Friday, March 29, 2019

Patron of the week (and streets)

A patron called in and self-identified as an old lady. She asked about our book club and then said "And do you have any other activities that would help keep me off the streets?"

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Why did you come in, then?

Today a patron came in to 'sign up for a library card,' but when we checked her name in our system it turned out that she used to have a card a long time ago and owed us about $50 for lost books, so we couldn't issue her a new card until she paid her fine down most of the way. I was helping someone else so I didn't hear most of her discussion with my coworker. All I knew was that a couple minutes later, she stomped past my desk muttering angrily "I didn't want to read anyway!"

Friday, March 15, 2019

Not Thursday

Today at Walnut Bluff:

A man needs to print off some paystubs and doesn't speak any English at all. 20 minutes of help conducted entirely in Spanish, which goes better after I get him to write down "talones de cheque" so I can Google the translation and finally figure out what he is asking for. He and his dad are very patient, and Dad insists on introducing himself and getting my name on the way out.

Middle-aged patron: Is there a card catalog computer where I can look up books for myself?

Spend half an hour moving tables and chairs around for a program, no one comes.

I wear a button on my ID badge lanyard that says "My preferred pronouns: She/her/hers." I'm a cis woman who wears skirts to work, so I don't think it's really needed to help people figure out how to refer to me--it's more for trans or non-binary patrons who can see a signal that I'm probably not going to be awful to them. I was helping a teenager print a PDF that was causing them problems for some reason and they saw my button and asked where I got it. They thought it was so awesome that my library system had issued it to me. Then they asked me about an LGBTQ event that our neighboring branch is hosting next month, then they gave me a fist bump on the way out. Patron of the week for sure.

Do you have any books about BPD? Or general mental health, that would be good too.

While on the desk, I spend a lull running circulation reports, and then another lull trying to translate some of our flyers into Spanish.

Our heating is still out and our heating/cooling system is just a bunch of fans spread around the library. One of my coworkers goes to snap at a patron who reaches out to adjust one, I jump in and say "Go ahead, ma'am." I love being the manager today.

Man: I am here for the English class.
Coworker: I'm sorry, that class meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Man: It not Thursday now?! 

A kid wants The Bad Guys by Aaron Blabey--I love those books. 

Do my half-hourly walk around, picking up trash and refilling the toilet paper in the bathrooms. I wonder what our annual toilet paper expenditures are.

Children's librarian needs to talk to me about summer reading. "These people say they will come for free, but I've heard they are really unreliable. If it's okay with you, I'm going to put in a funding request to get someone else." 

Sorry, sir, you need to leave your Uber scooter outside. Those things have been causing us enough trouble lately as it is.

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

The last straw

My most laid-back coworker (the one who gave me a Sandra Boynton board book about dinosaurs when I was having a stressful day) comes from a long career in food service so he's seen it all and normally doesn't bat an eye when patrons are awful to him or to the library. However, today he was walking across the parking lot to his car after a long shift and spotted a half-empty bottle of Coca Cola sitting by itself in an empty parking space. He walked over, seemed to take a deep breath, clenched his fists, looked up at the sky, and shouted "Motherf*****! People are animals!" before picking it up and stomping over to the dumpster to fling it inside.

Monday, March 11, 2019

Food rules

My library, like many public libraries, is a city department, and one of the things that means in this case is that we have to follow a lot of health/safety-related rules in our programs. One of them is that we can only serve pre-packaged food at library programs. That's usually not an issue since we never have money to buy food, so normally we don't serve food at all. However, we have a craft program that is run by a volunteer, who loves to buy food with her own money and bring it in. It's very nice of her, but I am constantly in a battle with her about following the pre-packaged rule and other food ordinances. To be honest I'd probably let it go in other circumstances, but she and the people who attend her program always leave a huge food mess behind, so this is part of my strategy in trying to make bringing food so inconvenient that she will stop and then my staff and I won't have to clean up after the program anymore.

Last week I was wiping down the tables in the program room where her craft program takes place and saw that someone had put a banana in the trash can.  My coworker was in there setting up for the next event and so I rolled my eyes and said "[Coworker], the craft volunteer brought in bananas this week!" Without looking up from what she was doing, my coworker just shrugged and said "Would you say a banana is 'pre-packaged,' at least?"

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

Other duties as assigned, part 2

I've mentioned before that something I love about my job is how varied the work is. I was a little worried that when I became a manager I would lose that, but it turns out that the duties I've lost are more than made up for by the new things I have gained. Here are some ways I spent work time this week:

  • Helping little kids play "Pin the Hat on the Cat" during a Dr. Seuss birthday celebration (3/4 of them cheated, kids are weird)
  • Attending training on how to do storytime (Less so I can do it and more because I was worried that if I wasn't in the room certain staff members I had assigned to attend would not take it seriously)
  • Helping a patron who is trying to make a DACA case and wants to see if we can provide proof that he has a library card
  • Counting the total number of each kind of chair we have in out building, as step 1 in a plan to convince Administration to buy us more
  • Creating a little training quiz about library policies that my staff can use to meet a system requirement for "continuing learning"
  • Writing a thank you note to a local business that donated a prize for us to give out during a recent program (made me feel important)
  • Posting to social media about a library program we have coming up. No matter how carefully I try to make sure I include the name of the library and the address and the date and the time and the phone number and the intended age range and that no registration is required and that the program is free, it never fails that I miss one of those pieces of information and immediately someone posts a question asking about the missing piece and I feel like an idiot.
  • Counting out 837 Goldfish crackers to put in a guessing jar for the Dr. Seuss program. Embarrassed that I never before considered and appreciated the work done by guessing jar creators.
  • Helping a patron who heard from everybody at church that it was essential she have a LinkedIn profile for her job search, but who had no clue what LinkedIn was

Monday, March 4, 2019

More bad signs

Like many American public libraries, we have a green road sign out on the nearest main road that points to the library. It looks like of like this:
File:Library-road-sign.jpg
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Library-road-sign.jpg

But of course ours is attached to a metal pole. I don't drive by it on my way to work. This week two different patrons came in to tell us that someone had turned the arrow around so that it pointed the other way, away from the library. I ended up having to spend an hour on the phone with the city's Streets department while they decided whose job it was to come out and flip it back around.

Every time I start thinking maybe I've seen all the major variations of facilities issues, something like this happens.