A long bathroom break

The staff entrance to my library is set in a sort of alcove the opens off the alley that runs behind our building. Unfortunately, like with most libraries, it seems like the architecture firm that designed our building didn't think about how people really behave, and made this a nice little semi-enclosed area that offers the illusion of privacy and safety. Until recently, the library had a lot of trouble with people sleeping back there, peeing on the wall, or just dumping trash. One of my first acts as a new manager was to lobby library administration to spend the money to add an extra security camera to cover that area, and I am grateful that they chose to do so. Since then, the problems have stopped. Mostly.

At around 11:00 one of my coworkers arrived at work (she is on the evening shift) and reported that someone had left a shopping cart full of stuff in the alcove. We looked around the library property to see if we could find the owner, and then looked through the library, too, even though people who are homeless who want to use the library generally leave their stuff by the front entrance, not at the back. We didn't have any luck finding the person who the cart belonged to, so I decided we'd wait an hour to see if someone came back for it. No one did, so I put on some latex gloves and my best psychological armor and took some trash bags out to start bagging up everything in the cart and throwing it in our dumpster.

I have a very sensitive gag reflex and this person had a lot of smelly fabrics. It was probably the most miserable 45 minutes I've spent at work, at least since I escaped retail. I also felt super-guilty that I was throwing away all of someone's worldly goods, and was dreading when they would inevitably come back and yell at me.However, we can't have people just dumping things on city property, and it's not like the person had made an effort to contact us and enlist us as allies. Sometimes we have people who will be like "I know I have too much stuff, but I really need to come in and charge my phone--is it okay if I leave it outside the front door?" and we say yes, make sure it's not in the way of other patrons, and ensure they take it with them when they leave. No big deal, but they have to tell us.

I finally finished bagging up everything, but our dumpster was full and there was a bunch of scrap metal in the cart that wouldn't fit in the dumpster, so I left a couple of bags of stuff and the metal outside while I went inside to call someone for advice on what to do about getting the cart and the metal picked up, and to see if we could get sanitation to come do an extra pickup of trash.

While I was on the phone, the 'owner' of the cart came back, but not to get it! Instead, she came back and left new trash! One of my coworkers was leaving for lunch and caught her doing it, so she hurried back in to get me. The two of us ran back outside to see the patron rearranging the trash I had bagged up back onto her shopping cart. "Ma'am," I said, "I'm sorry, but you cannot leave your stuff here, especially if then you leave library property."

The woman rolled her eyes at me and said "I just left for a minute to go to the bathroom! Fine! I will take it away!" and she rolled away her cart of scrap metal and trash, not saying a word to us about the fact that 75% of her stuff had disappeared into the dumpster.

I checked the security cameras later, and they showed that the woman had been gone for a total of two and a half hours.