Crabby Saturday librarian

(Courtesy of https://64.media.tumblr.com/0dbcefc16a0f8f10751d77d898c80e6d/0419aef259754211-69/s1280x1920/a13381cae52a4f223b4cfaa5b7079fc3418e254a.jpg)

Sir, I'm going to need you to keep your shoes on in the library.

Me: I'm sorry sir, but if you are going to eat, I'm going to have to ask you to go down to our lobby area.

Patron, flinging his bagel into the trash can forcefully: Fine! Then I'll just throw it away!

Me [in my head]: No one asked you to do that, sir.

For the rest of my shift, every time I pass near this patron he tries to set me on fire with his eyes.

SIR, you need to keep your shoes on in the library.

A patron gives me a five-minute rant about our public computers but repeatedly declines to fill out a comment card to make the complaint official, even though they are anonymous.

I gesture at a patron on a Zoom call in a study room to please lower his voice. He rolls his eyes and then says to the people on the call, in a voice 1% quieter than before, "I've just been told to keep my voice down."

This branch has two kinds of chairs, wooden ones and ill-advised cloth armchairs that you'd have to pay me $100 to sit on. Someone has taken several plastic bags and arranged them carefully over one so that she can sit in it without making any direct contact with the fabric. I get the idea, but why not just sit in a wooden chair, ma'am?

Someone has taken apart all the different sections of BOTH our copies of the local newspaper and interfiled them seemingly randomly before piling them up on a table.

 

Me to patron watching a loud YouTube video on his phone: Hi sir, do you have a pair of headphones?

Patron: Yeah.

Me: ...

Patron: ...

Me: I'm going to have to ask you to either put them on or lower your volume.

Patron: What about that guy who's snoring?

Me: He is MUCH quieter than you, sir. If he causes a disruption, I'll shush him too.

 

Quick reference shift

 A man asks: Does your sister work here? 

Me: No, I think I just have one of those faces. People are always asking me if I go to their same church and stuff.

Man: Seriously!? Me too, actually! Three times already this morning I've had people ask if they know me from somewhere. I'm 51, so I don't think I went to school with you, sir...

I told him I was excited to meet another person like me.

Later as I was passing the area where he was sitting, he held out his fist for a fist bump.

A kid asks me for help figuring out 15x12 (I show him a trick my dad taught me, that 15x12 is the same as 10x12 and 5x12 added together).

Same kid, later:

Hi...[grabs a piece of scrap paper]...bye!

I have to tell about 50 disappointed families that tonight's storytime is cancelled (our usual presenter and our backup are BOTH out sick, and I could do it, but only if we wanted to just leave the reference desk unstaffed all night). They are all so nice about it and I can't tell if that's better or worse than people being crabby.

A break up a study-room-related incident that has escalated to one patron threatening to sue the other for assault (don't worry, no one was actually hurt).

Oh no

I am doing a pet project of cleaning up old notes on patron records when I have downtime on the reference desk. As far as I can tell, I seem to be undoing the life's work of one of Those Old School Library Workers who felt that all things should be noted in the patron's account, period. Today I deleted someone's social security number from the notes field of their patron record.

SMH.

Characters

 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.

Jargon

Did I mention that my latest job is as the technology librarian for the system, and that I'm one of the system administrators for our integrated library system? Somehow despite getting a degree in history, I had to learn these terms today:

API=Application Programming Interface: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API

URI=Unique Resource Identifier (not the same as a URL): https://danielmiessler.com/study/difference-between-uri-url/

Bonus: When I did an initial Google search for "what is an API" Google suggested "What is an API in simple terms" which I think tells you everything you need to know about how my day has been.

Shoe saws

 A patron comes up to the front desk: Hi, do you have a lost and found?

Me: Yes, we do. What are you missing?

Patron: Some shoe saws.

Me: I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you. Could you repeat that?

Patron: Some SHOE SAWS.

Me [trying and failing to Google what I think I'm hearing]: ... All right, can you describe them?

Patron [mumble mumble] gray [mumble mumble] Watson logo.

Me: I'll go check for you. While I do that, would you like to write down your name, number, and what you lost? That way if it's not in the lost and found but we find it later, we can call you.

Unsurprisingly, I don't find anything matching the patron's description in the lost and found. When I come back, he's written down his name and phone number, but no description. Darn. When I tell him that unfortunately I couldn't find his items, he wanders forlornly away.

A couple hours later, the phone rings.

Me: Checkout desk, this is Emma, how can I help you?

Librarian at the ref desk: Hey Emma. Do you remember the incident report from last week about the guy who tried to convince the janitorial staff to let him go on the roof?

Me: Yeah...

Librarian: That guy you just checked the lost and found for, that was the guy! Did you get his information?

I wonder if the roof is where is shoe saws are.

Study room demands

 All four branches of New Library have 4 study rooms each. Patrons love them and I hate them. 

 During a single hour on desk earlier this week:

Patron #1: Do you have a study area?

Me: Yes, sir. We have two study rooms available right now that you can check out with your library card, or we also have two different quiet rooms, one behind me to the left here and one over by the magazines.

Patron #1: Is that all?

As I said, patrons love our study rooms. For the other incident, it's important to know that how we handle the high demand is that each user gets two hours of guaranteed time. After that, they can stay as long as no one else asks for a room. If someone does, whoever has been there longest is asked to leave. We keep a little laminated card with a barcode on it for each room, and write down the end of the two hours on the card so that if all the rooms are full, we can see at a glance who we need to ask to wind down. It's also worth mentioning that the study rooms are basically identical.

Patron #2: Is there a study room?

Me: Right now we have 3 and 4 available, sir. Do you have a preference?

Patron: Doesn't that card say room 1 will be free in 10 minutes?

Me: Well, sir, everyone gets two hours guaranteed in the room, but then they can stay past that as long as no one else is waiting for a room. This just shows when they will hit their two hours, they won't necessarily be done at that time.

Patron: But I'M waiting.

Me: We have rooms 3 and 4 available right now, so you don't have to wait.

Patron: But I want room 1.

Me: I'm sorry, sir, but I'm not going to ask people to leave when there are other rooms open.

Patron: You're going to make this difficult, aren't you?

Me: ...

Patron: Fine, I'll take room 3.

As my friend who used to manage this branch used to say: I'm sorry there's not enough PRIVATE space at this PUBLIC library for you.

Gems from the 90s

We had to clear out the oldest, dustiest storage area in my building this week to make room for some facilities work, and we unearthed a truly horrifying set of binders belonging to a long-retired staff member, including one just labelled "Delinquent Patrons." I flipped through it to take out anything that would jam the shredder and came across:

• A cassette tape taped to a page. The cassette tape had a barcode written on it but it was also labelled "not in catalog." Reading the attached sheet, which detailed the patron's failure to return the tape in a timely manner, did not make it at all clear why our 1990s predecessors had felt it necessary to keep the tape as evidence.
• A set of correspondence that went all the way up to the library director from a patron who had accidentally recorded over a library VHS tape and was being charged for a replacement. She was incensed that a security device to prevent this mistake had not been installed on the tape, and insisted that due to the library's negligence in not making that happen, she should not have to pay for the one she damaged.
• An incident report about a patron who got abusive when told of charges on his account. Attached to the report was a Post-It note on which was written, in different handwriting than the report: "I say we hire someone to break his kneecaps" and a set of initials.
• A packet of correspondence about a problem patron who had a habit of leaving lots of notes for staff in materials he returned. This patron, Mr. Jimmy Glen, was apparently told at some point by a staff member that he could not do whatever it was he wanted to do unless he provided either his library card or an ID. Instead, Mr. Glen showed the staff a hole-punched piece of paper attached to his keychain that had been carefully 'laminated' with tape and which said "Jimmy Glen: All Access Pass."
  

She needs to study hard

At this branch, if a patron wants to use a study room they check it out at the reference desk and then the staff member give them a little card showing they have the room checked out and then walks them over to the room and unlocks it.

I was helping a pair of patrons who wanted to check out a study room, and there was another patron standing in line behind them. Since she looked student-y, I asked "Do you need a study room too, by any chance?" so that I could check out one room to each group and then walk them over together. The patron looked at me like she was alarmed/confused that I was speaking to her and then said "no," so I said "Sorry, I'll be with you in just a minute." I checked out the study room the the couple in front of her, walked them over to the room, and came back to the desk. Then I asked "How can I help you?" and she said "I need to check out a study room."

Bonus: When I followed up with "Sure, can I please see your library card?" she only THEN began digging through her bag to pull it out (despite witnessing an entire study room transaction moments before) and told me "It's gonna be a minute."

Still confused

 We now have two large A-frame signs outside our front doors that patrons have to basically squeeze past to reach the doors themselves. The signs say "CLOSED. Curbside pickup only, call 1-800-WALNUT-BLUFF." Of course, people being people, they often squeeze past the signs and pull on the door handle, at which point our front door person (whose job is supposedly delivering curbside pickups as cars arrive) has to shout the information to them. Most people get it at that point. However, today I had a couple who were still confused. They asked me "What kind of appointments do you guys do?" and when I answered "You can come pick up books or movies or printouts!" they replied, "Wait, so you can't come inside and look at books?"

When I relayed this conversation to Children's Librarian, she said, "I think people have been spending too much time in their houses watching TV and they don't know how to interact with real people anymore. They're like 'This one is talking back to me when I talk to it! What am I supposed to do!?'"

More bad signs

Signs I have found in my library lately:

• "Children's Books on Tape"
• "NO bicycles or shopping carts in lobby"
• An emergency evacuation chart showing that our official safe meeting point is across the street next to a building that no longer exists.
• "Videos"
•  "DO NOT place anything in this area!!!"

And, most ominously, one by the front doors that just says "Pacemaker warning."

New Year patrons

A patron has a resume saved to a flash drive and needs to upload it to an online job application, but first she asks, "If I want to, you know, twerk it first, how would I do that?"

While helping a patron sign up for a library card: "Are you the manager? I read about you on the reviews! They say you're nice!"

At closing, there's a guy who won't leave the men's bathroom. After a bit of back-and-forth:
Me: Sir, I'm sorry, but we really have to close. My watch says it's 6:05--if you are still in there at 6:07, I am going to call the police and have them escort you out.
[at 6:06, the door opens and he peers out, shirtless] 
Patron: I've got to--
Coworker, looking away: Just go through here and out the door, we won't judge you!
 

And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"

A patron wandered up to the desk and announced "I need to save a document on my drive." Seeing as she was holding a flash drive in her hand, I walked her back to her computer and guided her through plugging the drive in and locating the "save" function on Microsoft Word. When we finally got to the correct folder to save it in she said that she wanted to change the document's name from the default. I showed her how to do that. She typed "[Patron] resume" and then: "What year is it?...Oh, right, 2019...What month is it?" I just said "It's May, ma'am. Good luck with your job search!"

Plumbing the depths of bad patron behavior

It was a long week at Walnut Bluff this week. Our sewage system backed up twice, spewing gross contaminated water into both public bathrooms and the staff bathroom. The city plumbers were out working on it for a long time. When they finally got it working again, they insisted that I come outside and see what they had pulled out of the plumbing: It was a pair of pants!
 

The Trouble Brothers, 15 years later

One of the blog tags is "Trouble Brothers" for a pair of kids who used to come into my original library and cause chaos. Since I don't work at that library anymore I thought maybe I could re-use the tag for two adults who I think are related and who take trouble to the next level. Hopefully this will be the only instance of the resurrected tag though, since I had to ban them...

There are two men about my age who I think are related (maybe they aren't actually brothers, but they do look alike) who have been coming in lately and have kind of taken over one of the alcoves with tables in it (who designs a public library with alcoves!? aargh!). They seem to be maybe schizophrenic, or otherwise unwell in a paranoid sort of way. I know that mental illness is really tough to deal with, especially in a state like Texas where there is basically no social safety net, so I've really been trying to give them every chance, but they've been bothering other patrons on a pretty regular basis. The problem is that since they are paranoid, other people's perfectly normal behavior, like walking past their table more than once, or browsing the shelves near them, or looking at them because they are constantly muttering fearfully is interpreted as 'stalking' them or 'staring' at them or 'harassing' them.

Today, one of our teen volunteers went to sit at a nearby table and play on his phone while he waited for his ride after his volunteer shift had ended. About 30 seconds later, he came back looking afraid and was like "There are two guys over there who say I am trying to start something with them! They were getting in my face!" I went over there and told the brothers that they were making other patrons uncomfortable and they needed to stop doing things that made other people afraid to be in the same space as them. Of course, instead of apologizing and changing their behavior, they got defensive and insisted that our teen volunteer, who is like 15 years old and about as intimidating as a rabbit, had been hassling them. I ended up having to call the police to make them leave. The entire time I was trying to hustle them out the door they were insisting that the teen volunteer had been stalking them for weeks and was part of a conspiracy against them--they only finally left when I told them that if they weren't gone by the time the police arrived, I would ask the police to cite them for trespassing since they were banned from the library.

After they finally left I went back to the teen volunteer to make sure he was okay. Fortunately he is tougher than he looks and he was fine. I asked if he had had trouble with them in the library before or maybe elsewhere in the neighborhood, since they had been claiming that he followed them around at the grocery store, and had thrown stuff at them out of his car (he doesn't drive) so I was worried maybe they had been a problem for him in the neighborhood too. He looked at me in confusion and said "I have literally never seen those guys before in my life."

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.

In Walnut Bluff, 911 call YOU

We have a charging station behind the checkout desk at Walnut Bluff and we will take your phone and charge it for you while you use the computer or browse for books. I kind of hate that we take responsibility for patrons' phones, but before we had this system people were constantly plugging their phones into random outlets on the public floor, leaving their phones unattended, and then coming and freaking out to us when they got stolen, which happened pretty regularly.

There is supposed to be a whole process where we issue you a claim ticket, but some of our regulars will just kind of fling the phone at staff as they come in and try to skip the 'hassle' of establishing proof of ownership over their phones.

Earlier this week a man came up to one of my colleagues, looking kind of out of it, and shoved a phone in her face. She said, "Did you want me to charge this for you, sir?" and after a moment he said, "No! Talk!" Too surprised to do anything else, she put the phone to her ear. On the other end was a 911 dispatcher asking for the address. She gave them the library's address, helped the patron to an empty chair, and a few minutes later some EMTs arrived, talked to the guy, and took him away in an ambulance. 

None of us knew what was wrong with him, but as I was checking with the EMTs to make sure they didn't need anything from the library, I saw another patron talking to the clerk at the front desk and gesturing dramatically in our direction. After everyone left, the clerk said "That patron said he saw the other guy huffing paint thinner outside in the parking lot. Want me to go take a look for the can?"

(I went out, collected the empty can, and threw it away.)

This week

Bathroom issues: A man wants to permission to use the women's restroom because whoever is in the single stall in the men's room is taking ages. "If you don't let me in, I'm going to pee on myself right here!"

Later the same day a woman complains that another woman threatened her in the bathroom because she thought she was trying to look through the stall at her. The accuser is a known stirrer-upper-of-drama so I offer her the phone to call the police to report the threat. Surprisingly, police come, and speak to and calm down both ladies involved.

When is there going to be tax help at the library? times 20.

While picking up trash outside the library (I failed to escape this responsibility by transferring to Walnut Bluff) I find two empty beer cans and an empty full-size wine bottle. Yikes.

I fill in for a sick coworker at a kids' craft program. I tried bribing my other staff members (most of whom are very afraid of children) by saying that anyone who sat through the program with me as a sort of exposure therapy could go home an hour early, but no one took me up on it.

A kid at the craft program has a stuffed dog in a Superman costume.
Me: Wow, is that Superdog?
Kid: No, it's Dinodog.
Kid's mom: He has dinosaur pajamas on under the Superman outfit. It's complicated.

A Hispanic guy comes in, sees my white self and my black coworker at the desk, and immediately looks away and pretends he doesn't see us.
Me: Hi, how can we help you?
Him: Uh...no English.
Me: Oh, como podemos ayudar a usted? [Oh, how can we help you?]
Him: Whoa...[I need to print something.]
Me: [Yeah, sure, we can do that!]

My colleague spots me as I am dusting the Spanish section--"Are you trying something, or is this a hint?" Kind of both.

Different colleague is trying and failing to pull out the first wipe in a canister of Lysol wipes, but he can't reach in far enough. He says, "I wonder if this is what t-rexs felt like" and I accidentally crack up loud enough that a patron glares at me.

Not a service dog

I was working on next month's work schedule in my office when one of the staff members on the desk came to get me and said "I'm sorry to bother you, but a woman has tied her dog up inside the library and I don't know what to do."

Sure enough, I went out to the public floor and saw that there was a large golden retriever tied to a newspaper rack in the little vestibule between our lobby and the actual outside. I looked around and didn't see anyone who was obviously the dog's owner, so I went over to the dog, hoping that whoever was with the dog would notice and come and talk to me. As I was approaching the vestibule, another patron came up to the library doors from the outside, looked nervously at this 75-pound dog, and hesitated. As I was trying to figure out if I could maybe stand between the nervous patron and this dog so that the patron could come in, a woman about my age bustled up to me from inside the library and huffed irritably, as though she was incredibly put-upon: "Don't worry about it! I am taking him outside right now!" She unclipped his leash while giving a massive eye roll and stormed out with her golden retriever, turning to whine over her shoulder, "I was just going to print something really quick!"

Honesty not the most effective policy

Patron: I want to make a complaint! She [points at staff member] was extremely rude to me on the phone! I told her that I wanted blah blah blah...then she said blah blah blah...then I screamed at her...
Me: Sorry, what? Did you just say you screamed at her?
Patron: Well, yes, I screamed at her. She upset me!
Me: Sir, you can't talk to the library staff like that. I'm afraid you need to leave the library for today. You can come back tomorrow after you have had a chance to calm down.