Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Excuses

One of our crabby regulars asked me to look up the phone number of a man in North Carolina. As I was looking for it she told me that she had had it before, but she lost it so she needed it again, and she asked last night but "the lady at the desk didn't want to help me, she was so rude." Doubting that this was the case, I ventured, "I'm so sorry about that. I don't know why that would have happened. I guess you never know what else is going with people" to which the patron replied, "Nope. It doesn't matter. My therapist told me not to make excuses for other people."


After I told her that the phone number was not in our consumer database nor in the online white pages, she got mad and said she would go to the South branch, where they are actually competent!


This year a lot of the staff put in some money to get a gift card to WalMart for one of our patrons who is homeless. I vote that next year's collection goes to getting this patron an appointment with a new therapist.

8 comments:

  1. wow, what a b-tch. and she probably hears from her therapist whatever she wants to hear, so I'd stick with helping the homeless.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, the homeless patrons tend to be a lot nicer. I would say they are the #1 demographic for library appreciation (although the variance is wide).

      Delete
  2. Ah, so you'll be awaiting her apology from when she learns that the people at the other branch can't magically produce the number?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It turns out that after shift change she asked one of my coworkers, who is a reference wizard, and she couldn't find it either. So I was validated.

      Delete
  3. don't you want to just once call a patron's bluff when they claim something happened at another library or with another librarian?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Always. You know it would never end well, though.

      Delete
  4. I need a therapist like that...or maybe not.

    ReplyDelete