February weirdness

I am originally from a much colder climate than Texas, and my mother used to celebrate getting through February, which always felt miserable in the wintry north. I was thinking that now I live in Texas I should have a similar celebration at the end of August, but if this month continues on the current course, I'm going to have to keep celebrating surviving February:

A volunteer who, despite being repeatedly offered the chance to lock her purse in the staff area, insists on keeping it with her while shelving, came to us distraught and asking us to call the police because, you guessed it, someone stole her purse. Fortunately, its absence was noted almost immediately, apparently before the person who took it had a chance to get away, and our security guard found it abandoned on a bottom shelf in the stacks. Not until police had already been called, though, and they were crabby when they arrived.

Our storytime has moved into our program room from the children's area because it's too big. The children's librarian likes to leave the door open to welcome the many families that come in fashionably late, so I am posted at the door for an hour as 'storytime assistant' and I spend 90% of my time redirecting a crabby toddler who keeps trying to escape into the rest of the library (I'm only free the last 10% of the time because his caregiver snaps and buckles him into his stroller for the last part of the program).

Instead of weeding damaged or outdated books, I swear all the other branches are sending them to us to "float" into our collection.

Our heating system has had some sort of catastrophic failure. While we wait for the replacement part to arrive, the library is heated by a series of loud, obnoxious fans that facilities services seems to have placed in order to maximize the number of patrons that their cables and noise will disrupt. Also, when I ask the facilities services techs if we can leave the system running at night, they say "Well, it will be cold in the morning. But better a library that's cold but still there than one that's burned down." So now it's 60 degrees when we arrive each morning, and the hour we have before patrons arrive is NOT long enough for things to heat up enough to keep them from complaining.

Everyone's kids have the flu, so I work a couple of 9-9 shifts to cover people who are out sick. That means I have half a day of comp time, and I plan to sleep through aaaaall of it.

We are un/fortunate enough to be hosting free tax help for patrons--it's a great service that people can't get many other places, but WOW is it a staff headache. One of the library assistants warns, "I know this is your first year and I don't want to stress you out, but you should probably know that the two volunteers who are in charge of tax help are enemies. They will always tell you contradictory things about what they need."

A patron cries at the desk because we can't accept the document she brought in as proof of city residency to sign her up for a library card. "I just wanted to get a booooooook!"