemed to sense this and had a feeding frenzy.
I hate days like this.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
I can sit at the desk for a half-hour flipping through new books, smiling at patrons walking in the door, and nodding when folks comment about the Indian summer, secretly wondering why they’re celebrating the weather by spending the afternoon inside the library, checking their pathetic email and MySpace pages. I surf the news for stories about the most recent psycho in my neighborhood to kill someone so I can see if they have a library card at our library. But most of all, I just reserve out computers that noisy patrons are using so that they cannot get extensions, and also so that I don’t have to confront them about what an asshole they’re being. It’s Sunday, after all. This is my day of giving people breaks. And I choose to passive-aggressively break them from their computer.
Just when I got complacent about the lazy afternoon I was spending at work, two kids walked up to me. The first was looking for information on the Banaue Rice Terraces, which is obscure enough not to have entries in any encyclopedia we own or databases we subscribe to, so I resorted to the evil and distrusted internet for this boy’s research. If his teacher has something against Wikipedia or a few dot-coms, then this boy is going to get a big, fat F on his assignment.
Yet, on the plus side, I learned about the Banaue Rice Terraces, which are fucking fascinating, and I’d love to see them before they are destroyed.
Put the Phillippines on my list, Jeeves. And stop by a gas station so I can pick up some lottery tickets, too, please.
The other boy, who waited semi-patiently, was looking for a recommendation for a good movie. That’s all he gave me to go on. I thought about telling him to watch the DVD I recently watched and loved, Earth: the Biography, but I didn’t figure he’d appreciate that. Finally I got him to share that he was looking for old, scary movies, you know, like Halloween.
Ah, yes. All those old movies are kept in a special vault in the back, where we control the temperature and pH of the environment so that they don’t turn to instant dust in the sunlight. I gave him a list of recommendations and sent him on his way.
In the meantime, the phone had been ringing and I let it go to voice mail. Once the boys were served, I checked the message and wished for some more wild goose chases by pre-teen boys to keep me busy rather than the request from this patron.
“Hi. Um, I need some information about how to get electricity to a building outside my home. Like, how do I run the wiring? Do I have to use plastic or [mumble, mumble]… so if you could just call me back and let me know how to do this, I’d appreciate it. My number is [whatever].”
No name. Just do all my electrical research for me and give me a call back when you have it.
So I called the number.
“Hi, I’m calling from the library, returning…someone’s phone call from a few minutes ago.”
The woman who answered said, “Oh, hello. Let me just put you on hold for a minute and get the person who called you.”
Oooooh, big identity secret! I get it. No names please. I don’t want to be subpoenaed when you blow up your shed!
He finally got on the phone and said, “Hi, I’m the one who called.”
What the hell is with the anonymity? Don’t they know I’m a librarian? Don’t they know I can just look them up by phone number and find out who they are? Don’t they know I have already researched their public records and know how much their house is worth, what their criminal record shows, and I’m currently trying to hack into their medical records? Don’t they know I have LexisNexis connections and I know their life story? Don’t they know that I have already stolen their identity and am currently booking a flight to Indonesia so I can see these Rice Terraces close up?????
Ahem. Anyway.
I started explaining to the caller that we have some older books on electrical codes, some do-it-yourself manuals, and a few other things that will likely cover most his questions, but for local ordinances I have no current information.
I could hear the disappointment in his voice. He was expecting a phone call with step-by-step instructions on how to electrify his backyard porn studio without him having to get up off his recliner. For something this important, particularly when there are wires, codes, laws, and electrical currents involved, you probably shouldn’t rely on a book-y librarian to give you all the information you need on this subject. It always amazes me when a man wants to do things himself, but he wants someone else to do all the digging, prepping and legwork for the projects. Glory whore.
Which is much different from a glory hole, but not by too much, so suddenly I was envisioning him constructing his porn studio with multiple rooms to accommodate all the pervy minions he serves as their Big Daddy.
Without missing a beat, I encouraged him to come into the library and do some of the research in the books I was recommending, and also to call the local village to find out about local ordinances for buildingporn studios outside structures.
He sighed and said, “I was hoping to avoid having to make a trip over there.”
I apologized and told him I simply couldn’t research his building project for him, but the books were on the shelf if he wanted me to set them aside for him.
He signed deeply again and said not to bother.
I guess building a den of sin takes more work than he anticipated. Involving the local library in this construction was an interesting thought, though. Namelessly, I should add. Perhaps if I’d been extended an invite to the grand opening, I might have been more generous. Alas, it’s in his hands now. Unless it’s somewhere else… nevermind.
About twenty minutes later, I was helping someone with a printing problem and in walks a regular patron of ours, looking quite intense.
He’s one of those holy-rolling, preachy men, who only will watch movies rated G, because PG-ratings these days let downright obscene content and language pass. Once he asked me if there was anything disgusting in the movie Big, with Tom Hanks, and I remembered enjoying that movie immensely (despite the fact that Tom Hanks was the star) and I said it was a sweet, funny movie. Later he came in and scolded me for recommending it, saying it was so offensive and sexual in content that he could not finish the entire movie. This is the man who called about the electrical wiring, who I had, without knowing it was him (because no, I hadn’t researched him and stolen his identity, which I’m starting to think I should have) assumed he was building a smokehouse for a neighborhood sausage-fest. Somehow, it all made sense.
Sunday.
To some this day means something.
To me, it’s just a day when I have to deal with the lunatics all by myself.
Just when I got complacent about the lazy afternoon I was spending at work, two kids walked up to me. The first was looking for information on the Banaue Rice Terraces, which is obscure enough not to have entries in any encyclopedia we own or databases we subscribe to, so I resorted to the evil and distrusted internet for this boy’s research. If his teacher has something against Wikipedia or a few dot-coms, then this boy is going to get a big, fat F on his assignment.
Yet, on the plus side, I learned about the Banaue Rice Terraces, which are fucking fascinating, and I’d love to see them before they are destroyed.
Put the Phillippines on my list, Jeeves. And stop by a gas station so I can pick up some lottery tickets, too, please.
The other boy, who waited semi-patiently, was looking for a recommendation for a good movie. That’s all he gave me to go on. I thought about telling him to watch the DVD I recently watched and loved, Earth: the Biography, but I didn’t figure he’d appreciate that. Finally I got him to share that he was looking for old, scary movies, you know, like Halloween.
Ah, yes. All those old movies are kept in a special vault in the back, where we control the temperature and pH of the environment so that they don’t turn to instant dust in the sunlight. I gave him a list of recommendations and sent him on his way.
In the meantime, the phone had been ringing and I let it go to voice mail. Once the boys were served, I checked the message and wished for some more wild goose chases by pre-teen boys to keep me busy rather than the request from this patron.
“Hi. Um, I need some information about how to get electricity to a building outside my home. Like, how do I run the wiring? Do I have to use plastic or [mumble, mumble]… so if you could just call me back and let me know how to do this, I’d appreciate it. My number is [whatever].”
No name. Just do all my electrical research for me and give me a call back when you have it.
So I called the number.
“Hi, I’m calling from the library, returning…someone’s phone call from a few minutes ago.”
The woman who answered said, “Oh, hello. Let me just put you on hold for a minute and get the person who called you.”
Oooooh, big identity secret! I get it. No names please. I don’t want to be subpoenaed when you blow up your shed!
He finally got on the phone and said, “Hi, I’m the one who called.”
What the hell is with the anonymity? Don’t they know I’m a librarian? Don’t they know I can just look them up by phone number and find out who they are? Don’t they know I have already researched their public records and know how much their house is worth, what their criminal record shows, and I’m currently trying to hack into their medical records? Don’t they know I have LexisNexis connections and I know their life story? Don’t they know that I have already stolen their identity and am currently booking a flight to Indonesia so I can see these Rice Terraces close up?????
Ahem. Anyway.
I started explaining to the caller that we have some older books on electrical codes, some do-it-yourself manuals, and a few other things that will likely cover most his questions, but for local ordinances I have no current information.
I could hear the disappointment in his voice. He was expecting a phone call with step-by-step instructions on how to electrify his backyard porn studio without him having to get up off his recliner. For something this important, particularly when there are wires, codes, laws, and electrical currents involved, you probably shouldn’t rely on a book-y librarian to give you all the information you need on this subject. It always amazes me when a man wants to do things himself, but he wants someone else to do all the digging, prepping and legwork for the projects. Glory whore.
Which is much different from a glory hole, but not by too much, so suddenly I was envisioning him constructing his porn studio with multiple rooms to accommodate all the pervy minions he serves as their Big Daddy.
Without missing a beat, I encouraged him to come into the library and do some of the research in the books I was recommending, and also to call the local village to find out about local ordinances for building
He sighed and said, “I was hoping to avoid having to make a trip over there.”
I apologized and told him I simply couldn’t research his building project for him, but the books were on the shelf if he wanted me to set them aside for him.
He signed deeply again and said not to bother.
I guess building a den of sin takes more work than he anticipated. Involving the local library in this construction was an interesting thought, though. Namelessly, I should add. Perhaps if I’d been extended an invite to the grand opening, I might have been more generous. Alas, it’s in his hands now. Unless it’s somewhere else… nevermind.
About twenty minutes later, I was helping someone with a printing problem and in walks a regular patron of ours, looking quite intense.
He’s one of those holy-rolling, preachy men, who only will watch movies rated G, because PG-ratings these days let downright obscene content and language pass. Once he asked me if there was anything disgusting in the movie Big, with Tom Hanks, and I remembered enjoying that movie immensely (despite the fact that Tom Hanks was the star) and I said it was a sweet, funny movie. Later he came in and scolded me for recommending it, saying it was so offensive and sexual in content that he could not finish the entire movie. This is the man who called about the electrical wiring, who I had, without knowing it was him (because no, I hadn’t researched him and stolen his identity, which I’m starting to think I should have) assumed he was building a smokehouse for a neighborhood sausage-fest. Somehow, it all made sense.
Sunday.
To some this day means something.
To me, it’s just a day when I have to deal with the lunatics all by myself.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Quit Momming Me!
For some reason, my library employs a lot of moms. I don’t just mean women who have children, but that personality flaw that causes these uterus-active ladies to treat everyone around them like they are parental to us. Thanks, but not only do I have a mom already, I have enough female bosses who are condescending, and I really don’t need people who do not have any authority over me to be treating me like they exist to guide me in the ways of being a responsible person.
One of the moms frequently sends out an inordinate number of emails making announcements about various staff members she deals with. Each email doesn’t just announce something, but it guides us in how to react to this announcement, like we’re all retards who didn’t know we should probably congratulate the recent graduates or wish a fond farewell to the departing employees.
We receive things that are worded like this:
“Today is Barbara-Ann’s last day. She will be off to college for her senior year. Please wish her well in the school year before her shift ends today.”
Maybe the momming brings out the juvenile in me, but my instant reaction is to say, “No. You can’t make me.”
Recently, one of our employees had a baby. A joyous event for her, I’m sure, but pretty much meh for me. I hardly know the woman and babies just don’t interest me at all. In fact, I regard pregnancy as a parasitic infection that results in having to care for the parasite for the remainder of your life. It really baffles me why people celebrate this, but I recognize that I’m fairly unique in my view of how very uninteresting it is when someone has a child, and I try to pretend to care when they’re around. Or I avoid them.
Anyway, there were no fewer than three greeting cards that went around for us to sign, from baby shower to birth, in addition to these patronizing emails announcing that we should sign these cards for our beloved coworker, and wish her the appropriate greetings. Why didn’t she just fill it out for us? Would I be on her shit list if I didn’t sign the card in the way she instructed? What if I signed the card and didn’t congratulate her? What if I accidentally forgot my instructions to congratulate her on her parasite, panicked, and instead wrote “Happy Birthday”? Well, I can only imagine the chastisement I’d get! Clearly more detailed instructions would follow in subsequent emails.
“Monday is Marcus’ birthday. There is a card on my desk for him. Please sign the card with only wishes of a happy birthday and do not deviate from the topic at hand. Do not take up more than three lines or use permanent marker. Do not write in another language because Marcus only speaks English. Wait for the ink to dry before closing the card again. Be respectful. Use proper spelling and grammar. Do not write with letters that would be larger than 24 font if in a document. And make sure you don’t leave any dirt or grease stains on the card of envelope. Thank you for following instructions to the letter.”
Why do these women feel compelled to give us instructions on how to be human? Are we that animalistic that they can’t possibly leave it up to our uncivilized tendencies to address important events with the right words? What the hell do these moms say about us behind our backs?
“Did you hear what so-and-so said to Mrs. Smith yesterday?”
“No, what?”
“So-and-so helped Mrs. Smith print something out, and when Mrs. Smith thanked her, instead of saying ‘you’re welcome’, she said, ‘no problem.’ How rude is that?!”
“Oh yeah? Well, I heard you-know-who today refer to a couple at a computer as ‘you guys’, and it was a man AND a woman. She called them ‘you GUYS!’ And worst of all, you should have SEEN her posture! She might as well have had a hunchback!”
“Unbelievable. Someone needs to teach these people about proper work etiquette.”
“Let’s do it! If I can potty-train my stubborn toddler, I can teach these people how to use fewer colloquialisms and actually make us proud.”
“It’s a daunting challenge. But if my teenager ever talked the way some of my coworkers do, I’d sent him right to military school.”
“But it has to be subtle, so they don’t complain. Let’s give them polite instructions in emails whenever we address something.”
“Yes, we need to guide them without it being too overt. Invite them to participate in something so they feel included, but then tell them exactly what’s expected of them, so they know how to behave.”
“Exactly. They can’t be trusted on their own at this point.”
I just want to gather up these moms and strangle them. While using bad posture. And speaking in slang. And wearing dirty underwear.
One of the moms frequently sends out an inordinate number of emails making announcements about various staff members she deals with. Each email doesn’t just announce something, but it guides us in how to react to this announcement, like we’re all retards who didn’t know we should probably congratulate the recent graduates or wish a fond farewell to the departing employees.
We receive things that are worded like this:
“Today is Barbara-Ann’s last day. She will be off to college for her senior year. Please wish her well in the school year before her shift ends today.”
Maybe the momming brings out the juvenile in me, but my instant reaction is to say, “No. You can’t make me.”
Recently, one of our employees had a baby. A joyous event for her, I’m sure, but pretty much meh for me. I hardly know the woman and babies just don’t interest me at all. In fact, I regard pregnancy as a parasitic infection that results in having to care for the parasite for the remainder of your life. It really baffles me why people celebrate this, but I recognize that I’m fairly unique in my view of how very uninteresting it is when someone has a child, and I try to pretend to care when they’re around. Or I avoid them.
Anyway, there were no fewer than three greeting cards that went around for us to sign, from baby shower to birth, in addition to these patronizing emails announcing that we should sign these cards for our beloved coworker, and wish her the appropriate greetings. Why didn’t she just fill it out for us? Would I be on her shit list if I didn’t sign the card in the way she instructed? What if I signed the card and didn’t congratulate her? What if I accidentally forgot my instructions to congratulate her on her parasite, panicked, and instead wrote “Happy Birthday”? Well, I can only imagine the chastisement I’d get! Clearly more detailed instructions would follow in subsequent emails.
“Monday is Marcus’ birthday. There is a card on my desk for him. Please sign the card with only wishes of a happy birthday and do not deviate from the topic at hand. Do not take up more than three lines or use permanent marker. Do not write in another language because Marcus only speaks English. Wait for the ink to dry before closing the card again. Be respectful. Use proper spelling and grammar. Do not write with letters that would be larger than 24 font if in a document. And make sure you don’t leave any dirt or grease stains on the card of envelope. Thank you for following instructions to the letter.”
Why do these women feel compelled to give us instructions on how to be human? Are we that animalistic that they can’t possibly leave it up to our uncivilized tendencies to address important events with the right words? What the hell do these moms say about us behind our backs?
“Did you hear what so-and-so said to Mrs. Smith yesterday?”
“No, what?”
“So-and-so helped Mrs. Smith print something out, and when Mrs. Smith thanked her, instead of saying ‘you’re welcome’, she said, ‘no problem.’ How rude is that?!”
“Oh yeah? Well, I heard you-know-who today refer to a couple at a computer as ‘you guys’, and it was a man AND a woman. She called them ‘you GUYS!’ And worst of all, you should have SEEN her posture! She might as well have had a hunchback!”
“Unbelievable. Someone needs to teach these people about proper work etiquette.”
“Let’s do it! If I can potty-train my stubborn toddler, I can teach these people how to use fewer colloquialisms and actually make us proud.”
“It’s a daunting challenge. But if my teenager ever talked the way some of my coworkers do, I’d sent him right to military school.”
“But it has to be subtle, so they don’t complain. Let’s give them polite instructions in emails whenever we address something.”
“Yes, we need to guide them without it being too overt. Invite them to participate in something so they feel included, but then tell them exactly what’s expected of them, so they know how to behave.”
“Exactly. They can’t be trusted on their own at this point.”
I just want to gather up these moms and strangle them. While using bad posture. And speaking in slang. And wearing dirty underwear.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
It Wasn't Even a Monday
She said to me, “Aw, you don’t look pretty today. Too bad.”
Yes, that was my greeting from what I would ordinarily have considered a friendly patron.
I shouldn’t be so offended because this comes on the heels of her making such a huge deal about how pretty she said I looked the other day, when I was in a fairy costume for a program. Evidently, I should always have pink flowers in my hair, a low-cut shirt and a glittery skirt on, because otherwise the disparity compels her to tell me I’m not pretty today.
Pshaw, she should’ve seen me when I woke up this morning.
Yes, that was my greeting from what I would ordinarily have considered a friendly patron.
I shouldn’t be so offended because this comes on the heels of her making such a huge deal about how pretty she said I looked the other day, when I was in a fairy costume for a program. Evidently, I should always have pink flowers in my hair, a low-cut shirt and a glittery skirt on, because otherwise the disparity compels her to tell me I’m not pretty today.
Pshaw, she should’ve seen me when I woke up this morning.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Phone Misuse
A woman approached my desk and I could tell right away that she was hard of hearing. Aside from her audio assault, she required me to nearly scream back at her when I responded. These encounters drive me nuts because I hate to shout in a quiet and empty library.
She roared, “I HAVE A CALL ON MY CALLER ID FROM THE LIBRARY, BUT I’M NOT SURE WHY ANYONE CALLED ME. THE GIRL AT THE OTHER DESK SAID I DON’T HAVE ANY HOLDS IN. DO YOU KNOW WHY THEY CALLED ME?”
I answered, “We don’t usually—“
She pushed, “WHAT?!?”
I tried again, “WE DON’T USUALLY CALL PATRONS FROM THIS DESK UNLESS YOU’RE EXPECTING US TO CALL YOU WITH AN ANSWER TO A QUESTION. WERE YOU EXPECTING A CALL FROM US?”
She yelled, “I ORDERED A BOOK, BUT THEY SAY IT’S NOT IN YET. I DON’T KNOW WHY ANYONE WOULD CALL ME.”
I said, “Was there a message?”
She hollered, “WHAT?!?”
“WAS THERE A MESSAGE?”
“YES. BUT I DIDN’T CHECK IT. DO YOU THINK I SHOULD CHECK IT?”
No, ma’am, I really think it’s probably quite smart that you saw the Caller ID register a call from the library, so you got into your car, drove over, and began bellowing at every staff member you encountered about this mystery call, because there’s no better way of getting to the bottom of a Caller ID call than confronting the 50 people who might have placed that call from the public library in your neighborhood. And really, since we all don’t work at the same time, you should probably hang around and scream at each person from each shift, for at least the next few days, if not weeks, until you’ve loudly interviewed all the staff and get to the bottom of this. Voice mail exists for people who aren’t into thorough investigating like you, ma’am. Someone with as much attention to detail as yourself should be rewarded with a live and very vociferous conversation about the very same thing they already left on your voice mail. Why should you listen to a message when you can interrogate the library staff and totally disturb the entire building? Please, do us all a favor and just deactivate the voice mail so that we may have the pleasure of these intelligent and practical encounters. Please.
Once the screaming lady checked her voice mail and found out that the message was regarding something she ordered that we were unable to obtain for her, she smiled and loudly announced she had her answer and could leave now.
Bummer. I was starting to hope I’d have to yell at her all afternoon and pretend not to be irritated with her inability to use her head.
Then I was greeted with one of my least favorite patrons, Bertha. Bertha is one of those women who is sizable as well as malicious, which makes her quite intimidating and difficult to get rid of. Last week she infuriated a coworkers who is probably one of the most unflappable of our staff, all because Bertha saw her helping another patron, walked right up to her, interrupted her, and asked her to find something for her. She was in the middle of speaking, and Bertha touched her and started talking over her, to stop her so she’d answer her question instead. Well, it didn’t work, and she told Bertha to wait until she was done. Bertha was so offended that she wasn’t helped immediately, that she stood next to her with her arms crossed over he chest, sighing and shifting her weight impatiently. Bertha is not someone who takes no for an answer.
My first encounter with Bertha almost resulted in having to call the police because she would not accept that her card had fines on it and wasn’t usable until she cleared up her bills. She had her two very sizable and malicious sons with her, and the three of them were leaning on my desk, yelling at me, calling me names, telling me I was too stupid to be of any use to anyone. She was asked to leave and she had a few choice words to shout as she walked out, too.
I’m no fan of hers.
So, when she approached my desk today, I knew I was probably going to need backup.
Bertha said, “Honey, I need a phone. Where can I use a phone?”
I recommended the pay phone in the lobby, but Bertha swore she hadn’t a penny to use it. Then I suggested she make a collect phone call.
She got animated and said, “Look, I don’t have a cell phone or any money to call anyone, but I just got this email from someone about a job, and I need to call about this job so I can work! Okay? Do you understand how important this is? I can’t be calling a future boss collect! Who would hire me?”
I told her I understood, but that the telephone at my desk was strictly for library staff to use, and only in an emergency could someone else use it.
Bertha insisted, “This is an emergency! I need a job!”
I apologized and said that it was actually a personal call, not an emergency, and I couldn’t let people use my phone for their personal calls. I asked if she had a friend, family member, neighbor, or anyone who had a phone she could use, and she insisted that she had to make this phone call right that minute or risk losing this job opportunity.
This is when the battle in my head began.
Would I deny this phone use to anyone else, or is it because it’s Bertha that I’m so staunchly opposed to letting her use it?
Would it do me more good to let her use the phone and go away than to deny it and fight with her, possibly having to bring in someone else who might just let her use the phone and make me look like a vulvahead?
Am I overstepping myself and trying to teach her some kind of lesson about her expectations of limitless services offered by the library and its staff?
Would someone else let her use the phone for this reason?
When I broke it down, I figured there was SOMEONE on staff who would likely agree to let her make the phone call, so it might as well be me. And that’s what did it, surprisingly: the refusal to be overridden by someone who is a spineless pushover. So, dummy that I am, I let myself be the biggest pushover because I didn’t want to be the biggest bitch.
I sternly cautioned, “I’m going to let you do it this time, and only this time, and the call must be very brief. Don’t expect anyone else on staff to ever do anything like this for you, either, because I guarantee it won’t happen.”
She thanked me and I dialed her number.
Then I sat there and listened to a 3-minute job interview over the phone, which involved Bertha telling this man on the phone, who she repeatedly called “Honey”, “Sweetie” and “Dear,” what a wonderful worker she is. She talked up all her extensive office experience and people skills, which caused me to have to turn my back quickly so as not to laugh loudly enough for her interviewer to hear. She didn’t even set up a real interview with the man. It seemed she had overreacted to the email and called right away to thank him for responding to her. He must have said he’d contact her to set up an interview, and she assured him that the phone number she provided belonged to her nephew, but that he would relay any message to her quickly. She thanked him and called him a pet name again.
As she was ending the phone call, she said, “I really look forward to hearing from you. I think it would be so wonderful to work at O’Hare Airport and I hope you call soon.”
Yeah, she’s exactly the type of person we need at O’Hare. The unfriendly skies are about to get unfriendlier, I fear. Between the craziness of all the reports of family members who PICK UP or DROP OFF a traveler to be required to have all of their proper immigration papers on them just for stepping into the airport itself, and ridiculous rules about nail clippers and three ounces of fluid, with constant flashing signs about the terrorism alert levels being high, why the hell not hire Bertha to work there too? It’s not like traveling by plane is a pleasant experience anyway. Why not just require passengers to hack off an appendage so that they are duly miserable during their flight? Break a rib, voluntarily sodomize yourself with a rolled up newspaper, or deal with Bertha in some capacity on your way to your destination – it’s all the same. Bertha could actually cut out some body fluid cleanup by just inflicting herself on people, and then more people would hate to fly. That sounds like a fabulous idea. That’s what the airlines are trying to do, right? Yeah, Bertha will fit right in.
In a year, Chicago will be the Leader of Staycations.
She roared, “I HAVE A CALL ON MY CALLER ID FROM THE LIBRARY, BUT I’M NOT SURE WHY ANYONE CALLED ME. THE GIRL AT THE OTHER DESK SAID I DON’T HAVE ANY HOLDS IN. DO YOU KNOW WHY THEY CALLED ME?”
I answered, “We don’t usually—“
She pushed, “WHAT?!?”
I tried again, “WE DON’T USUALLY CALL PATRONS FROM THIS DESK UNLESS YOU’RE EXPECTING US TO CALL YOU WITH AN ANSWER TO A QUESTION. WERE YOU EXPECTING A CALL FROM US?”
She yelled, “I ORDERED A BOOK, BUT THEY SAY IT’S NOT IN YET. I DON’T KNOW WHY ANYONE WOULD CALL ME.”
I said, “Was there a message?”
She hollered, “WHAT?!?”
“WAS THERE A MESSAGE?”
“YES. BUT I DIDN’T CHECK IT. DO YOU THINK I SHOULD CHECK IT?”
No, ma’am, I really think it’s probably quite smart that you saw the Caller ID register a call from the library, so you got into your car, drove over, and began bellowing at every staff member you encountered about this mystery call, because there’s no better way of getting to the bottom of a Caller ID call than confronting the 50 people who might have placed that call from the public library in your neighborhood. And really, since we all don’t work at the same time, you should probably hang around and scream at each person from each shift, for at least the next few days, if not weeks, until you’ve loudly interviewed all the staff and get to the bottom of this. Voice mail exists for people who aren’t into thorough investigating like you, ma’am. Someone with as much attention to detail as yourself should be rewarded with a live and very vociferous conversation about the very same thing they already left on your voice mail. Why should you listen to a message when you can interrogate the library staff and totally disturb the entire building? Please, do us all a favor and just deactivate the voice mail so that we may have the pleasure of these intelligent and practical encounters. Please.
Once the screaming lady checked her voice mail and found out that the message was regarding something she ordered that we were unable to obtain for her, she smiled and loudly announced she had her answer and could leave now.
Bummer. I was starting to hope I’d have to yell at her all afternoon and pretend not to be irritated with her inability to use her head.
Then I was greeted with one of my least favorite patrons, Bertha. Bertha is one of those women who is sizable as well as malicious, which makes her quite intimidating and difficult to get rid of. Last week she infuriated a coworkers who is probably one of the most unflappable of our staff, all because Bertha saw her helping another patron, walked right up to her, interrupted her, and asked her to find something for her. She was in the middle of speaking, and Bertha touched her and started talking over her, to stop her so she’d answer her question instead. Well, it didn’t work, and she told Bertha to wait until she was done. Bertha was so offended that she wasn’t helped immediately, that she stood next to her with her arms crossed over he chest, sighing and shifting her weight impatiently. Bertha is not someone who takes no for an answer.
My first encounter with Bertha almost resulted in having to call the police because she would not accept that her card had fines on it and wasn’t usable until she cleared up her bills. She had her two very sizable and malicious sons with her, and the three of them were leaning on my desk, yelling at me, calling me names, telling me I was too stupid to be of any use to anyone. She was asked to leave and she had a few choice words to shout as she walked out, too.
I’m no fan of hers.
So, when she approached my desk today, I knew I was probably going to need backup.
Bertha said, “Honey, I need a phone. Where can I use a phone?”
I recommended the pay phone in the lobby, but Bertha swore she hadn’t a penny to use it. Then I suggested she make a collect phone call.
She got animated and said, “Look, I don’t have a cell phone or any money to call anyone, but I just got this email from someone about a job, and I need to call about this job so I can work! Okay? Do you understand how important this is? I can’t be calling a future boss collect! Who would hire me?”
I told her I understood, but that the telephone at my desk was strictly for library staff to use, and only in an emergency could someone else use it.
Bertha insisted, “This is an emergency! I need a job!”
I apologized and said that it was actually a personal call, not an emergency, and I couldn’t let people use my phone for their personal calls. I asked if she had a friend, family member, neighbor, or anyone who had a phone she could use, and she insisted that she had to make this phone call right that minute or risk losing this job opportunity.
This is when the battle in my head began.
Would I deny this phone use to anyone else, or is it because it’s Bertha that I’m so staunchly opposed to letting her use it?
Would it do me more good to let her use the phone and go away than to deny it and fight with her, possibly having to bring in someone else who might just let her use the phone and make me look like a vulvahead?
Am I overstepping myself and trying to teach her some kind of lesson about her expectations of limitless services offered by the library and its staff?
Would someone else let her use the phone for this reason?
When I broke it down, I figured there was SOMEONE on staff who would likely agree to let her make the phone call, so it might as well be me. And that’s what did it, surprisingly: the refusal to be overridden by someone who is a spineless pushover. So, dummy that I am, I let myself be the biggest pushover because I didn’t want to be the biggest bitch.
I sternly cautioned, “I’m going to let you do it this time, and only this time, and the call must be very brief. Don’t expect anyone else on staff to ever do anything like this for you, either, because I guarantee it won’t happen.”
She thanked me and I dialed her number.
Then I sat there and listened to a 3-minute job interview over the phone, which involved Bertha telling this man on the phone, who she repeatedly called “Honey”, “Sweetie” and “Dear,” what a wonderful worker she is. She talked up all her extensive office experience and people skills, which caused me to have to turn my back quickly so as not to laugh loudly enough for her interviewer to hear. She didn’t even set up a real interview with the man. It seemed she had overreacted to the email and called right away to thank him for responding to her. He must have said he’d contact her to set up an interview, and she assured him that the phone number she provided belonged to her nephew, but that he would relay any message to her quickly. She thanked him and called him a pet name again.
As she was ending the phone call, she said, “I really look forward to hearing from you. I think it would be so wonderful to work at O’Hare Airport and I hope you call soon.”
Yeah, she’s exactly the type of person we need at O’Hare. The unfriendly skies are about to get unfriendlier, I fear. Between the craziness of all the reports of family members who PICK UP or DROP OFF a traveler to be required to have all of their proper immigration papers on them just for stepping into the airport itself, and ridiculous rules about nail clippers and three ounces of fluid, with constant flashing signs about the terrorism alert levels being high, why the hell not hire Bertha to work there too? It’s not like traveling by plane is a pleasant experience anyway. Why not just require passengers to hack off an appendage so that they are duly miserable during their flight? Break a rib, voluntarily sodomize yourself with a rolled up newspaper, or deal with Bertha in some capacity on your way to your destination – it’s all the same. Bertha could actually cut out some body fluid cleanup by just inflicting herself on people, and then more people would hate to fly. That sounds like a fabulous idea. That’s what the airlines are trying to do, right? Yeah, Bertha will fit right in.
In a year, Chicago will be the Leader of Staycations.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Saturday, Bloody Saturday
It was one of those Saturdays when the library could have run itself. Maybe 40 patrons wandered in and out of the building throughout the day, but only five approached a staff member for help, while the rest were self-sufficient. Eight hours of sitting in an uncomfortable chair, looking up enthusiastically at each and every face that approached the desk, only to greeted with a smile as everyone rounded toward the public computers or found their own material. It was suitably a day when I worried about job security and the obsolescence of my position. On top of that, there were two of us sitting there for those eight hours, trying very hard to stay awake.
It’s days like this that I think the little things are going to make me lose my mind.
One of the first people through the door that morning was a young man of about 19 who frequently parks himself in front of a public computer for most of the day, and it was no different yesterday. However, either he had a cold or ragweed season has officially plunged him into runny-nose misery, because the silence of a Saturday morning library was interrupted every five seconds by his thick, mucus-y sniffling. He was using the back of his own hand to wipe snot from his nose at regular intervals, after a handful of viscous sniffles, and the chorus of nasal activity was starting to develop a pattern. This went on for an hour and a half before I had to excuse myself from the desk to escape the maddening desire to bean him with a box of Kleenex.
I strolled out to the circulation desk and told my tale of sniffly woes to the clerks, who trumped me straight away, as usual.
A woman had just walked up to one of the clerks with her library card in her mouth, and then plucked the contaminated device from her dark, wet, germ-hole to hand to the clerk.
This is so common an occurrence that each clerk has his/her their own way of dealing with it. Some try hard to touch the card only where it wasn’t touched by the mouth, and others will just suggest the patron set the card down on the desk, whereupon any library card number can be read and typed into the computer by hand. The clerk who received the mouth card yesterday morning was so sick of people doing this to her that she reached around behind her and grabbed a tissue, which she used to hold the card.
The patron was not embarrassed by the position she put the clerk in -- she was actually offended that the clerk would refuse to touch her wet card.
“What are you doing that for?” she demanded.
The clerk replied, “Well, you had it in your mouth, and I didn’t really want to touch it.”
The indignant patron then shocked everyone by saying, “So what? I’m just going to put it into my wallet and pull it back out next week, and you think it’s going to get clean between now and then? No. I’m going to hand it to you, and it will still have been in my mouth a few days earlier, and you think you’re going to be any safer if you didn’t see me put it in there?”
These are the patrons you wish to put some kind of flag on their accounts so that others will know to put on biohazard suits before dealing with them, but the rub is that you have to touch and scan their cards before you will reach the flag on the account.
No one knew quite what to say to this rude patron, who happened to be right, because we all know disgusting people are, with little or no regard for the rest of the world.
After lunch, two of our regulars paid us a visit. They are the quintessential embodiment of what you would picture if siblings had sex and produced offspring. 21-year-old twin girls, with some mental, physical and maturity handicaps, dirt poor, uncouth, uneducated, unwashed, and unaware that we call them The Beasts.
They asked for two computers, and because they owe the library so much in fines, I had to put them on the temporary computers five feet from the reference desk. With so few other patrons in the building, they were able to use these computers for about two hours before we finally booted them off. What caused us to boot them off had nothing to do with demand for the machines, either.
Somehow, they always have money for snacks, and they bring bags of candy and potato chips, along with their preferred soda brand out to the computers. The twin nearest our desk was grazing steadily from the moment she arrived, and each time she took a swig of her pop, she let out this manly, vulgar belch, and then promptly said, “Excuse me.” It was as if she’d given herself license to behave in any ill-mannered way in public, as long as she excused herself afterward. In a library where patrons were scarce and the loudest noise we could hear was the hum of the air conditioning, the frequent burping was starting to get on my nerves.
I have a relatively short fuse when it comes to the little things, but I can deal with a huge crisis in a state of calm and clear-headedness, and never worry I’m going to have a meltdown. The Beasts were by no means a crisis, but I could feel my tension building as I looked around for some office supplies I could maim them with.
My partner at the desk, who sat closer to them than I did, sent me a quick email stating that he’d had enough of them, that he found their behavior to be so fucking disgusting that he was kicking them off the computers. I wrote back and thanked him for acting, explaining that I was worried they were only driving me nuts and no one else. He jotted an email back that said he could smell the odor every time Beast #1 burped, and it was making him sick.
With that, he put reserves on their computers that would time-out their sessions in just a few minutes, and he announced he had to step away from the desk for a few minutes. I told him to take his time, and then proceeded to turn on the fan, because the most recent burp’s odor was wafting my way now.
The Beasts were oblivious to the offense they caused, and when their computers ran out of time, they simply left.
I swear, for the remainder of the day I still smelled the stench of their post-chewed food, mixed with gastric juice, belched up and shared with the world.
Saturdays like these are uncommon, and given that school starts on Monday, I’m assuming we won’t see another for about ten months.
Good riddance!
It’s days like this that I think the little things are going to make me lose my mind.
One of the first people through the door that morning was a young man of about 19 who frequently parks himself in front of a public computer for most of the day, and it was no different yesterday. However, either he had a cold or ragweed season has officially plunged him into runny-nose misery, because the silence of a Saturday morning library was interrupted every five seconds by his thick, mucus-y sniffling. He was using the back of his own hand to wipe snot from his nose at regular intervals, after a handful of viscous sniffles, and the chorus of nasal activity was starting to develop a pattern. This went on for an hour and a half before I had to excuse myself from the desk to escape the maddening desire to bean him with a box of Kleenex.
I strolled out to the circulation desk and told my tale of sniffly woes to the clerks, who trumped me straight away, as usual.
A woman had just walked up to one of the clerks with her library card in her mouth, and then plucked the contaminated device from her dark, wet, germ-hole to hand to the clerk.
This is so common an occurrence that each clerk has his/her their own way of dealing with it. Some try hard to touch the card only where it wasn’t touched by the mouth, and others will just suggest the patron set the card down on the desk, whereupon any library card number can be read and typed into the computer by hand. The clerk who received the mouth card yesterday morning was so sick of people doing this to her that she reached around behind her and grabbed a tissue, which she used to hold the card.
The patron was not embarrassed by the position she put the clerk in -- she was actually offended that the clerk would refuse to touch her wet card.
“What are you doing that for?” she demanded.
The clerk replied, “Well, you had it in your mouth, and I didn’t really want to touch it.”
The indignant patron then shocked everyone by saying, “So what? I’m just going to put it into my wallet and pull it back out next week, and you think it’s going to get clean between now and then? No. I’m going to hand it to you, and it will still have been in my mouth a few days earlier, and you think you’re going to be any safer if you didn’t see me put it in there?”
These are the patrons you wish to put some kind of flag on their accounts so that others will know to put on biohazard suits before dealing with them, but the rub is that you have to touch and scan their cards before you will reach the flag on the account.
No one knew quite what to say to this rude patron, who happened to be right, because we all know disgusting people are, with little or no regard for the rest of the world.
After lunch, two of our regulars paid us a visit. They are the quintessential embodiment of what you would picture if siblings had sex and produced offspring. 21-year-old twin girls, with some mental, physical and maturity handicaps, dirt poor, uncouth, uneducated, unwashed, and unaware that we call them The Beasts.
They asked for two computers, and because they owe the library so much in fines, I had to put them on the temporary computers five feet from the reference desk. With so few other patrons in the building, they were able to use these computers for about two hours before we finally booted them off. What caused us to boot them off had nothing to do with demand for the machines, either.
Somehow, they always have money for snacks, and they bring bags of candy and potato chips, along with their preferred soda brand out to the computers. The twin nearest our desk was grazing steadily from the moment she arrived, and each time she took a swig of her pop, she let out this manly, vulgar belch, and then promptly said, “Excuse me.” It was as if she’d given herself license to behave in any ill-mannered way in public, as long as she excused herself afterward. In a library where patrons were scarce and the loudest noise we could hear was the hum of the air conditioning, the frequent burping was starting to get on my nerves.
I have a relatively short fuse when it comes to the little things, but I can deal with a huge crisis in a state of calm and clear-headedness, and never worry I’m going to have a meltdown. The Beasts were by no means a crisis, but I could feel my tension building as I looked around for some office supplies I could maim them with.
My partner at the desk, who sat closer to them than I did, sent me a quick email stating that he’d had enough of them, that he found their behavior to be so fucking disgusting that he was kicking them off the computers. I wrote back and thanked him for acting, explaining that I was worried they were only driving me nuts and no one else. He jotted an email back that said he could smell the odor every time Beast #1 burped, and it was making him sick.
With that, he put reserves on their computers that would time-out their sessions in just a few minutes, and he announced he had to step away from the desk for a few minutes. I told him to take his time, and then proceeded to turn on the fan, because the most recent burp’s odor was wafting my way now.
The Beasts were oblivious to the offense they caused, and when their computers ran out of time, they simply left.
I swear, for the remainder of the day I still smelled the stench of their post-chewed food, mixed with gastric juice, belched up and shared with the world.
Saturdays like these are uncommon, and given that school starts on Monday, I’m assuming we won’t see another for about ten months.
Good riddance!
Monday, August 11, 2008
You Can Smell the School Year Starting Soon
Last week I found a 7-year-old using one of the unfiltered computers in the adult department.
I approached him and said, “Hi there. Can I ask you a question? How old are you?”
He said, “Seven.”
I shook my head knowingly and said, “I’m sorry, but you have to be 14 to use the computers here. You can use the computers in the youth area, though, even if you don’t have a library card with you.”
He said, “Aw hell! I can’t just use this computer?”
“No, sorry. When you’re 14 you can.”
“Shiiiiiiiiiit.”
This was when I noticed he had a tattoo. Seriously, a big black anchor tattooed on his neck. It started at the bottom of his neck, spread out down across his collarbones, and the tip dipped down into his little-boy chest. This was no lick-on tattoo, nor was it a sketch with a Sharpie. It was perfect, and a professional did it, and it actually was drawn so that the tiny lumps of his collarbones didn’t distort the image. I was in disbelief: this boy had a fucking tattoo on his neck, and on top of that, he used language as bad as my own.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that he was with a group of teens and not a parent. The teens were so irritating to me that I was considering kicking them out, even though they hadn’t done anything truly disruptive or dangerous. One girl had a horrible habit of laughing in this explosive way. It seemed she’d start off biting her lips to try to keep from making the outburst, but it would burst out anyway, and sound like BUH-haaaaaaaaaaah! Each time she did it, I asked her to keep her voice down and she would look right at me and deny doing it, even though I watched her do it. And they were runners. Excitable kids who felt the need to constantly run from one to the other, and when I told them to walk, they’d slow down to a walk, and on the return, would be sprinting past again. It was nothing overtly belligerent, just extremely irritating, and I could feel my blood pressure rising.
Not long after I announced to my partner that I was about to throw the group out, they started screaming threats to fight with another group of teens, who were quietly sitting at a computer, holding a baby. My partner called the police and I made sure the obnoxious group with the tattooed little boy left the building and did not return.
Teens with babies in the library. Other teens with a younger sibling, tattooed on his neck. Fights. Police. And it’s still summer vacation.
How do you prevent the school year from starting?
I approached him and said, “Hi there. Can I ask you a question? How old are you?”
He said, “Seven.”
I shook my head knowingly and said, “I’m sorry, but you have to be 14 to use the computers here. You can use the computers in the youth area, though, even if you don’t have a library card with you.”
He said, “Aw hell! I can’t just use this computer?”
“No, sorry. When you’re 14 you can.”
“Shiiiiiiiiiit.”
This was when I noticed he had a tattoo. Seriously, a big black anchor tattooed on his neck. It started at the bottom of his neck, spread out down across his collarbones, and the tip dipped down into his little-boy chest. This was no lick-on tattoo, nor was it a sketch with a Sharpie. It was perfect, and a professional did it, and it actually was drawn so that the tiny lumps of his collarbones didn’t distort the image. I was in disbelief: this boy had a fucking tattoo on his neck, and on top of that, he used language as bad as my own.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that he was with a group of teens and not a parent. The teens were so irritating to me that I was considering kicking them out, even though they hadn’t done anything truly disruptive or dangerous. One girl had a horrible habit of laughing in this explosive way. It seemed she’d start off biting her lips to try to keep from making the outburst, but it would burst out anyway, and sound like BUH-haaaaaaaaaaah! Each time she did it, I asked her to keep her voice down and she would look right at me and deny doing it, even though I watched her do it. And they were runners. Excitable kids who felt the need to constantly run from one to the other, and when I told them to walk, they’d slow down to a walk, and on the return, would be sprinting past again. It was nothing overtly belligerent, just extremely irritating, and I could feel my blood pressure rising.
Not long after I announced to my partner that I was about to throw the group out, they started screaming threats to fight with another group of teens, who were quietly sitting at a computer, holding a baby. My partner called the police and I made sure the obnoxious group with the tattooed little boy left the building and did not return.
Teens with babies in the library. Other teens with a younger sibling, tattooed on his neck. Fights. Police. And it’s still summer vacation.
How do you prevent the school year from starting?
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Scissor Thief
There are days when people rub me wrong, for reasons that aren’t necessarily in some kind of written etiquette guide.
For instance, recently I was at the reference desk cutting out images for a display, and a man walked past the desk, saw me using the scissors, and immediately asked if he could use them.
Does he not see that I’m in the middle of using them? No, he sees. Does he think that I’m supposed to stop mid-cut and hand him my scissors because he’s suddenly struck by the idea that he needs to borrow them for something he wasn’t even approaching me for? Yep.
This caused me to freeze and stare at him, eyes wide, scissors open and in the middle of splaying a sheet of paper. My hesitation caused him to reach across the desk, without waiting for me to respond by handing him the very utensils I was in the middle of using, without question. If my partner at the desk hadn’t reached into the drawer to offer up a different pair of scissors, I firmly believe this man would have peeled my fingers off the handle and taken the instrument from me, with me sitting there silently, slack-jawed, unable to react.
Even children know to ask if they can borrow something when I’m finished using them, or ask if I have a spare pair of scissors. This makes me wonder just how far people will go with their I-come-first demands from us.
Would they ask for the glasses off my face if their pair broke and they needed to see something?
If they spilled something on their shirt, would they ask for mine?
Could I expect someone to peel the Band-aid off my finger to place on their own in the event that they receive a papercut?
These might sound extreme, even creepy, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
I’ve had complete strangers ask if they can have a drink from my bottle of pop because they’re thirsty, or ask me for money, or for a ride somewhere. They have no qualms about violating my personal space or asking for inappropriate favors or services. Not just that, but they have actually asked me to not only break rules for them, but commit what I would consider a crime by pretending I found something on the shelf so I can waive their fines, or asking if I’d give them an item and pretend like it was damaged enough to withdraw it and give it away. They frequently ask if they can just copy a cassette or CD from another library’s set, to replace the piece they lost from an audiobook. We’re not talking about the people who take CDs home just to burn them, but people who are trying to get out of paying for damage by illegally making copies to cover it up. As if no one would notice the solitary, silver Memorex CD among eight others, with human scrawl declaring it part of the set. Why not? More than once we’ve received torn books returned to us with DUCT TAPE holding the pages together, as if this was some kind of reasonable way to mend a book without us noticing.
Just last week one of the clerks had a patron screaming at her for so long that she ended up in tears because this patron insisted vehemently that she returned an audiobook. Everyone knew she didn’t because she had so often used this tactic before, and then found the item she swore she returned, and had to fess up and pay her fine. So when the woman came into the library a few days later and was visibly hiding something and looking around suspiciously, one of the clerks followed her out to the stacks, where she was witnessed putting an audiobook onto the shelf. The clerk could see it was the very audiobook that had caused such a ruckus just a few days before, and she swiped it back off the shelf to confront the patron. The woman had scurried off to the circulation desk to demand someone check the shelves again, but the cynical clerk rounded the corner with the audiobook in hand, quick to confront her about the deception. Even though she’d been followed and someone witnessed her putting the item on the shelf, she stood there denying it, accusing the clerk of waiting for her to come in again so they could frame her like this. It’s scary what people will say and do to our employees to avoid responsibility. If three people hadn’t been involved in watching her, with one following her, I wonder if management might have actually believed this patron.
Another woman claimed that the fines on her account were not her own, but those of her bad twin sister who fraudulently used her card.
At one point last week, there was a mother and adult daughter pair who came into the library claiming they’d never lived in the area and wanted to obtain new library cards. A quick search turned up records on them from a few years earlier, with the daughter owing over $80 and the mother owing $30. Due to the hefty amount, every effort was made to verify that these were in fact the same people. The birthdays matched, the parent name in the daughter’s account matched, and the names matched, down to the unusual spelling. One of the pair had a mugshot still in the system from her last card, and the picture even matched. Still this pair claimed to have never lived in the area and to not owe anything on existing accounts. For reasons that were unclear, this pair put up such a huge fuss, screaming, swearing, demanding management, and totally disrupting the entire building, yet no one asked them to leave. They eventually left on their own, only to return shortly thereafter with a police officer. The officer wasn’t quite sure why his presence was required, and in no uncertain terms told the women that he had no authority over our records and alleged library fines, but his presence was still a bit comforting to the staff, who thought these women were nuts. For even more elusive reasons, they issued a new card to the mother only, and this pair then checked out a heap of material. Later, when the manager had all the information, she barred the new account laid down the law about these two being responsible for their previous fines.
While all these assaults are clearly serious signs of something being wrong with mankind, I do believe the man who was ready to pry my scissors out of my hand for his own personal use is somehow a greater offense. Screaming, shouting and lying are almost more normal and expected than someone who would take the very item out of your hand, without your approval. I’m not quite sure why, but that’s one of the most shocking and offensive things I’ve experienced in the library. More so than the poo. More so than the stalkers. And more so than raving lunatics.
Thankfully my partner was there to rescue us both by providing this man with his own scissors to use.
He might not have tried this if he knew about all the deaths I’ve plotted with office supplies.
For instance, recently I was at the reference desk cutting out images for a display, and a man walked past the desk, saw me using the scissors, and immediately asked if he could use them.
Does he not see that I’m in the middle of using them? No, he sees. Does he think that I’m supposed to stop mid-cut and hand him my scissors because he’s suddenly struck by the idea that he needs to borrow them for something he wasn’t even approaching me for? Yep.
This caused me to freeze and stare at him, eyes wide, scissors open and in the middle of splaying a sheet of paper. My hesitation caused him to reach across the desk, without waiting for me to respond by handing him the very utensils I was in the middle of using, without question. If my partner at the desk hadn’t reached into the drawer to offer up a different pair of scissors, I firmly believe this man would have peeled my fingers off the handle and taken the instrument from me, with me sitting there silently, slack-jawed, unable to react.
Even children know to ask if they can borrow something when I’m finished using them, or ask if I have a spare pair of scissors. This makes me wonder just how far people will go with their I-come-first demands from us.
Would they ask for the glasses off my face if their pair broke and they needed to see something?
If they spilled something on their shirt, would they ask for mine?
Could I expect someone to peel the Band-aid off my finger to place on their own in the event that they receive a papercut?
These might sound extreme, even creepy, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
I’ve had complete strangers ask if they can have a drink from my bottle of pop because they’re thirsty, or ask me for money, or for a ride somewhere. They have no qualms about violating my personal space or asking for inappropriate favors or services. Not just that, but they have actually asked me to not only break rules for them, but commit what I would consider a crime by pretending I found something on the shelf so I can waive their fines, or asking if I’d give them an item and pretend like it was damaged enough to withdraw it and give it away. They frequently ask if they can just copy a cassette or CD from another library’s set, to replace the piece they lost from an audiobook. We’re not talking about the people who take CDs home just to burn them, but people who are trying to get out of paying for damage by illegally making copies to cover it up. As if no one would notice the solitary, silver Memorex CD among eight others, with human scrawl declaring it part of the set. Why not? More than once we’ve received torn books returned to us with DUCT TAPE holding the pages together, as if this was some kind of reasonable way to mend a book without us noticing.
Just last week one of the clerks had a patron screaming at her for so long that she ended up in tears because this patron insisted vehemently that she returned an audiobook. Everyone knew she didn’t because she had so often used this tactic before, and then found the item she swore she returned, and had to fess up and pay her fine. So when the woman came into the library a few days later and was visibly hiding something and looking around suspiciously, one of the clerks followed her out to the stacks, where she was witnessed putting an audiobook onto the shelf. The clerk could see it was the very audiobook that had caused such a ruckus just a few days before, and she swiped it back off the shelf to confront the patron. The woman had scurried off to the circulation desk to demand someone check the shelves again, but the cynical clerk rounded the corner with the audiobook in hand, quick to confront her about the deception. Even though she’d been followed and someone witnessed her putting the item on the shelf, she stood there denying it, accusing the clerk of waiting for her to come in again so they could frame her like this. It’s scary what people will say and do to our employees to avoid responsibility. If three people hadn’t been involved in watching her, with one following her, I wonder if management might have actually believed this patron.
Another woman claimed that the fines on her account were not her own, but those of her bad twin sister who fraudulently used her card.
At one point last week, there was a mother and adult daughter pair who came into the library claiming they’d never lived in the area and wanted to obtain new library cards. A quick search turned up records on them from a few years earlier, with the daughter owing over $80 and the mother owing $30. Due to the hefty amount, every effort was made to verify that these were in fact the same people. The birthdays matched, the parent name in the daughter’s account matched, and the names matched, down to the unusual spelling. One of the pair had a mugshot still in the system from her last card, and the picture even matched. Still this pair claimed to have never lived in the area and to not owe anything on existing accounts. For reasons that were unclear, this pair put up such a huge fuss, screaming, swearing, demanding management, and totally disrupting the entire building, yet no one asked them to leave. They eventually left on their own, only to return shortly thereafter with a police officer. The officer wasn’t quite sure why his presence was required, and in no uncertain terms told the women that he had no authority over our records and alleged library fines, but his presence was still a bit comforting to the staff, who thought these women were nuts. For even more elusive reasons, they issued a new card to the mother only, and this pair then checked out a heap of material. Later, when the manager had all the information, she barred the new account laid down the law about these two being responsible for their previous fines.
While all these assaults are clearly serious signs of something being wrong with mankind, I do believe the man who was ready to pry my scissors out of my hand for his own personal use is somehow a greater offense. Screaming, shouting and lying are almost more normal and expected than someone who would take the very item out of your hand, without your approval. I’m not quite sure why, but that’s one of the most shocking and offensive things I’ve experienced in the library. More so than the poo. More so than the stalkers. And more so than raving lunatics.
Thankfully my partner was there to rescue us both by providing this man with his own scissors to use.
He might not have tried this if he knew about all the deaths I’ve plotted with office supplies.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Skanky Fungal is Not So Fun
At my library, when someone asks you if you noticed “that skanky girl”, you have to wait, because there must be more information to accompany that, otherwise the possibilities are endless.
It could’ve been the African American girl who used to be pretty until she hit puberty, and now she wears shorts that go straight up her rectum. It must take a while to wedge the denim in there, but she is devoted. She also has a relatively small chest compared with her larger hips, but this does not stop her from walking with her back so arched that she does a better job of pushing her ribs out where her boobies are lacking. I bet her back aches by the end of the day. Today she had on a purple T-shirt that was so small, both vertically and horizontally, that I suspected she stole the shirt from a baby sister. (Emphasis on the baby.) I’m not even going to talk about all the lavender, glitter makeup.
Or it could’ve been the young woman in the pink, rhinestone-studded T-shirt, which, thankfully, was longer than the purple T-shirt of the other girl. “Thankfully” because her jeans were so tight and hung so low, that her muffin-top turned into a muffin-landslide. She had muffin overflowing in places I didn’t know muffins grew. I’m telling you, these pants were tight. I noticed her because she had about 30 keychains on the spiked belt that seemed to facilitate the valiant attempt to keep these pants on her body. They were not built for her. They were not built for someone 30 pounds lighter than her (and she wasn’t overweight). They were built for someone probably 8 years younger than her. She was a prime example of why stretch denim should be outlawed. This fabric does not make it okay to buy clothes six sizes too small.
Or it could have been the motherly woman with a tank top that was far too large, over a bra that was far too small. Or maybe the pre-teen girl with the summer dress that just barely clears her butt cheeks. How young is too young to wear thong underwear, by the way?
So, when my coworker approached me and asked, “Did you see that skanky girl earlier? The one with the pink T-shirt and the spiked belt?” I knew which skanky girl she was talking about.
Unfortunately, the good news ended there.
My coworker continued, “Did you see the ringworm sores all over her arms?”
I made a noise that started off as a scream, which I tried to mute into a gasp, then the air got caught in my intake valve caused me to choke, and the sound resembled that which a squeaky screen door makes when it’s flung open and allowed to slam. Not pretty. That alone could’ve killed me.
My incredulity ruled and I began grilling her about what the sores looked like and if she was familiar enough with ringworm to confidently identify the markings. She described them perfectly.
DAMMIT! We’ve been fungied!
When I was a young lass, my mom contracted ringworm while visiting a friend, who had just bought a new Doberman from a puppy breeder. Clearly this was not a good breeder because the dog was diagnosed with ringworm the very next day, and my mother developed a case so bad that the fungus is still in her, rendering her feet unsuitable for public display, and her big toenail had to be permanently removed. Ringworm is something that has long caused suffering for my mom, and I spent months having to check my body for the sores and avoid contact with my mom.
I do not like ringworm. Ringworm is bad. It is creepy. It is disgusting. It gave me the heebie-jeebies so bad that I could hardly sit still.
My coworker elaborated that there were many sores on this woman’s arms, and she was scratching them like mad when she was speaking with her.
Quickly we did a mental regression to try to remember where we’d seen her, what we thought she might have touched, and then set about to disinfect the area. With gloves, wet wipes and Lysol in hand (not knowing if any of that would work on ringworm), we attacked the OPACs, the doors, the counters and anything else she might have casually touched while she browsed in our library for about an hour. Thankfully, she wasn’t able to get online because she owed too much in fines (which she attributed to her “bad twin”, I kid you not), so we didn’t have to evacuate the computer area. What she was doing in the library for so long, we don’t know. She couldn’t check anything out, either. Clearly, she was just infecting things. Lots of things. Things I don’t even want to know about.
At the end of the night, I had to pee so bad that it actually hurt, and I announced to my desk partner that I’d be right back.
She shouted to me, “You might want to wipe the bathroom down before you go in there.”
OH SHIT! Ringworm Girl might have used the bathroom on her way out! I considered holding it until I got home or running all the way to the staff lounge, but my bladder would not wait or tolerate bounding down stairs. I grabbed a handful of wet wipes and wiped down every surface before I touched it, including the toilet seat and bowl, just in case my clothes brushed them. I was so thoroughly grossed out about cleaning the bathroom, which is notorious for being the recipient of biological graffiti, that I actually held my breath, figuring the rest of my body was thoroughly cootified when I stirred up the germs, that I would not inhale any of the newly launched airborne particles.
When I got out, I said to my partner, “I don’t know if Ringworm Girl used the bathroom, but I think I just came into contact with about 1,000 more germs by cleaning the bathroom, that are probably 1,000 times more dangerous. I should have just peed my pants.”
Sometimes it’s better when you don’t know and don’t take measures to avoid things. Swerving to avoid an accident can lead to bigger accidents.
Ringworm: it’s not the worst thing lurking in the library.
It 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.
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