I(don't-know)9

A weird thing has been happening lately. Well, lots of weird things have been happening, but at this second I'm specifically talking about patrons coming in and asking me to help them fill out I-9 paperwork as an employer's "authorized representative."

The first time this happened was last fall, but I've had 3 or 4 additional requests since then. Apparently a requirement of the I-9 is that the employer (or their 'authorized representative') view the employee's actual physical ID and work authorization documents, which presents a problem for companies that don't have a local office. Apparently, companies are telling new employees to take their documentation and the form to a library and have the librarian be their representative.

Now that I've done a little research to verify that I really am qualified to sign people's I-9s (that is, that legally there are no special qualifications required, it can be anyone the employer agrees to), I don't mind doing this for people, but it's odd that I never saw a request like this for years and all of a sudden there's this spike. Maybe it's all one staffing agency and I just haven't noticed? Or maybe some government entity put out a bulletin advising employers to deal with this obstacle by using the employee's public library?

I was hoping one of the readers might know more. Any ideas? Also, does it seem like a privacy issue to be looking at people's social security cards?

P.S.: I investigated the government bulletin theory, but the closest thing I found was a first-page Google search result that included this image:

Source: https://www.ebiinc.com/resources/blog/i-9-verification-for-remote-employees 

Annoyances

Since library workers tend to like control and to be kind of perfectionists, I suspect our workplaces are a little more filled with conflict (mostly passive-aggressive conflict) over the office environment than average. I try to not get emotionally invested because not only is that unproductive, in my experience public libraries are actually more collegial overall than other workplaces (my theory is that rude patrons are a collective enemy who make us see each other as allies and fellow sufferers).


Normally I am pretty successful at not caring. However, it so happens that I am the one who bought the most recent two bottles of dish detergent. The first one I bought was friendly to the environment brand that is as effective as any other dish soap but develops a hard cap of soap if it goes unused for a couple of days. The second was a cheap store brand bottle from the dollar store across the street. When I first got it, I put the second, unopened bottle right next to the open bottle on the counter so that people would know there was a spare when the open one ran out. Within a day someone had opened the new bottle, presumably because they didn't like spending the extra two seconds to get the first bottle to squirt. I admit that drove me a little crazy.


Do you have any pet peeves or petty frustrations in your library or office environment at the moment?

Disobedience

My boss is on vacation and I am taking joy in departing from a few of her policies that I most dislike, #1 being: You can't leave the desk unattended. This means that patrons have to wait for help until your counterpart returns or you can call someone from the back to interrupt whatever they are doing and stand at your computer. In some libraries I think this would be a reasonable rule (we do have the cash drawer here, after all) but in mine, the desk is standing-height and projects out from the staff area, a doorway from which is the only way to enter the behind-the-desk space. The staff area is separated from the public area with a badge-swipe lock. So a patron who wanted to get behind the desk would have to vault over it.

Not that that would never happen, just that it doesn't seem reasonable to base constant policy on a rare event.

What do you revel in doing at your library when your boss/manger/the director is away?

Ethics emergency

I'm currently at the desk watching a patron flagrantly copy a whole academic text using the library's document scanner. I went and spoke to him about it once and reminded him that he had pressed "accept" to a screen explaining copyright law and stating that he would follow it, but I was brought up short by the fact that the book he was copying wasn't something from our collection. I had been planning a spiel trying to get him to borrow the book instead, but obviously that isn't going to work.

I suppose I could kick him out of the library for the day because he is violating the library's code of conduct (which says you must obey all laws), but the enforcement culture at Mystery Library is definitely on the relaxed side and my boss isn't here to ask. The only way to stop him short of that is to power off or unplug the machine right in front of him, and that's awfully confrontational.

I know we have some academic librarian readers who probably deal with this kind of stuff all the time. How do you handle it, and, also, how do you wish it would be handled?

UPDATE: The scanner was overwhelmed because it's not designed to capture 200 images at a time, and it froze! Ultimate justice! He wanted "help" with the problem, and when I told him the situation he A) complained that he flagrantly violates copyright all the time at Other Branch and that never happens there and B) said in an aggrieved tone of voice that since I wasn't offering him any other options he guessed he'd let me restart the machine, but he wasn't going to start over all his "work."

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

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!

Reader poll

I just wanted to mention that if you look over to the right-hand side of the page, I've added a poll to find out if readers of this blog are mainly library workers or not. So far I have no plans to do anything with this information. It's just to satisfy my curiosity, and possibly your curiosity as well. I encourage you to consider responding!

News sources

 How I get my news as a librarian:
1.  Patron gossip
2.  Reading newspaper headlines in the time between ordering my Saturday Librarian coffee at the coffee shop on my way to work and receiving said coffee
3.  Sharing the customer service desk with baby boomer coworkers who still have Yahoo! as their personal email provider
4.   Lastly, since I’m a public servant i.e. a parasite on god-fearing taxpayers, I am also obligated to get my news from the liberal media (i.e., NPR)

New job

Good news, everyone! I had scheduled blog posts out through August mainly just because the number I had written spread neatly over that length of time rather than because I realistically thought I would have a job by September, but I am starting at a new library next week!

I haven't come up with a nom-de-blog for New Library yet (I think I'll need to get to know it a bit better first) but the striking thing about it is that I'll be working in its children's department. It's a small library so I'm sure there will be a lot of cross-over, but I'll be doing kid's programs and things and doing some extra chatting to small children and their parents. I expect that that will make for good blog material.

I didn't specifically seek out a children's librarian job--instead, I wanted to work at this particular branch of Sprawling Metropolitan System because it's in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country, so the materials and services that the library is providing access to are really, really important to the people living there. I'm not sure if I'll make a good children's librarian or not, so if any of you have tips or resources to suggest, I would be grateful!

 

Haikus

Someone on another website I read started a guessing game where you describe your job in haiku and other people try to guess your job title. I thought a mini version for library-themed poems might be fun. I submit:


I cannot tell you
What your email password is
This place is for books


and


Yes I pick the books
This collection is for everyone
Please don't yell at me

Best comments

One of the things I love about doing this blog is all the stuff I learn from the comments, especially because they are usually delivered in a humorous way. Here are some of the best things I've learned from the blog's comments:

"no one wants to *look* "stupid" --we prefer to *act* stupid." (On Hypocrisy)

"Libraries would be better if their policies were based on good data rather than on what some middle-class white woman has been doing for 30 years." (On How Are My Numbers?)

"Emergency cake is a fabulous idea. Working scissors is a pipe dream." (On Supplies I Have Wished for at the Reference Desk)

"Pseudoscience, the patrons love it." (On Things To Worry About)

"patrons with coats over their heads=trouble" (On Curses)

And my very favorite:

"people really do want to be told what to do, but not in respect of the things I want them to do, if you know what I mean." (On Overheard by the Staff Elevator)

Librarian, reader, CAD user

This isn't a typical shift, but I wanted to tell you about it to illustrate how great my job is.

Normally I'm not paid to read (a common public misconception about librarians) except that I do host a monthly book club at Small Town Library, so I am paid to read one book per month and come up with discussion questions about it. I spent the first 90 minutes or so of my morning doing that, plus 30 minutes or so of catching up on emails, dealing with things that I found in my mailbox, etc.

Then I came down for a quiet shift on the reference desk, where I spent the first hour designing a sign holder in a neat program called Tinkercad. My library recently acquired a 3D printer, and my boss got the idea that we could use it to print replacement sign holders for the end of each row of shelves. We essentially have something like this:

Picture source: https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-15772/Magnetic-Labels/C-Channel-Magnetic-Warehouse-Card-Holders-2-x-4?pricode=WY675&gadtype=pla&id=S-15772&gclid=CJqrtJmdkNMCFQYPaQodBVQIhA&gclsrc=aw.ds

I started on Thingiverse, which is a collection of designs for CAD objects, trying to find one that someone else had made and shared which I could use as a starting point (the 3D printing community is very big on sharing their work). Either there wasn't one out there or I didn't know what words to use to find it, so I built one from scratch. After a lot of experimenting, I created this: 

 

Nothing too fancy, but an accomplishment for an amateur like me (it can be stretched vertically to make it the right width if this segment turns out to fit our signs okay).  Now to either find time to fire up the printer and test it out, or, even better, lean on a colleague to try it using the set of step-by-step instructions I wrote for printing and find out of they are easy to follow.

I still have an hour left on my shift. Maybe I'll actually get to answer some reference questions today! I do seem to be on a roll.