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."

Reasonable requests

 Things today's patrons want:

"I don't feel safe coming to the sewing program because of COVID, and I don't have a computer. Can I call at the time the class is happening and listen by phone?"

"Do you have a book about transitioning from orthopedics to cardiology?" 

Justified suspicion

One of the libraries in my new system has some high-tech locks on the study rooms. You hold your palm up to them to 'wake them up,' then enter a code to unlock the door. Holding up your palm to the lock again locks the door. I was showing this to a patron when I was on the desk this evening in case she wanted to go out to the bathroom without having to take her backpack with her. When I opened the door for her with a flourish, she looked at me hesitantly.so I said "Do you have a question?" She said "So...that lock recognizes hands?" "Oh!" I said, "No, it's not that high-tech. It doesn't know that it's your hand or my hand, it just knows that there's a hand in front of it." The patron sighed and said, "Okay, good. I wasn't sure I wanted to go into a room that was smarter than I am."

Disappointment

 I spent 30 minutes searching for the third book in the Spanish translation of a Debbie Macomber series this weekend, in which both the series and the individual books were dramatically re-titled, only to find out that apparently the translations weren't sufficiently profitable and the publisher had dropped the project after the first two books in the series. It's a toss-up whether I or the patron was more disappointed.

How I can tell my team isn't as overworked as I was afraid they were

Overheard in the staff office: "...that's what you get when you do a Google image search for 'fearsome wallaby.'"

Another new job

 I am moving libraries yet again. My new job is not going to be public-facing, so I'm afraid I may be starved of blog material for quite some time! I know I didn't have much time to post to the blog as manager of Walnut Bluff so hopefully people aren't checking this too often/any disappointment has already been experienced. I will certainly keep posting highlights, they are just likely to be infrequent.

Ironically given how I am a mega-grinch, one of my last acts at Walnut Bluff was to put up a big "Season's Readings" display in the library windows. At least I got a pun in.

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!?'"