Friday, December 29, 2017

"Management"

I came back from being gone for a few days to find that someone had put printed signs on every single chair in the library saying something like this:




"Do not move chairs. Do not turn chairs around. Put books where they belong. Library cameras are watching. If you do not follow these rules you will be banned from the library for one week. Thank you, Management."




As you may have guessed, "Management" turned out to be a disgruntled patron, unauthorized and acting alone (as far as we know...).

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Christmas gift

A patron gave me a Christmas card today that was former President Obama as a nutcracker. I'm not sure if it was meant to be pro- or anti-Barak.

Monday, December 18, 2017

Job titles

I helped a frustrated man today who was trying to apply for a job at a Amazon warehouse and needed help figuring out what high falutin' job title "guy who works in the warehouse" corresponded to. Amazon has some truly impressive titles, and it was making me feel like "librarian," "library assistant," "branch manger" and the other titles we tend to use in our industry were bland and descriptive. Do you have any suggestions for better names? Here's my first draft list:


Literature Delivery Associate
Senior Shelf-Straightener
Display Adjustor 3rd Class
Materials Sortation and Delivery Operator
Professional DVD Locator II
Knowledge Site Manager
Database Curator
Advisor for Introductory Information Technology





Monday, December 11, 2017

More questions to ponder on a quiet desk shift

If a kid knocks a bunch of board books off the shelf when no one is around to see, does an adult still trip over them later?


Do the patrons have mental nicknames for the staff the way I have mental nicknames for the people I see regularly but don't know the real names of? What is mine? Bad Spanish Lady?




How many total pounds of masking tape are holding all the signs, posters, etc. up? Could estimating this become a STEM program somehow?


Why is it that Patron A will come back the next day for his handwritten song lyrics he left on the copier, while Patron B left her driver's license here months ago and never returned?


How much of the square footage of the library has literally never been cleaned?


Why in the name of Elon Musk and Bill Gates do agencies still require people to FAX them things?

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Submissions?

Hello again, readers. Sorry for all the meta stuff on here lately. I know it's not as entertaining as funny library stories (which, never fear, will eternally remain the central core of this blog).


Anyway, I was wondering if I should open up the blog to submissions. I hadn't really thought about this before, mainly because Gina Sheridan had such a great thing going at iworkatapubliclibrary, but then two things happened: She stopped publishing in January of this year, and the reader poll indicated that I had more readers than I realized (sorry, I thought you guys were bots!) and that a substantial fraction of readers work in libraries of other types, which as far as I know doesn't have anything too similar to Sheridan's blog. There's always Librarians who say MOFO, of course, but its format isn't as great.


It would be pretty easy to add guest posts/submissions to this blog, but I don't know if it's something people would like to see or not. If you have an opinion one way or another, or just a thought of things I should take into consideration, please let me know!

Maybe not

Long-time readers will know that I'm pretty ambitious and would like to be a branch manager, or something similar, someday. However, I have times when things happen that make me discouraged, like this week. Here are some dilemmas I encountered recently that were both boring and difficult to figure out how to handle--a bad combination:

Someone left a cart belonging to the grocery store down the street in our parking lot. Do we take the store's property indoors even though it isn't ours, or do we leave it in the lot and risk someone's car hitting it and getting damaged?
(Our resolution: We brought it inside, but the next day the manager rolled her eyes and took it down the street to the store. We didn't know we were allowed to go off-premises for things like that!)




We are one of the places where kids who are truant from school can come and to make-up work. The school district gives us a big packet. We hand out a copy to each kid and keep track of how much time they spend at the library working on it. Today a girl came in who really didn't read English at all, and the packets are only in English. Do we give her the English packet and tell her to do her best? Translate the packet into her native language on demand? Tell her sorry, we can't help her? Of course this is in the evening so the truancy person at the school district cannot be reached, and she insists she needs to work on it NOW.
(Our resolution: We told her sorry, we couldn't help her. No one is happy with this, but neither can we come up with a better solution.)




A kid peed on a chair. Our custodian doesn't work weekends, and neither does the central system's call-in system for bigger clean-ups. Do we clean it up ourselves? Block off the area until Monday? Call the on-call facilities manager and ask him to handle it?
(Our resolution: I put on latex gloves and cleaned it up after a coworker discovered it. I firmly believe that if it has to be cleaned up before someone whose job it is can get there, the highest-paid person in the building at the time should be the one to suck it up and do it.)



Wednesday, December 6, 2017

A fashion statement

Today one of our regulars came in wearing a sweater that was half Christmas sweater, half streetwear jacket, that said "Only Santa can judge me."

The lean library

We don't have a color printer. We were recently told to stop giving paper clips to patrons. There is a sign on the bathroom door requesting patrons to conserve resources by not taking rolls of toilet paper with them. The staff members bring in our own hand soap. We don't have any tissues, for patrons or for ourselves. My budget for adult programs is zero dollars per year. My request to buy magnetic label holders for the magazine titles was turned down because they were deemed too expensive.


There's lean and then there's starving.

Monday, December 4, 2017

Poll results

Hello, readers! This is a quick update to let you know the results of the reader poll: 12 readers work in public libraries, 5 work in other kinds of libraries, and 3 do not work in libraries at all. The most exciting takeaway from this for me was that I have 20 readers! I only knew of 3, all of whom I have personal connections to, so that was pretty cool to read.


Thanks for reading this blog, everyone. I really enjoy having an outlet to talk about my work, and I will keep trying to keep you entertained!