|
Shooting Blanks posted:When I was 20 or so, I read a different book that was basically Lolita but was written from the girl's point of view. Lo's Diary by Pia Pera? Best part of that book was Dmitri Nabokov's extremely salty and disapproving foreword.
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 09:57
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 21, 2024 21:16 |
|
|
Fleta Mcgurn posted:Lo's Diary by Pia Pera? Innocents by Cathy Coote
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 14:32
|
|
|
Oh, god, we didn't need one, let alone two. how was it?
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 14:58
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:I'm interested in hearing the "The woman who got shot to death outside that first library job" story, if it's not too awful. How about the story about the widow of a guy who was shot in front of the library i used to work at?
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 15:16
|
|
|
By popular demand posted:drat, it's not available for my kindle. https://archive.org/details/shakedownstreet00nasa (not 100% sure how you arrange to borrow epubs from archive.org, but it's an option they make available)
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 15:17
|
|
|
Thanks, I'll give this a try later.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 15:23
|
|
|
Parahexavoctal posted:https://archive.org/details/shakedownstreet00nasa Just did it and it's working fine. I'm going to ask the head librarian to update our resource lists, too. Thanks for reminding me about this!!! I used it a few years ago in China when I was really sad and needed to reread Maggie Adams, Dancer or I would die.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 15:40
|
|
|
DONT TOUCH THE PC posted:How about the story about the widow of a guy who was shot in front of the library i used to work at? If you're up for it, I'll take it!
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 16:15
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:If you're up for it, I'll take it! sure, it's not going to be as long as the other weirdo posts in the thread but, content is content. For starters: This is in the Netherlands, in a medium-sized city. A year or so before I started, there was a drug-related murder in front of the Library. The guy got shot 6 times, his wife was standing next to him, many librarians had to make statements. His wife was hit hard by the murder and after about a year she turned up at the library every day and each day we could see her sliding towards alcoholism. The thing that puzzled us was how she managed to get drunker during the day without leaving her spot in the library, she didn't have any cans hidden around the shelves (like other ones tried and failed at) and she didn't have a bag. What she did have was this:  A carton of mineral water. One day she dropped it because she was too drunk and.... well you guessed it, it was filled to the brim with cheap vodka. She quickly gained the nickname Mrs. Bar-le-duc because of and was banned from the library for about a month. After the ban was lifted she returned, still troubled (lots of mood swings: picking fights with staff one day, apologizing profusely the next), but trying to become better (as she was barred from viewing her granddaughter). Just before I quit my job there I saw her sitting in the children's section with a little girl: turns out she was sober for a year and she was allowed to see her granddaughter and visit the library with her.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 08:56
|
|
|
DONT TOUCH THE PC, you work at a library in the Netherlands? What software suite do you use?
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 14:25
|
|
|
Another story with a happy ending!  Thank you, that was sad, depressing and ultimately uplifting.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 14:36
|
|
|
Cloks posted:DONT TOUCH THE PC, you work at a library in the Netherlands? What software suite do you use? I used to I quit working there in 2013 and then had a short stint in an academic library. All In all, I worked for about 14 years as a librarian. One of my final projects was my involvement in the development of the new national library catalog as an expert user, but I never saw it get past the development stage. When I first started at my little old library we used Concerto, then we moved to Bicat, Bicat/Wise, and when I left we were using plain Wise.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 19:35
|
|
|
DONT TOUCH THE PC posted:I used to I quit working there in 2013 and then had a short stint in an academic library. All In all, I worked for about 14 years as a librarian. I work on Wise, which is why I asked.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2018 14:30
|
|
|
JacquelineDempsey posted:SNAKES ALIVE! e: that's my dream way of getting fired, getting busted wearing nothing but a loincloth playing a pungi at a tangle of RCA cables My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 14:43 on Nov 15, 2018 |
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2018 14:39
|
|
|
Cloks posted:I work on Wise, which is why I asked. thank you for your service, that system was so much better than the stuff I had to use before.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2018 16:18
|
|
|
Interesting article this morning about libraries and queer spaces. None of the libraries I've worked at have had any kind of program like that, just the usual LGBT History displays and serving as a marshaling point for Pride parades, but it's interesting to consider.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2018 15:35
|
|
|
That was a really cool article, thanks for sharing it! Hadn't really considered what a boon self checkout is for privacy. The flip side to that was my mom's library changing how they dealt with putting books on hold, so patrons could do self-checkout. They used to keep holds back behind the circ desk, and then they started putting them out on a shelf accessible to the public so you could pick it up and self-checkout. You couldn't swipe someone else's book if it wasn't held under your card, but you could kinda see what other people had on hold --- they'd put the first three letters of your last name on the spine, shelved alphabetically. My mom had been diagnosed with cancer (of the butt, no less), and she was trying to keep it under wraps for a while. As the wife of a minister in our smallish town, she didn't want 200 gossipy church ladies noticing that there were a bunch of books on "rear end Cancer for Dummies" sitting on the shelf with the first 3 letters of our fairly unusual last name stuck on them. So she avoided putting a lot of books on hold. :/ On a lighter note, while shelf-reading one day I discovered that the library I worked at had two books on how to grow marijuana. No idea why, as this was in 2001, and it's still ridiculously illegal in Virginia, you can't even get it for medicinal purposes. I guess someone donated them? I was always itching to check them out, but was afraid to (this was long before we had self-checkout)! I never checked them in/out while working circ and swear they never moved from their shelf, so I guess other patrons were chicken, too, lol.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2018 20:45
|
|
|
JacquelineDempsey posted:That was a really cool article, thanks for sharing it! Something I've seen before was a woman checking out a group of books on how to escape an abusive relationship and how to divorce someone. I didn't say a word.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2018 21:12
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:Something I've seen before was a woman checking out a group of books on how to escape an abusive relationship and how to divorce someone. Thought I'd posted on this already, but I just checked and I must've closed the tab before hitting post or something. That is one of the things that made me truly chuffed to be a library employee --- our dedication to patron privacy and being a neutral zone. I got back into library work mere weeks before 9/11, so when I was still fresh there, terrorism hysteria was rampant. Anyone else remember the big anthrax-in-the-mail scare? Our mailroom clerk started wearing gloves and changed our policy of letting employees put their personal mail in with the library stuff so she could run them to the post office as a favor to us. Pretty sure no terrorist was targeting a library in rural Virginia with anthrax when you had 3 major military bases and a nuclear power plant within a 10 mile radius that you could gently caress with... but that was the mood of the time, for you young 'uns who don't remember those years. Anyways, the PATRIOT Act gets passed thanks to this nationwide paranoia, and not too longer afterwards, something nutty happens. Our city council held their meetings in a building we shared a lot with, and the day one such meeting was supposed to happen, the janitors were tidying up beforehand and discovered someone had gotten in and poured mercury on the seats the council members sat in. Yeah, liquid mercury, like the kind you find in thermometers, but in significant quantities. Can you even get poisoning from sitting in it? Was the attack meant to just shut down the meeting during the hazmat clean-up? A crazy proto-sovereign citizen, a disgruntled HOA person, just some random weirdo? The case was never solved, iirc. During the investigation, the local cops came over and tried to pressure circ and ref into giving out patron records, citing the PATRIOT Act. They wanted to know anyone who had checked out books or media on chemistry, specifically mercury. Our director and head of ref told them that unless they could provide a warrant on a specific patron, they could pound sand. And then an email memo was sent out to all staff saying that was our policy. As someone horrified by all the wire-tapping and poo poo going on in those days, I was so proud to be a library employee that day. Edit: changed an "after" to a "before". I'd actually started working there the week before 9/11; if anyone wants to hear how I found out about it and watched it live at on tv at work, I could share that story. JacquelineDempsey fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Nov 16, 2018 |
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2018 22:19
|
|
|
JacquelineDempsey posted:As someone horrified by all the wire-tapping and poo poo going on in those days, I was so proud to be a library employee that day. I count my blessings that I was too young to be caught up in any of that, I was still in middle school at the time and 9/11 and the consequences simply weren't important to me. So, I used to post in the venting about student thread over in SAL when I worked at a university library, and I started looking at some of my posts. A small taste of the joys of night shift at an academic library... Cythereal posted:Why did I find a soiled pair of boxers in one of the third floor study rooms in the library when closing the building for the night? Cythereal posted:God drat it, student(s). When students came by complaining of a horrible smell coming from one of the currently unoccupied study rooms (we lock our study rooms and check out keys from the circ desk), I was expecting to find food someone had left in the garbage can, or particularly foul-smelling perfume. I was not expecting to find a pile of literal poo poo on one of the study room chairs. Cythereal posted:When reading through this thread during the summer, I wondered why so many posters talked about developing a drinking habit. One and a half days into the fall semester as the main guy manning the circulation desk at the library during the day shift, I've stopped wondering. So far I've had a student returning a book that his dog had shat on, and a greasy guy in a fedora sexually harassing one of the student workers. The nonstop barrage of students asking the same four or five questions I actually don't mind. Cythereal posted:This is not going to end well. Student entered the library, said he was going to take a two-hour math test in the computer lab. When I noted that we're closing in less than an hour (closer to half), he shrugged and said he'll manage. Also, I'd managed to completely forget about the  worthy levels of racism I saw while working there - not from any of the staff, but from the public. It was a rather rural university and I live in the Deep South (particularly Deep at that time), and a lot of our student workers were international students who had trouble finding employment off-campus.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2018 22:28
|
|
|
Wow, your "returned a book a dog shat in" bit reminded me of something... Story from before I worked at libraries, and was a tween age patron: I was browsing the regular (not kids) stacks, I think it was fiction, and found a book that caught my eye. I opened it up to read the jacket blurb, and out fell a Polaroid of a woman, all big 80s hair and gobs of makeup. She was naked, with a bush that rivaled the Amazon forest, and spreading herself wide open for the camera with her fire engine red Lee Press-on Nails. You older goons know about how the young goons have never experienced "woods porn", thanks to the internet? That was, like, the equivalent of woods goatse. It's been probably 30 years, and that image is seared into my brain.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2018 23:16
|
|
|
JacquelineDempsey posted:Wow, your "returned a book a dog shat in" bit reminded me of something... Some more recollections. Cythereal posted:The library has extended hours during the first two weeks in December. A student just came in with a body pillow depicting an extremely scantily clad underage anime girl. I feel ill. Cythereal posted:Students, if the computers in the library computer lab flash warnings that they shut off at closing time every five minutes starting fifteen minutes before we close, it is not a good idea to start printing 300 pages at five minutes till closing. Cythereal posted:The customer services department at the library had a meeting this morning, reviewing the totals from the public suggestions board we put up during the last few weeks of each semester. By far the most popular suggestion is one I wholeheartedly agree with: ban the theater majors from the library. Somehow, that even managed to outstrip the cries for free food and coffee. Cythereal posted:And in the "That was a very special call to the custodial services department" file tonight, a student pissed all over the carpet in one of the private study rooms. When asked why he didn't use the restroom, the student responded that he couldn't find it. The restrooms were fifteen feet from the study room he was in, had a big lit-up sign, and there are signs on the walls about every twenty feet on that floor pointing towards the restrooms. Cythereal posted:Surreal moments in academic librarianship: looking high and low for weird noises that sound like they're coming from inside the library only to discover that it's a student practicing their sousaphone behind the library.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2018 23:37
|
|
|
JacquelineDempsey posted:
It's funny, you totally just made me have a flashback to seeing this dude's show once or twice in elementary school in the mid nineties. I had completely forgotten about that. (I grew up in Charlotte.) Also, love the stories. I worked in my middle school, high school, and university libraries, but don't really have any fun stories to share.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2018 02:54
|
|
|
Coasterphreak posted:It's funny, you totally just made me have a flashback to seeing this dude's show once or twice in elementary school in the mid nineties. I had completely forgotten about that. Yay! Yeah he was totally cool to work with, I loved working his gigs even if it did mean throwing my back out hefting Penelope and her case off the stage. He was always very polite and gracious to us library staff. Did you get to see Tarzan, his semi-trained iguana? That was always a big hit, he had this iguana that he kept hidden in an enclosure under a sheet, but would come out on cue for a treat and all the kids would scream in delight. Fucker was the size of Godzilla, I swear.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2018 04:05
|
|
|
DONT TOUCH THE PC posted:thank you for your service, that system was so much better than the stuff I had to use before. Thanks for the kind words, I'll pass that along. We're working on a US localization right now.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2018 05:10
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:Something I've seen before was a woman checking out a group of books on how to escape an abusive relationship and how to divorce someone.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2018 13:17
|
|
|
My Lovely Horse posted:One guy came up to me at the reference desk and had clearly worked up the nerve to talk to me for a while. He was looking for books on dealing with anxiety issues. Kept my poker face, but inside I was like, dude, I feel ya, that's one hell of a catch-22. Made sure to drop a few more "no problem at all, call me if you need anything else"s more than usual. Aww, St Jerome (patron saint of librarians) bless you. quote:Cythereal posted: Oh hell, that reminds me of "The Gilmore Girls". That was my name for this mother-daughter duo who always came in together and were... kinda creepy in how chummy they were. (If you've never seen the tv show Gilmore Girls, the reason I called them that was that the show was all about a oh-so-hip single mom who treats her teenage daughter like her best friend and equal (or at least the episodes I've seen; I had a casual interest in it during the first season and quickly became annoyed with it.)) The mom dressed just like her teenage daughter, and they'd share a computer in the ref section, often with their arms wrapped around each other. I mean, even in my rebellious punk rock teen days, I loved and respected my mom, but I didn't snuggle with her in a public library, that's just fuckin' weird. They almost always came in 20 minutes before closing, too, and even though Pitbull was going around flicking the lights and loudly announcing that we were closing, they'd start printing pages and pages of stuff off at 8:59. Despite the repeated glares hotter than the surface of the sun from me, the one circ person left, and Pitbull 15 minutes after we were supposed to close, they never even apologized on their way out. Fuckers.
|
|
#
?
Nov 19, 2018 01:48
|
|
|
JacquelineDempsey posted:Fuckers. Escaping retail did not free me from them.  Cythereal posted:Just had a pre-med try to check out every single organic chemistry study guide and solutions manual at the library because midterms are coming up. Cythereal posted:It's getting to be that time of year. An American government class has a paper due tomorrow for which students are supposed to watch and then write a paper about a DVD the professor put on course reserve at the library. They've had the entire semester to do this. I know this because the professor in question teaches this course every semester and hands out this assignment every time. I also know this because I've had nine people today - I've counted - come to the library to check out the DVD in question only to be told that it's currently checked out and has a waiting list (it can only be checked out for two hours at a time, and the movie's an hour and a half long). Which also happens every semester. Cythereal posted:Working Saturday at the library again, just had to save one of my student workers from a nontraditional student. Cythereal posted:A student has started leaving Chick tracts around the library. This is going to be a fun departmental meeting.
|
|
#
?
Nov 19, 2018 02:58
|
|
YOU CAN'T POSSIBLY HELP ME, LITTLE GIRL. I NEED TO TALK TO SOMEONE WHO'S FINISHED GROWING UP.
|
Cythereal posted:Escaping retail did not free me from them. An enterprising student could get this earlier and rip / burn it and stand outside the library selling them for some sweet beer / weed money.
|
|
#
?
Nov 19, 2018 03:11
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:Working Saturday at the library again, just had to save one of my student workers from a nontraditional student. Old people coming up to me and asking for help in the most condescending way possible really brought out the bastard in me and they got an avalanche of subtle insults about how much of a dick they were.
|
|
#
?
Nov 19, 2018 09:41
|
|
|
I swear almost every time a new touring musical act came to put on a concert, this would happen: Either they'd call ahead and let Skipper know they were in town, checked into their hotel, and they'd be arriving shortly. Skipper, being an awesome boss, would tell me to go get a couple cigarettes in because lord knows how long I was gonna be stuck in the booth doing a soundcheck. Or, they'd just show up. If the former, I'd usually be standing out back on the theatre loading dock smoking when they pulled up; if the latter, I'd be at the desk by our entrance. So I'd generally be the first one to greet them. "Heyyyy, you must be Band Name! I'm JD. Come on back, I'll show you where to load in and where the dressing rooms are." "Nice to meet you JD!" And we'd head into the theatre, I'm offering to help carry stuff, etc., asking how their drive from wherever was. They get a little settled in and then inevitably: "Okay, so when do we meet the sound guy?" "You're looking at her." And they'd always look a little stunned, as if "A  is our sound tech? How can this be?" The exception to this was Four Bitchin' Babes, who asked "are you doing our sound?", probably because they are four bitchin' babes (seriously check them out, they're hilarious. They'd do a song called "BOB", which stands for "battery operated boyfriend", it's a love ode to vibrators). Christine Lavin was cool, too, and when we ordered food from the local pub as per her rider, always insisted I got fed as well. Loved working with her. But yeah, if the performer was a dude or a group solely of dudes, it seemed to blow their mind that their sound guy was actually a sound gal. You'd think musicians would be a little more open-minded, but... 
|
|
#
?
Nov 19, 2018 23:28
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:Escaping retail did not free me from them. The law library had a high proportion of older patrons than the other places I've worked at, which is maybe not surprising. Most of them were actually pretty professional, barring this one guy who went absolutely ballistic because we wouldn't sell him a piece of our catalog. It was one volume of a pamphlet and wasn't what he was actually trying to find, but by god, we'd better rip off the state for him or else he'd have us fired! And when he dies, he's going to donate a lot of money to our parent institution! Which, like, it's a law school, dude. It's primarily self-funded, and you're not dead yet, sooo. There was a huge reserve section for study guides and assigned reading, so of course we'd have the people who put off their assignment to the last minute all fighting over one copy of a book. The law library twist is that your class ranking is important as all get-out if you want to make it into one of the big national firms, and obviously the easiest way to do this is to ensure your peers fail, rather than to study hard. Every so often we'd have somebody slip in at open, check out a reserve item that was going to be hugely popular that day, and then hide it somewhere in the library. Rapidly compounding fines were apparently worth it to potentially sabotage everyone else's grades, since obviously you'll be the one making six figures on graduation while the rest of the proles are stuck clerking. Turns out lawyers are kinda dumb and short-sighted.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2018 15:37
|
|
|
I had a high school teacher who told us he dropped out of law school after stuff like that--like people razor-blading out crucial pages of a book containing a necessary citation.Bluedeanie posted:Got any microfilm/fiche stories? I know all the reaction they're likely to cause is exasperation from young people who have to do a school project and need to figure out how to work such archaic machinery but I have a soft spot for them. They're a uniquely library thing. When I worked for a library, one of the faculty handed off what was ostensibly a legal research project but was obviously just football fandom (he wanted to know exactly when the Redskins moved stadiums). I scrolled through a ton of Boston newspapers from the 1930s and learned a lot about Hitler and pro wrestling. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Nov 20, 2018 |
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2018 21:05
|
|
Man, I love libraries and my dream part time job is working at a library, even doing grunt level book return type poo poo (or at least, that's how the fantasy goes lol). I was a library aide in middle school and that was by far my favorite 'class' so I'm sure some of it is rose colored glasses, but still. I'd kill for a position at a library but of course they are rare nowadays and I'm sure there's a ton of competition that I won't be able to overcome. Ah well 
|
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2018 15:56
|
|
|
Watermelon Daiquiri posted:Man, I love libraries and my dream part time job is working at a library, even doing grunt level book return type poo poo (or at least, that's how the fantasy goes lol). I was a library aide in middle school and that was by far my favorite 'class' so I'm sure some of it is rose colored glasses, but still. I'd kill for a position at a library but of course they are rare nowadays and I'm sure there's a ton of competition that I won't be able to overcome. Ah well Hey, don't give up your dreams! Even if they aren't hiring, most libraries will take on volunteers. Maybe do that a few hours a week, and then when a shelver leaves, you'll have your foot in the door and be way up on the list. Heck, my library was an option for juvenile offenders who needed to do community service hours. They'd commit some minor, non-violent crime, opt for community svce over paying a fine or going to jail, and suddenly we had a new shelver for a couple weeks. I think we hired at least one because they showed up on time, worked hard, and had a knack for not mis-shelving stuff. Also, I don't know what the situation's like in today's atrocious economic climate, but my library offered tuition reimbursement. I'd looked into getting my MLS while working as a soundguy there; as long as you kept your GPA above a certain grade, the library would basically pay for you to get it. Didn't even have to be library oriented, fellow soundguy Will was taking science classes at the local community college (his dream was to become a meteorologist) on the library dime.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2018 16:44
|
|
I wonder if they'd reimburse an independent thesis physics masters  Getting my Ph.D. Is my real dream, but gently caress does a library position sound like a great part time job for me
|
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2018 17:21
|
|
|
JacquelineDempsey posted:Heck, my library was an option for juvenile offenders who needed to do community service hours. They'd commit some minor, non-violent crime, opt for community svce over paying a fine or going to jail, and suddenly we had a new shelver for a couple weeks. I think we hired at least one because they showed up on time, worked hard, and had a knack for not mis-shelving stuff. At the very least that would do as a b-plot for a Nicholas Sparks movie.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2018 17:36
|
|
|
Personally I'd rather have gone for a library assistant qualification than the proper librarian degree, in retrospect. The latter gets you locked away in offices and meetings, the former has you actually go out and do poo poo and talk to patrons. And at my last job me and an assistant both got saddled with the same lame-rear end genuine grunt work data entry job, so it's not like the degree really offers any protection from that sort of thing.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2018 18:12
|
|
|
Watermelon Daiquiri posted:Man, I love libraries and my dream part time job is working at a library, even doing grunt level book return type poo poo (or at least, that's how the fantasy goes lol). I was a library aide in middle school and that was by far my favorite 'class' so I'm sure some of it is rose colored glasses, but still. I'd kill for a position at a library but of course they are rare nowadays and I'm sure there's a ton of competition that I won't be able to overcome. Ah well When I was a graduate assistant I also worked part time at my university library reference desk. It was an absolute dream job, and they were constantly looking for more people who qualified for it. You needed to be a Graduate student in English, History, or the Social Sciences because that mostly covers the research skills and topical knowledge you needed to field the "hard" questions you could get at reference. Mostly you just gave direction though. Well, really mostly you just sat around and browsed the internet, an hours "work" would involve maybe 10 minutes of real work. On-topic: I didn't encounter many genuine weirdos during my tenure, but three patrons come to mind. 1: We had a tiny old Chinese homeless woman who somehow journeyed to my small college town (she may have been the only homeless person in the entire town) based on a vision. She sat at the public library computers and wrote her memoirs. I think she was schizophrenic. She wanted me to look at them, and they had the Crazy Capitalization Of random Words thing going on and in detail outlined how an old school friend of hers had allied with the Microsoft corporation to put a microchip in her brain. Very polite and reserved woman besides that though. 2: We had a student who was extremely talkative and had this kind of subtly disturbing twitchy manner. He would sit down and ask me to explain differing cultural experiences of time (I was a graduate student in Anthropology so I was the most qualified person to field that question among the reference staff). He was very long-winded and repetitive when explaining his thoughts and asking questions, and we'd have a long conversation about it and look about books and articles on it. So far, so mostly good. Thing was, he would come back at least once a month with more or less the same question. He did this for the entire time I worked there, and other librarians noted that he's been here and been doing that since long before I started working. 3. Our most hated patron was "no socks guy." I called him "angry guy" but "no socks guy" seemed to stick among the staff better. He always wore dirty sneakers with no socks and he'd come to the library to use the computers. He never had any questions, though he would sometimes come to the desk to use the complementary tissues. But like clockwork an hour or so into his visit he'd just explode. He'd shout curse words, bang his hand on the desk, kick over a trash can, some kind of huge display of rage. Then he'd look kind of sheepish and leave. We never banned him because he didn't hurt anyone or break anything, but it was an added stress whenever you saw him because you would just know in a bit he'd be screaming.
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2018 01:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 21, 2024 21:16 |
|
|
Mr. Prokosch posted:
This was me during the summer. Our library sponsored concert and lecture series ran from fall to spring, so If I got night shift in the summer, I missed all the YS summer reading programs in the morning, and was essentially babysitting the desk for hours on end. It is no coincidence that my reg date for SA is in August. "No socks guy" reminds me of a topic someone asked about : weirdos who rented out our community rooms/theatre. Since I'm having the most boring Thanksgiving ever, let's have some stories. Being available, for an extra fee, to be open on Sunday's before the library proper was open, we rented our theatre and rooms out to all kinds of quirky start-up churches. Evangelicals who drove Ford Econolines to hold their quiver of 12 kids, baptists who spent enough in fancy hats that they could've bought their own church if they just held off on the haberdasher, weird rear end cults that had me up in the sound booth playing stuff that wouldn't have sounded out of place at Jonestown. I just smiled and played along, until one group moved in. I'm sorry I can't recall the name of their group/sect, but they all took their shoes and socks off upon entering the theatre and wandered around the library (including the restrooms) barefoot. Now, I'm not one to penalize a faith, you do you, but I did feel responsible for the health and well-being of other patrons. And I'd seen enough "no shirt no shoes no service" signs growing up that I thought this might be a problem in a public building. After witnessing it, I casually mentioned it to our asst director. "Is that okay? Do we have a policy on that?" This turned into a massive discussion between the library and the county attorney. Now for months we had no idea what, if, any, policy we had,. I had essentially kicked a beehive about "can we tell a patron they have to have shoes on?" without meaning to. The eventual ruling was that they could be barefoot in the theatre during services, but not wandering around the rest of the library like that. Seemed fair. And of course as is the way of these things, shortly thereafter they stopped renting from us, having found a new venue (for totally unrelated reasons), rendering the whole issue moot.
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2018 03:37
|
|