Yes!

Best moment at Small Town Library so far: Seeing someone check out a book that I chose and ordered for the library's collection!

Unsurprisingly, the patron was a small elderly man in hat. Old Man Fan Club forever!

Bathrooms

So, I know these two things don't seem related at first glance, but bear with me:


1. I feel strongly that libraries should have gender-neutral bathrooms.
2. Today I found a 750 ml bottle of peppermint Schnapps in the women's bathroom.


Somewhat ironically, the Downtown Library, which has a very liberal staff, has traditional men's and women's bathrooms, while Small Town Library, which is located in a pretty conservative community, instead has four single-user gender neutral bathrooms. I suspect this is not a deliberately progressive choice on the part of Small Town Library but rather the result of having a user base of parents with children young enough that their parents still have to go into the bathroom stalls with them.


Back to the Schnapps: It was a useful reminder that 90% of Downtown Library's crazy problems and incidents take place in bathrooms--the drug deals, the overdoses, the prostitution. This is because the rest of the library has security cameras, but you can't put a security camera in a bathroom.


As far as I'm concerned, the ethical superiority of gender neutral bathrooms is pretty self-evident. It shouldn't be the job of public institutions to make you declare a gender identity. It's just not our business, especially for a privacy-oriented institution like a public library. Unfortunately, this argument is never going to convince Downtown Library to spend the money to renovate the bathrooms. But, another argument might: How would it affect Downtown's problem behaviors if all of our bathrooms were single-user? Every time two people went into the bathroom at the same time, it would be a clear red flag. Yes, occasionally someone would go in with a kid or with someone else who wasn't capable of using the bathroom alone, but all of the people who go in to take drugs together or drink alcohol together or have sex would look very suspicious all of a sudden.


It would really be nice to have our rather un-progressive security guards start monitoring the cameras outside the bathroom for pairs of people going in together instead of making a big deal of "a male dressed as a female entering the women's restroom."


(My favorite coworker was on desk with me when we heard the statement above come over the walkie-talkied. Normally she always politely asks if I mind if she leaves the desk, but this time she just looked at me and said, "Sorry, gotta go downstairs, I think they're about to try to kick a transwoman out of the library for using the women's bathroom." With Laura intervening in the issue, I'm at least confident that "try" was the key word.)

Password pain

Things you can't do without logging into a website, but that you should be able to do without logging into a website:

1. Check the status of your state tax refund
2. Apply for a job at Walmart
3. Sign up for the summer reading program at the Downtown Library, starting this year!
   

Dear Library Bosses,

This afternoon, I helped a woman reset her password for a website by following the steps to generate an email that would be sent to her address with information on changing her password via an included link. As soon as the email was sent, she said, "Okay, so now I can enter my new password and it will work?" I had to explain that she had to go to her email inbox and see the new email first.

Do you really think this online summer reading idea is going to work? You know I love the internet, but I think this whole thing is getting a little out of hand.

Love,

Your concerned employee

Titles

Different ways I have been addressed while on the reference desk:
"Ma'am"
"Miss"
"Sir"
"Lil' mama"
"Shawty"
"Girl"


For the record, any of these are preferable to "Do you work here?" and also to patrons who just raise their hands or wordlessly gesture me over as though I am a waiter.

Small Town Library is so white...

...that is has only a single book about basketball, yet it has 8 books about hockey. The single title about basketball is from 1996. I'm ordering a book that mentions Kobe Bryant, stat. 

Don't even get me started on the fishing section. You would not believe it.

Heritage

This week's patron of the week was a good-humored hard of hearing guy in a motorized chair who just found out he is part Odawa Anishinaabe and met his half-brother for the first time! He asked me to please see if he had some books he could use to learn about his newly-discovered cultural heritage.


I found him some histories of the Odawa people, but I forgot to also suggest Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians But Were Afraid to Ask, a book by Professor of Ojibwe Anton Treur that I personally thought was excellent for ignorant white people like me (and, I fear, like our patron of the week).

I don't believe you

Things patrons have told me at this library that are probably not true:


"I'm going to open a bakery for diabetics. It will use sugar alcohol. That has no calories."


"I returned that yesterday."


"The people at legal aid told me to come here, and that you could find me the form for contesting a will in Michigan."


"My son read his book to the police department and they decided to buy 250 copies to give away to the youths so they would know not to make the same mistakes."


"I'm not a drug addict anymore, I'm on methadone."


"A meat packing plant is like a toy store for men. They just love them."


"If your computer would just let me go to the website, I could collect my fifty thousand dollars!"


"It took my money but then didn't give me my printouts."


"The streets aren't built right. They should be generating electricity from the vibrations. That would make them safer, too."