Today an elderly lady who was hard of hearing came in with her grandson, who I'd guess was in his mid-20s. I'd ask the lady questions in a loud speaking voice, and she'd say "What's that?" and then her grandson would repeat whatever I said by shouting it 18 inches from her ear: "SHE SAYS THERE'S A SCANNER IN THE COMPUTER LAB!"
Fortunately, none of the other patrons complained.
The library system where I work has four locations. Here is how changing of the desk shifts "on the hour" works at each one:
Location #1: If you're not arriving to relieve your colleague 5 minutes before the hour, you're late.
Location #2: You arrive on the hour, on the dot, period.
Location #3: You wander in around 5 minutes past the hour. Sometimes the person on desk has to call their replacement to remind them to come out.
Location #4: Half the staff thinks the cultural standard is the same as location #1 and half the staff thinks it's the same as location #3, and they hate each other. You cannot win. If you try the location #2 approach, BOTH groups hate it.
I know that I am easier to reach than the IT department is, but please be advised that the things below are not my job just because I am the Technology Librarian:
Our main library is two stories and has an open staircase between the floors. Overheard around closing time just out of line of sight:
Parent: Don't do that.
Kid: Whyyy?
Parent: Because that's antisocial behavior....[pause]...would you want someone to drop a taco on YOUR head?
When I started this blog more than 10 years ago, I was in my early 20s and got harassed by creepy patrons ALL THE TIME. It has its own tag in the blog.
Now that I spend less time on desk and I'm in my 30s, it's been literal years since it's happened to me. But today I was filling in at a branch and doing a 'roam' around the public floor and a very Anglo-looking patron said "Hola" to me. Being polite, I said it back, but when he followed up with "¿Como estás?" after I'd already passed him, I pretended I didn't hear and just kept walking. I was not at all surprised when he said "damn, that ass!" as I was not quite out of earshot.
The sexual harassment is much less nerve-wracking than it was when I was young, but it was still exactly as gross.
Today I caught a pug that wandered into the library and released him back into the neighborhood. I THINK this is dog #3 that I have captured and removed from a library, but I'm not even 100% sure, which I feel says a lot.
Now that I mainly work at the administrative office, I fill in randomly at all four branches in our library system. The one I've been spending time at lately has more characters than the others. It reminds me a little bit of Downtown Library in Michigan.
A patron cried because a different patron (4 computers away from her) was banging too enthusiastically on her keyboard while she played her online poker game.
There's another mid-30s white woman with shoulder-length light brown hair and rectangular glasses who works at this branch. People are constantly getting annoyed at me because "you helped me yesterday, how do you not know what I want!?" when Stephanie helped them yesterday, not me. I finally benefit from this inability to tell us apart when a clear Problem Patron refuses to ask me for help and chooses my unfortunate coworker to be her victim instead--it becomes clear that Stephanie enforced a library rule with her previously and now the patron refuses to engage with her (or, apparently, with anyone who looks like her).
A patron asked me to look up how far it was to Houston. He was going to walk there and wanted an estimate of how long it would take (about 85 hours).
And today, a patron told me he was "as fine as the hair on a frog" and then laughed to himself for several minutes.
