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So in another thread, a goon mentioned a guy expelled from school for watching porn during class. I was honestly curious what kind of porn he was watching, because I worked for a public library for over a decade, and part of my job was busting pervs for looking at porn in a public facility. They were never looking at something as vanilla as cute Playboy models, it was always super raunchy hardcore poo poo. Anyways, I mentioned in passing that I could do an A/T on crazy library stories, got some "yes, please!" replies, and here we are! Let's start with one of my favorites, the guy we nicknamed "The Shooter". Most public libraries have some scrap paper and a cup of pencils by the computers, so when you're looking up the Dewey number/author/name of a book, you can write it down and take it with you to the stacks. One of the shelvers' jobs was keeping those stocked, they usually did that at closing time. At some point, the shelvers were refilling the cups at night with our little golf pencils and noticed there was a.... substance in the bottom of them. A sticky white substance. Yeah, someone was serial jacking it into our pencil cups. Our security guard had her suspicions on who The Shooter was, but we could never bust the guy busting his nut and get the police involved. After a month or so of this, admin comes up with a solution: Replace the solid pencil cups with mesh ones. :facepalm: Yeah, good job admin, problem solved, surely that will thwart him, glad y'all are making 5x what I am. The Shooter now turns to ripping out bits of our plastic garbage bags and blowing his wad in that instead (we keep finding torn bin liners) and leaving them everywhere. Our maintenance guys and shelvers start wearing gloves 24/7, and my security guard is about to have an aneurysm if she doesn't catch this guy so we can get him banned and arrested. FINALLY we nail this motherfucker watching porn with his hands down his pants and get to call the cops. Of course by the time the cops arrive there's no immediate evidence, but he did have weed on him, so they took him away for that and got him banned from the library for life. As a pro-legalization person, that kinda sucks, don't like to see people do time for that, but good riddance to bad rubbish. Other potential stories: My first crazy patron, when I was 15 and got my very first job at a library: "ELECTRICITY!" The woman who got shot to death outside that first library job "Emotional support" animals (yes we totally need a parrot flying around and making GBS threads on books) Bicycle shorts guy Shrimp in the bathroom guy Antonio, my crazy stalker What do y'all wanna hear first?
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Oct 22, 2018 17:24
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Ceiling fan posted:Mmmm... That sounds like some extreme extra spicy crazy. Let's go with shrimp in the bathroom. Ah, that's my specialty! That was my job for the bulk of my tour of duty, between our 2 branches we had 6 community meeting rooms, plus a 300 seat theater. I was the head audio-visual wench, doing stuff like running sound for concerts, setting up LCD projectors and laptops (and for a couple regulars still living in the Paleolithic age, our Kodak slide projector), and cleaning up 75 pounds of glitter every time we had a children's craft event. ("Glitter is the herpes of the craft world" was my department's motto) But first,shrimp guy. Naturally, a public library attracts a lot of homeless folks. We're warm in the winter, air conditioned in the brutal southern summer, have comfy chairs and free entertainment in the form of books and Internet. And, of course, nice multi-stall restrooms. One day I'm minding our desk, probably dicking around on these here forums, and a male patron comes up with a very confused look on his face. "Ma'am? Uh, there's a guy, um, in the restroom, and he's....". He pauses, with a thousand yard stare. Great, we got another guy whacking it, I think, and start for the phone to call a male staffer to deal with this (we only had security on nights and weekends). "...he's got one of the sinks full of shrimp." Now I'm the one looking super confused. "Shrimp?" "Yeah, he rinsing off shrimp in the sink. I, uh, just thought you'd want to know." "Huh. Yes. Thank you for the heads up." LT, one of our facilities guys, happens to be passing by, and I get to confuse the gently caress out of him by asking hey, would you mind checking the men's restroom, there's supposedly a guy with shrimp in there? He does so and reports back. "It's that homeless guy, the old white dude? He got the shrimp in a bag, like a Food Lion bag. It's frozen, he thawing it out." "Is it raw or cooked?" I ask, immediately realizing the absurdity of this question. "Cooked, it just frozen. Nice lookin' shrimp, too, big ones!" (LT was known for always being hungry and eating anything and everything.) I've been drat close to being homeless myself, so I have a lot of sympathy for hobos. The fella in question had never caused us any trouble; who am I to begrudge a poor guy a nice seafood dinner? Dude scored big time on his pound of shrimp, I wasn't about to kick him out for that. I told LT to put up the "closed for cleaning, please use other restroom" sign, and got him to scrub the sink when homeless guy left. Bonus story: one of my co-workers had her indoor/outdoor wedding reception at a hall across the street from the library. The same homeless guy saw the party going on and wandered over to the buffet tables outside. My co-worker and her husband are pretty chill hippy types, so they politely told him it was a private party, he had to leave, but he could help himself to some vegetarian lasagna if he liked. He filled up a paper plate and wandered back to the parking garage he lived in, no fuss from either side. All us drunk library folks were dying laughing, though. "Girl, you just got your wedding crashed by The Shrimp Guy." Blendy (or any other library workers), feel free to chime in with your war stories! The more the merrier. JacquelineDempsey fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 22, 2018 22:17
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Proteus Jones posted:That’s awesome and you’re awesome for that. Aw, thanks! Your av is pretty awesome, too (though I miss the Zatanna one). I'm in a writing mood today, so I'll go ahead and share My First Experience with Library Crazy My first ever real (ie., getting a paycheck, not babysitting or raking leaves) job was as a page at our local library. In NY in the 80's, you could get a legit job in some not-really-hazardous workplaces at 15 instead of 16 if you had kept up good grades in school and didn't work past certain hours. Being a book nerd, the library three blocks away was an obvious move. For reasons still unclear to me, that library had separate pages for the kids' sections vs the adult section, so I solely sorted and shelved the kids' books as they get returned. Another task of the page/shelver is what's called shelf-reading, which is when you just go down the stacks book by book and make sure all the books are in order after patrons pull out one, decide they don't want it, and randomly shove it somewhere it doesn't belong. So I'm shelf-reading non-fiction, probably hiding over in 567.91 doing dinosaur books because I like dinosaurs, and I hear a toddler start crying over in the picture book/easy reader corner. This kid's wailing like a fire truck, but I'm used to being in the children's section, I'm no stranger to kids in that area throwing tantrums. I ignore it and keep shelf-reading. Then things get odd. Kiddo is sobbing away, and then a second crier joins in. At first I roll my eyes, thinking "great, we gotta chain reaction going on", that happens all the time when you have multiple toddlers together, right? But something's off; the second crier doesn't sound like a kid. And now the kid has stopped, but the second voice is still going, at dB levels that would shame a jet plane. I get up and walk around the stacks to see wtf is going on, just in time to see a worried mom scooping up her teary-eyed son away from a 50-something year old woman who is mimicking the crying child. She's not actually crying, she's just sitting on the floor in the picture book section going "waaaaah! waaaah! waaaah!", mocking this poor kid straight in the face and scaring the piss outta him. As a librarian approaches to defuse the situation, this woman gets up, pushes past the staff, throws her hands straight up in the air and screams "ELECTRICITY!" at the top of her lungs just before going out the emergency fire exit and setting the door alarm off. "What the hell just happened?" I ask my co-worker, Jeff, once the dust has settled and the fire department had been told, no, we're not on fire. "Oh, I heard we had a field trip group from [local psychiatric hospital]. She was with them." "Ya think maybe someone could give us a heads up next time we have a bunch of unattended schizophrenics roaming around?" Jeff just shrugged. That's library life. But after that, any time things got a little super busy or stressful there, Jeff and/or I would fling our hands in the air and yell "ELECTRICITY!" JacquelineDempsey fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 00:36
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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. I have no good tales about fiche save for my own personal boring stories of using it to find my estranged father via census records. I was never in reference, I was circulation/shelver until I moved over to "program servIces" which encompassed mostly a/v set-up, and also strangely my dept got put In charge of security so I was always tasked with looking over the cam footage and privy to hearing about the latest man* we needed to get banned. *Or woman, but I can only think of one example of a woman getting arrested/banned after 12 years there. Woman filled up two shopping bags full off expensive coffee-table art books and waltzed out. A decent patron tipped us off about it the next day, and I spent the better part of a shift watching hours of cam footage at 4x speed until I finally pegged her, to get her banned. Then I did a little googling to find out where she lived, because we need to send a certified letter to make the ban official. loving woman lived in a half million dollar gated community McMansion, and she's stealing from libraries. There's a special place in hell for her.
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Oct 23, 2018 05:42
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Uncle at Nintendo posted:This is loving amazing. What is the stalker story? Ah, Antonio. I guess "stalker" is a bit of an exaggeration, but you'll see why I got him banned. As I said, I worked for the theater/conference room dept, and we had our own entrance because we'd often have events before the library proper opened or after it closed. (Best one was an annual fall fundraiser for a non-profit organization, and they ran a cash bar. The woman running it would sneak us library employees beers all night as a "tip" for working until midnight and having to clean up after them. You got overtime AND tanked; we used to fight over who got that shift.) My desk was right by this entrance, so I had a constant view of people coming and going. One summer, I start noticing this guy coming in all the time. And by "all the time", I mean he would walk through my door dozens of times in one day. He would come in my door, head into the library, and apparently go right back out another door, then come back in through our entrance, staring at me. Aside from this, he stood out because he was absolutely expressionless, never talked to anyone or even checked out a book as far as I could tell, had a stiff gait, wore a parka in Virginia summer, and looked exactly like a slightly chunkier Michael Jordan. I think my first conversation with my second-in-charge, Rob, about him went like: "Rob, have you noticed that guy---" "Zombie Michael Jordan?" "loving YES!" So picture Zombie Michael Jordan for the rest of this story. We chalked him up as Library Weirdo #739, and didn't pay him much mind; as I said, he would just be doing laps and walk through our door 8 times a day. Whatever. But Pitbull, our security guard, started telling us that he was creeping out patrons and staffers in the stacks. Apparently after coming in my entrance, he would head for the stacks and then just stand there, staring, giving a lot of women (and libraries are predominately staffed by women) the heebie-jeebies. Pitbull finally gets fed up with hearing complaints from patrons, and calls the police non-emergency line to see if they know anything about this guy. The PD was literally across the street, we shared a parking lot, so a few minutes later two officers show up. One of them looks almost exactly like ZMJ. He's his brother. He tells us that while Antonio has some mental issues, he's harmless. Pitbull and our boss, The Skipper, are not totally satisfied with this response; he's freaking out both patrons and staff, can't you tell him to go creep out people somewhere else? But it's not a crime to just stand and stare at women in a public library, the police aren't going to do anything. Especially when it's a family member. Well, things start escalating. Antonio disappears for a while, and Pitbull, who, being Pitbull, reads the police blotter in the newspaper for fun and to keep track of our "problem patrons", tells us he got arrested for standing in the middle of a busy road throwing rocks at cars. A few weeks later a co-worker whose car broke down and was taking the bus tells us Antonio was on the same bus as him and kept going up to women and getting very all up in their personal space. When the women got up and switched seats, he was following them. Bus driver kicked him off and wouldn't let him on for the next few days, but he would still stand at his usual stop and glare at the bus. Even this fit male co-worker was kinda spooked by Antonio. One day, I'm coming in for a late shift, 2-10. As I'm walking towards our entrance, guess who's standing outside? He's staring at me all the way up, head swiveling as I ignore him and go in. About 15 minutes later, an elderly woman walks up to my desk looking a bit perplexed and frightened. "Excuse me, miss? There was a man outside, and he said to give this to the lady with the red hair at this desk. I guess that's you?" She's got a couple pieces of folded-up papers her hand. As I warily take them, I ask, "Tall dark-skinned guy with a shaved head?" "Yes!" "Ok, thanks. And just... Stay away from him." She jets as fast as her geriatric little legs will allow her, and I open up the notes. They're on our scrap paper we keep by the computers, in pencil. The first note, in the bizarre melange of uppercase and lowercase that is a pretty classic sign of crazy (my MA is in art therapy), is asking me to meet him at the Motel 6, room number and all. The second has what first appears to be absolute gibberish of number and letters. Then I notice they're all strings of six or seven characters. Huh, they look like... Virginia license plate numbers. Huh, that one's... MY license plate. Huh, I'm working after hours tonight and will be closing the library entirely by myself. I get Pitbull, Skipper, and the head of reference (who is in charge when admin has left for the day) down to my desk so fast, it would make your head swim. Skipper calls the cops, and has the presence of mind to specifically request that we NOT get Officer [Antonio's bro] to respond. Skipper immediately drafted the ban letter, emails were sent to all staff, and I had a friendly cop waiting in a marked car to make sure I got my car okay when I closed up shop that night. I also got special parking privileges for the rest of my days there; employees were supposed to park in the garage across the street, where Shrimp Guy lived, but I got to park as close to the building as I liked. We had occasional Antonio sightings around town after that, and folks were always quick to tell me about them, but fortunately that was the end of him coming in the library. JacquelineDempsey fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 17:18
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Cythereal posted:If I can chime in as a librarian who's not the OP? Probably the book of erotic BDSM retellings of Disney princess stories by Anne Rice under a pen name. You, and other library vets, are welcome to chime in at any point! Fleta's post about ham reminded me of another great subject: what's the craziest poo poo y'all ever found in the book drops (or anywhere else, for that matter)? Mine's a toss up between literal poo poo --- someone dumped (pun totally intended) a bunch of soiled diapers at our branch out in the sticks --- and the time I reached in our main branch's drop box and nearly sliced my fingers off because someone had thrown a circular saw blade in with 23 overdue VHS tapes.
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Oct 24, 2018 00:52
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Cythereal posted:Two years before I started at one of the public libraries I worked at, someone shoved a kitten in through the book drop. The cataloger adopted the cat and Dewey, as all library cats are named, was still doing fine when I started there. And I never caught any actual fuckers. One of our favorite gross stories during my a/v days, though, was when I was up in the sound booth, where I had a birds eye view of the whole theater. I'm sitting there, minding the sound board and bored out of my mind during some lecture, and then notice a genteel old southern lady picking her nose like it's her job. I mean, she's seriously rooting around in there. A co-worker comes into the booth to ask me something, and I point her out: "Check out the lady with the blue hat in the sixth row, she's been picking her nose like crazy. Look, she's doing it again." Just after I say this, we watch in horror as she examines her catch, and eats it. Surrounded by a packed theater, and as I said it was a lecture, so the lights weren't off, it wasn't like we were showing a film. In the next five minutes, I think we had half the library staff up in my tiny sound booth, watching this woman and giggling like 10 year olds, waiting for her to strike more gold and gross us out some more. Good times.
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Oct 24, 2018 02:22
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Cythereal posted:Fortunately my case was not dramatic. I was doing a sweep of the library at fifteen till closing (about 1:45 AM, I was mainly a night shift person) to tell everyone, and passed by one of our small group study rooms - which have extensive glass windows next to the door - and my mind looked just closely enough to realize what two African-American girls were doing on the table before I looked away, knocked on the glass, politely told them we were closing in fifteen minutes, and went on my way. Fwiw, sounds like you did the right thing. That's about the same call I would've made. Though I could be biased because the first time I ever kissed a boy was when I was 8, in the underground parking garage of that library I got my first job at. Had my first cigarette there too, when I was 12. Libraries: Temples of Knowledge, and Dens of Corruption.
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Oct 24, 2018 17:47
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Kid sounds like an absolute shithead either way (riding a hover board? Man, back in my day all we had to deal with were those stupid sneakers with the wheels that popped out), but just to clarify: did he deliberately or accidentally spill the Starbucks cup?
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Oct 24, 2018 18:30
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I've had a really lovely day, so how's about a fun story? The Day I Got to Feel Up Boris Karloff's Daughter One month, we were doing a cross-promotional series of events with the local university, based mostly on Frankenstein. We had some really cool lectures on 19th century science, including demonstrations of legit early electric devices, we were showing Frankenstein films in the theater every day, book club discussions about the novel, etc. The highlight was that we were having Sara Karloff, Boris's daughter, coming to not only speak at our theater, but bringing home movies, unavailable and previously unseen by the public, of her father. COLOR home movies, and unreleased color test footage where you can see that the monster is green, even though the release is black and white. As a fan of old monster movies, and mad science in general, you best believe I volunteered to work that shift. So my job is to make sure her laptop is happily married to our 6000 lumen LCD projector, and the remote is working, and then I have to put a lavalier (lapel) mic on her. Sara Karloff is a striking woman. I mean, "striking" is the best single adjective I can come up with because she's tall, imposingly built, and looks like Boris, but... sexy? And a snappy dresser. I've got an instant crush. "Ms. Karloff? Hi, I'm JD, I'm your a/v person tonight," I squeak, wringing my hands and sweating. "I need to give you this mic, and get a sound check?" She smiles graciously, then shakes (read: crushes) my hand. I fumble with hitching the lapel mic to the transmitter, and when I look up, she's pulled her blouse away from her waist. I stand there like a deer in headlights for a second, then realize she's waiting for me to be the one to thread the mic cable under her shirt. Usually, people like to do this themselves, so this throws me even more than the fact that I'm a little starstruck. I quickly, and as professionally as possible, snake the cable up her shirt past her magnificent rack, and clip the mic to her lapel and the transmitter to her hip. A consummate professional, she thanks me, and tells me she's ready whenever I am. And goes on to give a really stellar talk about her father, movie studio life, and I got to see some incredibly rare footage. It was events like that which kept me working there for 12 years despite all the annoying patrons and creeps and weirdos.
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Oct 25, 2018 02:47
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Cythereal posted:One public library I worked at, management was completely spineless and didn't want to make an official paperwork record of a patron threatening to come in and shoot us. The academic library I'm working at right now, my boss told me on my first day that we are allowed to tell anyone to leave the library if we think it's necessary oh and the police are on speed dial on all the library phones. Our admin staff was pretty quick with the ban hammer, but nights and weekends, when they weren't there, the senior-most reference librarian would be in charge. Most of them had less spine than a well-worn picture book. The most wishywashy one was the department head, so that put him in charge more than most. One day a patron complained to someone at the circ desk that there was a man at the computers with a hand down his pants. When the circ employee told Wishywashy, and asked if they should ask him to leave or call the cops, he responded, "Well, now, we don't know for sure what's going on. Perhaps he has a hand deformity and is embarrassed by it." That became a running joke for years. When they put Skipper in charge of security, we started banning people left and right, it was great.
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Oct 25, 2018 21:18
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Cythereal posted:The phantom shitter  Our only "haunting" story was James. When they first expanded the library in the 80s to include the theatre, the first (and, at that point, only) theatre staff member was James. He was apparently quite the character, known for, among other things, taking naps in the catwalk 30 feet above the stage in between events. Can't find James? Has anyone checked the mezzanine? He just sort of magically came and went, but also got the job done single-handed. When he left the library, he just plain dropped off the face of the earth. No one knew where he'd gone, or what he was doing. So any time we heard mysterious noises of something totally crazy happened with the a/v gear, the running joke was that it was James --- or his ghost. Not really a haunting, but funny horror story related: Hurricane Isabel back in 2003 totally trashed our building. The theatre had flooded going up our raked seating to about the fourth row. I came in two days after the fact, even though we were still closed due to power outages and the fact that all our carpets were still swampland. I was bored sitting around my apartment with no power, and wanted to get out of the house to see how hard we got we hit. I had the keys to the building, so I just drove up there to check it out. I see our head of facilities' truck is parked, so I know he's there. But he's not expecting me, so I scare the piss out of him as I'm roaming the the halls with a flashlight in a dead silent building. Then the Skipper shows up, and then Will, another theatre guy and the only black dude in our dept. We finally group up and decide what we can take care of. Bear in mind this is the theatre, so it's pitch black. It's pretty spooky in there. Head of facilities starts barking orders. "I'm gonna check the breakers. JD, you go get some buckets. Will, you go over to ----" "Aw, hell nah! I've seen horror movies, I know how this goes! We all split up, and it's always the brother that gets killed first!" This brings a hearty round of hysterical laughing, and then I reply: "Well, I'M just glad I haven't had teenage sex with any of y'all. Good luck!" and start heading for the maintenance closet. One of my fonder memories. JacquelineDempsey fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Oct 26, 2018 |
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Oct 26, 2018 03:48
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Cythereal posted:Rich white people are the worst. Not the hobos. Not the mentally ill people dumped off in the library by their caretakers so they don't have to take care of them for the day. Not the kids. Will confirm. They're also always the first ones to break out this chestnut when they're unhappy with your facility/service: "My tax dollars pay for this library/your salary!" I don't have a verifiable source on hand, but my boss, when I was in circ, told me the average Virginian pays something to the tune of $1.75 per year in local, state, and federal taxes combined that actually goes to libraries.
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Oct 26, 2018 13:07
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Proteus Jones posted:
Genuinely  here. If only I'd had the balls to say that.Talking about rich white folk reminds me of How I Earned the Library Nickname "The Mean Lady" One day we had events going on in all 3 conference rooms, plus the theatre. That night, we also had a very popular concert scheduled. So I'm running around like a headless chicken, satisfying various patrons as well as staffing the desk and answering a constantly ringing phone doing ticket sales for the concert. Our lobby is packed, and despite having Whisper Walls installed in there (they're insulated to absorb noise), it's loud and chaotic as gently caress in there. An entitled yoga mom is sitting on the benches right next to my desk with her toddler, waiting for.... something, idk. The toddler has just learned to make a new noise with his mouth, the kind where you let your lips go loose and blow out. Not a raspberry where you stick your tongue out, but a "BBBBLUBBBBLUBBBBLU" bubble-making noise. He's doing it at full volume a few feet away from me while I'm patiently asking people on the phone to repeat their credit card numbers so I can process their ticket orders. I must've shot a pained look in their direction, because when I got off the phone, the mother gives me a sweet smile and asks, "Oh, is he distracting you?" I smile back as politely as I can and hold up my fingers, making the "just a little bit" gesture. Her smile instantly turns into a scowl, and she glares at me while packing up her SUV-sized stroller. She scoops up her kiddo, roughly tosses him in, loudly declares so everyone in the lobby can hear: "Come on, Brayydin. We have to go. The mean lady doesn't want us here." ...and storms off. I'm left sitting there, a bit taken aback, wondering "why the hell did you even ask, unless you wanted the answer to be 'oh, no, I love having toddlers making stupid noises in my ear while I'm trying to do business here'?" A couple co-workers happened to be around and start laughing, patting me on the back and assuring me that if she complained to management, they'd back me up that I did nothing wrong. But from then on, I was jokingly known as The Mean Lady.
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Oct 26, 2018 17:57
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I pay part of your salary!
I will give you precisely $1.75 of service, if that's your attitude. My attention is all yours.
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My Lovely Horse posted:Yeah they say they want you to inspire fun in the people around you, but you set up one measly karaoke station and it's off to the head librarian's office with you That's why my library ruled. We got some cool new blood working for Youth Services one year, including one woman who was an avid gamer. They were tasked with bringing more teens into the library, so she booked our theatre and brought in her full Rock Band and Guitar Hero set-ups. I happened to be on deck that day, and while getting the a/v connections of her rig to talk to our sound board and LCD projector was a bit tricky (adapters and y-cables galore), the end result was incredible. Imagine playing Rock Band and Guitar Hero on a 36 foot wide theatre screen with a pro level sound system cranking through three 18" speakers. We had a blast, and so did the kids. They'd been tasked with convincing teens that the library was not some boring, stuffy place, and I think we succeeded admirably that day. But back to weirdos! Bicycle Shorts Guy There's not a heckuva lot of story to tell about this guy, but he was the first weirdo I was warned about when I started my last library job, so he sticks out (oh god that's a terrible pun as you'll find out) to me. Basically, this guy came in, in any weather, wearing bicycle shorts. Y'know, the Lycra/spandex things. He'd be spotted here and there around the stacks, but never checked a book out or asked any questions, and didn't even use the public computers. So that set off some red flags, and staff started keeping an eye on him. As it turned out, HE was keeping an eye on teenage girls, and wearing those shorts to make sure they would be keeping an eye on his raging erection. A subtle sort of exhibitionism compared to a flasher, but that was clearly his end goal. If memory serves (this was about 16 years ago), they finally banned him when he was caught crouching on the floor in the 800s so he could look up girls' skirts in the next aisle over (with a totally noticeable raging hard-on). This was right before I got hired, and before we had security cams, so I was wary of any cyclist coming in wearing bike shorts and had to keep whispering to staff "is that him?" Never did see him, I guess he took his fetish elsewhere.
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Oct 28, 2018 20:14
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My Lovely Horse posted:Like I said. Jealous. If you live in a city big enough to have some kind of youth center for poor kids' after-school programs, they might appreciate it. Rock Band is a nice gender neutral game without violence and stuff, it's pretty wholesome as far as video games go. Or maybe like a rehab/halfway house or women's shelter? Give the residents something fun to distract from their woes that involves music and isn't super competitive or just mindless watching tv. IDK, just spitballin' here, these could be terrible ideas, but it's what sprung to mind. Edit: also, what is your av from, it's one of those ones my crazy brain can just sit there and watch for way too long even though it's a 3 second looping gif JacquelineDempsey fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Oct 28, 2018 |
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Oct 28, 2018 20:51
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I, who as a little girl in the 70s/80s loved Thundarr the Barbarian, He-Man, Galaxy Rangers, and Blackstar --- all those sort of cartoons --- would have watched the absolute poo poo out of this if it was real. Hell, I still would. Well, guess the ol crazy brain has something new to watch on an endless loop (Seriously, thanks for answering that!)
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Oct 28, 2018 21:42
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Leperflesh posted:
Haha! Bit of a derail, but it's my thread, dang it. Around 1998 I worked at a indie used CD store (remember those  ?). We had those kind of security tags, which we put on the plastic security cases, which are called shucks. If you tried to shoplift a CD, shuck and all, it would set off the door sensor. If you could get a CD out of the shuck in the store without us noticing, well, more power to ya, because we used to try to break into those during slow times for fun, and they're pretty tough. For a time we kept finding shucks with burn marks in the r&b section; apparently someone thought they could use a lighter to melt their way thru em. Nope (and if you could, you'd probably melt the jewel case and disc too, you moron).Anyways, we used to prank new hires by putting a fresh tag, sticky side up, on the floor right by the register when it was busy. You'd step on the tag, and it would get stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Then when you went on break or got anywhere near the door, the alarm would go off. Newbies would be frantically patting themselves down, thinking they'd accidentally put a CD they wanted to buy in their coat, or just being plain mystified as to why they kept setting the alarm off. Us folks in on the joke would come up with all kinds of stupid "explanations" like: "Do you have any metal implants?" "Are you on your period? It always goes off when I'm on the rag." "Are you a Scorpio? It's very sensitive to Scorpios." ...etc. If it was today, we probably would have shrugged and said "Oh, it's Halloween. Guess it's haunted." Good times! ... As for Cythereals's blood bath(room) --- Given the blood was by the sink, any chance it was a horrible shaving accident? We had a homeless guy who always used our men's room to shave in. Patrons would bitch about it, but again, I went with a "no harm, no foul" policy, maybe dude's trying to get/keep a job and this is the only place he can clean up. There's bigger fish to fry.
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Oct 31, 2018 15:34
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Proteus Jones posted:Anomalous Library Incident is my band’s name. Mine is "Organic Event", which is what we called any puking/peeing/poop related issue. Our head of facilities went to some big trade show/conference for government-employed janitors. On his return, he made up a box of Absorb-a-stain (that kitty litter you throw on the carpet when a kid pukes on the floor), various antibacterial products, gloves, bleach, etc., and labeled it "organic event supplies", as I guess that must be the official term for gross bodily fluids in a public space. He took it seriously (because he had all the sense of humor of a cardboard box), but we used the term jokingly all the time. "Can one of y'all cover the desk? If I don't get to the ladies room soon, there's gonna be an organic event."
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Oct 31, 2018 16:20
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Vavrek posted:Mostly, I just want to share this, but since this is A/T I shall offer goonlore in the form of a question: poo poo, I remember that thread, thanks for sharing the link! :hattip: It's a good example of why I never got my knickers in a twist about homeless people using our space. Maybe it's just me, as a psych major who always wanted to help people, but I always viewed my public library as --- call me a weirdo --- a place for the public. My (fairly affluent) town had zero help for the homeless, so especially when the economy poo poo the bed in 2008, I had no problems with unemployed/homeless folks using any of our resources, whether it was a place to thaw your shrimp, a sink to shave in, or just a comfy chair to snooze in while it's sleeting outside. (As Cythereal pointed out, the rich white people who had 4.5 pots to piss in at their McMansions were the real douchebags.) Or a place to poo poo your brains out after eating questionable sausage found on the floor of your car, I forgot about that epic scatological tale. Err'body needs to at least read that part of that thread, click on the "?" under OPs name, it's on the first page of his posts.
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Nov 1, 2018 15:59
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Cythereal posted:Surprisingly to me, homeless people have never been a regular thing at any library I've worked at, as far as I know. I don't have any problem with it as long as they don't cause problems - the one time I was at a library having problems with a homeless person, it was more because she was very, very drunk than because she was homeless. Yeah, we really only had 2 problem homeless guys: one was Mike, who would go into the quiet study room and slam 40s of malt liquor (we'd find the bottles tucked under the study desks), then get not-so-quiet in the stacks. The other was Dave, who had not had bathed since the Clinton administration, I think. You could smell him from 3 stacks away. He'd come in, grab a newspaper, and fall asleep in our comfy chairs in the periodicals section with the paper over his his face, and the chair itself would reek after Pitbull kicked him out for the day. (Time to break out the organic event box!) During that winter, we also started finding him sleeping in the vestibule around closing time, and had to keep calling the police to kick him out. One friendly but exasperated cop actually offered to buy him a Greyhound bus ticket to someplace warmer (HE was tired of coming out in the cold just to boot this homeless dude out), but Dave politely declined. We eventually had to ban him. :/
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Nov 3, 2018 13:18
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Handsome Ralph posted:OP between this and the "Electricity!" story, I'm in tears. More please! Glad you're enjoying it! If you liked ELECTRICITY, you'll probably also enjoy Mercury Lady. We had a number of patrons who would come in and stop by my desk thinking we were a free a/v repair service. "I put this tape I checked out in my VCR, and it got stuck. Can you get it out it out?" That sort of thing. And if they were kindly old grandpas, and I wasn't busy, I'd take pity on them, because where else could you get a VCR fixed in TYOOL 2012? I had the tools and the knack for it, and I like fixing things. (Hell, half my job at that time was splicing broken videotapes together and buffing discs that people had apparently used as coasters.) The people I could not stand, however, were the ones who came in and expected me to fix their laptop issues. One, there's a Best Buy just up the street; go get that poo poo done by people actually getting paid to do that. Two, my computer expertise ends at Windows XP, because that's the OS we're still using, so I don't have a clue how to fix your issue. One woman came in, trying to get her laptop fixed. "Can you figure out what's wrong with this? My laptop's doing [whatever the gently caress the problem du jour was]" Sigh. "I can try, but this isn't really my job. What's the prob---" "I NEED TO LEAVE, YOUR WIFI IS BURNING MY SKIN. CAN YOU TURN THE WIFI OFF?" "... Nnnnooo?" This happened for weeks. She would come in, try to get her laptop fixed by us for free, and at the same time kvetch about the fact that we had WiFi and that it affected her physically in some way. It was a local election year, and League of Women Voters had a bunch of debates sponsored by them being hosted by our library. This woman kept showing up to congressional debates (despite our debilitating WiFi) with crazy rear end posters about how there was a huge conspiracy about mercury fillings in our teeth. And so she got named The Mercury Lady. She never did anything terrible or ban-able, she was just one of those patrons who you'd see coming in and roll your eyes. JacquelineDempsey fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Nov 3, 2018 |
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Nov 3, 2018 21:39
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Lurking Haro posted:Did you tell her her laptop has WiFi? That's what baffled the gently caress out of me. If wifi makes supposedly makes you break out in hives, I dunno, maybe don't use a laptop? Or come into the library? Or live anywhere in our town where we got wifi for days? She was just straight up cray-cray. This is a thread about weirdos in libraries, after all.
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Nov 3, 2018 22:19
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value-brand cereal posted:
My university library had security tags in most of the books. Open a hardcover, look at it from the top edge of the book, and see how the spine pulls away from the pages? Theyd stick them down that little gap there. My guess is the culprit wanted to steal the books and didn't care if they had covers or not. Alternately, if was just parts of books, maybe it was all the naughty bits or something. 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. I kinda mis-titled that, as I wasn't working there yet, I was too young. But it still affected me and freaked me out personally, as we shall see! One night my older sister and I had just gone to bed; we shared a bedroom. We weren't asleep yet, probably up whispering stupid kid things to each other, and we hear a helicopter fly past, very low and very loudly. The helicopter is joined by a second, then a third. Then one of them sounds like it's so close it's gonna land on our roof. We're getting spooked by this, which turns into full on hugging each other and crying as suddenly a blinding light illuminates our yard like its high noon --- the helicopter was scanning our yard with its searchlight. Our mom rushes into the room and tells us to stay put. "There's a strange man in the yard with a flashlight." Thanks mom, now we're in abject panic mode. Then my dad calls up the stairs: "I'm going outside Barb, lock the door behind me." Our crying amplifies. Dad comes in a couple minutes later, explaining that it was a cop with the K-9 unit. A woman had been shot right in front of the library 3 blocks away, and the suspect had been last seen running down our street. We had a detached garage, and the cop wanted to make sure it was clear. We were told to stay inside, lock the doors, and turn all the lights off. No way are sis and I getting any sleep now, between the helicopter noise and the terror of a guy with a gun potentially lurking around our house, so we went downstairs to stay with our parents and peeked out the windows. We had a brief moment of comic relief: we'd just gotten our bathroom re-done, and the old toilet was still sitting by the garage. Just as one chopper's making another sweep of our yard with the searchlight, we catch a glimpse of "Teehee, look at the cute police doggie with his head in the toilet!" About an hour later, the helicopters finally moved off, and at some point we went back to bed. In the morning, we learned the story: The library had a community room that folks could rent and use for up to an hour after the library closed at 9. That night, the community choir was using it for a rehearsal. The disgruntled ex-husband of a newly divorced woman, knowing she'd be at practice, waited in the bushes outside the library for her group to come out, and shot her point blank. She died of a sucking chest wound right there on the sidewalk, in front of her fellow singers. (Bear in mind this was the 80s so someone would have had to find a phone to call the police)  The rear end in a top hat ex was apprehended, about a block and a half from our house. So yeah, there's a good chance he did run through our yard. Between that and suddenly realizing that even my friendly library was Not A Safe Place, it shook me up for a while as a kid. We didn't have murders in my nice middle class suburb. And that's why to this day the sound of low flying and/or circling helicopters gives me the heebie-jeebies.
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Nov 6, 2018 23:07
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StrixNebulosa posted:You're a good storyteller, btw. Dawww, thank you! I always enjoy writing; I was never good at coming up with fiction, but I could write one helluva essay or term paper in school, and I've kept journals from time to time. I guess posting memoirs is a happy medium of story-telling, non-fiction, and journaling, as I get to use some creative language to tell a story that an audience might take interest in, but I don't have to make anything up from scratch. Thanks to everyone for reading and participating!  Also, as a palate cleanser after that story: the library donated space in one of their flower beds to the community choir. The choir still tends it, and there's a nice plaque commemorating her.  Anyone watch Legends of Tomorrow? I just watched the episode with the unicorn, which reminded me that it's about time for Weird Animals at the Library --- because every year we had a unicorn. I think we could all do with some fun after that last tale. First I wanna finish watching the next episode. God I love that show.
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Nov 7, 2018 02:59
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PT6A posted:Off topic for the thread, but have you considered trying your hand at writing narrative history or something similar that's not entirely fiction but not entirely non-fiction? I'd probably enjoy that, actually. Thanks for the suggestion! I had a particularly lovely day at my current job today, so who's up for the promised Weird Animals at the Library? The Unicorn We had two branches in my small, but well-funded, library system. One was colloquially known as the "downtown library", and that's the one with the swank-rear end theatre I worked for primarily; the other was "the county library", which was out in the sticks. As in, when someone called my line and asked for directions to the county library, I literally said "okay, get off I-64 at exit #[blah blah]. After you pass the cornfields on your right, it's the big building on your left about half a mile down. You can't miss it." (And really, you couldn't, it was the only structure besides the Mennonite church on that whole stretch of road.) Whenever a new Harry Potter book came out, we'd naturally jump on that to do some events to draw in kids and teens. At downtown, we did a thing in the theatre that was like the Sorting Hat. Kids would line up in their HP cosplay, they'd plunk down in a chair on stage, a librarian would put the hat on them, and then one of my coworkers would boom out from a mic in the soundbooth, with tons of reverb, what house they were in. Then we'd gently caress with the lightboard with the house colors. I never got into HP myself, but it was pretty fun watching the kiddos' reactions. County, well... we had less to work with, all they had was a big community room, no fancy lighting or sound. But they also had tons of country acreage surrounding the building. One year, a youth services librarian piped up: "I can bring a unicorn!" She owned a few horses, one of which was that pure white you always see in movies. She crafted a horn for him, very nice handiwork. He was a very docile horse that accepted not only wearing that, but being surrounded by people. The librarian tethered (roped? leashed? I don't know the right term, I'm no equestrian) him right outside the library, much to the delight of all the HP fans flocking to that event. While poor Freckles thought of ants and died, this guy got harassed by children for hours and was way more chill than I would have been being surrounded by squeeing tweens wearing robes, waving sticks, and yelling faux Latin spells. All while wearing a fake horn strapped to his head. That horse deserves a medal, maybe made of carrots or something. ...I admit this story isn't quite in the spirit of the thread of gawking at psychos and pervs and whatnot in libraries, but after that last story, and my crappy day, I just wanted to share how my library had a unicorn show up. Thanks for letting me reminisce. Next story, Penelope the Python, has some actual crazy in it, I promise.
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Nov 10, 2018 00:42
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Great thread idea! This is interesting to read. Nah, but we did get trained on CPR and using an automatic defribillator. That was a fun paid day, hanging around a fire house and whaling on dummies. Plus we got pizza for lunch! As promised, your next installment of Weird Animals (and their weirder owners) at the Library! SNAKES ALIVE! Every summer, we'd put on a number of events for kids in the theatre as part of our summer reading program. Some performers/presenters were annual regulars, like a magician who could also juggle while riding a eight foot tall unicycle (loved working with him), a one-man band, a puppet show troupe, that sort of thing. One such regular was a fella from North Carolina who put on "Snakes Alive!". He had this huge case on casters, full of plastic shoeboxes full of various snakes. Maybe 2 dozen snakes. He'd give a little talk about snakes, how they are mostly harmless and friendly pest-eaters, and then pull them out so the kids could hold them if they'd like. Various library employees and adult volunteers from the audience would hold the snakes and walk them around the theatre. As someone who's not afraid of snakes, I got tapped for this gig every year. I had tons of fun walking around with some pretty corn snake in my hands, freaking out the squeamish kids and amazing the bolder kids who would gently pet them. I'm no doubt biased as a lifelong tomboy, but I was always extra chuffed when a 6 year old girl would hold a snake while her older brothers would recoil in terror. The star of the show, though, was Penelope. She came in her own case about the size of a funeral casket, which, though on wheels, we had to lift up over a curb to get in the theatre back doors. Between case and python, this case weighed approximately 385 metric gently caress tonnes; it took five of us at least to get her in, push her across the stage, and then down the three steps off the stage onto the floor. So for the grand finale, he'd enlist a whole bunch of staff and volunteers, and a dozen of us would pull this massive (16 feet, maybe?) python out of her case, and stretch her out. Dang, but that snek was thicc. Even the more fearless employees were happy to let me get the head end, but Id gotten smart after a few years of doing this --- her mid section was as big around as my thigh, and weighed a ton, my skinny little arms started giving out after a few minutes. And the tail was what started constricting around your arm if she was not in a great mood. The head was actually the safest and easiest thing to hold, as long as she didn't try to go up my shirt sleeve and tickle my armpit with her tongue flicking in and out. Then we'd all lift her up above our heads for a photo op, looking for all the world like some crazy rear end snake cult straight out of Conan the Barbarian. I have pics somewhere but am not near my hard drive. If I can dig them up later, I'll post them. Unfortunately... One thing the guy would always bring up in his initial presentation was that snakes had a bad rap because of the Bible. That's fair enough; just because Satan (if you believe that stuff) appeared as a snake, not all serpents are bad. But his rhetoric got more and more vehement each year, and one year some Bible-thumping parents complained that it wasn't our place as a public library to put on programs that taught their children what they should and shouldn't believe about the Bible. Which, while true, kinda sucked, because that was the end of Snakes Alive coming to visit. The nutty thing is the dude's a devout Christian. He's just tired of snakes getting trash-talked because of one bad apple. (Haha, get it? Garden of Eden? Bad apple? ... Thanks, I'm here all week, try the veal and tip your bartender.) edit, after (HOLY MOLY this thread's been going for) over a year: finally found a pic of me holding Penelope.  I'm the red-haired gal holding the tail all the way to the left. JacquelineDempsey fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Jan 13, 2020 |
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Nov 12, 2018 22:26
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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.
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Nov 16, 2018 20:45
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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 |
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Nov 16, 2018 22:19
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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.
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Nov 16, 2018 23:16
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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.
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Nov 17, 2018 04:05
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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.
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Nov 19, 2018 01:48
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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... 
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Nov 19, 2018 23:28
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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.
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Nov 22, 2018 16:44
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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.
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Nov 23, 2018 03:37
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Coasterphreak posted:I would also think that the rental agreement would state something to the effect of "all event participants must remain fully clothed at all times, including appropriate footwear". You'd think, but yet there wasn't anything in there because I guess no one anticipated this problem. On a similar note, we also had a county policy of "no open flames in a county building". Seems like a no-brainer, right, don't loving start a fire inside a county building? Problem was, we had a hypnotherapist who held weight loss and smoking cessation sessions in one of our small meeting rooms. We started noticing funny smells coming from Room B every time he was in, but could never quite figure it out. But since he was very adamant about us not disturbing his sessions, we were all too wary to bust in and say "hey, what's going on in here?" We had a crazy surprise ice storm one night, and got told the library was closing early. I gritted my teeth (this guy was an rear end in a top hat on a good day), knocked on the door, and came in. He was burning six aromatherapy candles during his sessions, that's why Room B always smelled like burning oranges after he left. I got to be The Mean Lady and tell him not only did he and his patients had to leave, but hey, you aren't allowed to burn candles in the meeting rooms. I mean, we are a place full of paper, maybe flaming objects in a room full of zoned out people isn't a good idea?  So "no open flames" got added in our next revision to our rental contract sheets. Another legal issue came up when someone showed up with a gun to library board meeting. Our board meetings were open to the public (after all, it's YOUR TAXPAYER MONEY), and Virginia has open carry gun laws. So dude was legally okay, he had his permit and whatnot, but it freaked out a lot of folks, understandably, and we had to call up the county attorney again to find out if this was okay. The ultimate ruling was yes, you can open carry in the library. That's the law, and that's your freedom in this hosed up commonwealth. Now this predates Pitbull, when our security person was a douchebag named John. John got all huffy and said, "well if the patrons can have guns in here, I want to carry mine too!" I mean, I can see his point, but he was such a... well, trigger happy guy that letting him carry a gun in there would not have only frightened patrons but potentially cause an incident. So back on the phone with county atty. Ruling there was that library employees could not carry firearms on their person while on the clock. Which was fine by me, last thing I wanted was to be closing up in the dark and startle him and get shot for doing my loving job, you dig? He got fired, and then made a big point of wearing his gun into the library whenever he came in to check out books. Eeesh. Sorry your dick is so small, dude.
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Nov 25, 2018 02:25
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Cythereal posted:Without question, one of Anne Rice's (under a pseudonym) BDSM erotica retellings of a Disney fairy tale. Did you guys carry that series of romance novels that were --- swear I'm not making this up --- about Vikings that got time travelled to the present day, and met up with a bunch of Navy SEALS? And all these rough-and-tumble Viking ladies, with their bosoms heaving out of their bodices, seduce the SEALS? I heard about these books thanks to a webcomic and thought "aw, nah, that can't be real" and then looked it up on Google, then looked in our catalog and said "AW, NAH, WE DONT REALLY CARRY THAT, DO WE?!" poo poo was hilarious to read, especially since I worked with a couple ex-Navy guys and had fun reading certain passages aloud to them, but made me ashamed to work there for a hot minute. The one book I entertained withdrawing illicitly for "reasons" was by Joyce Meyer. I'd never heard of the lady, and I was shelf-reading the 200s and bumped into her "Pack Up Your Gloomies" book, right after 9/11 when, as a former NYer, I was chock-a block full of said gloomies. Fun cartoony cover, looked like some Chicken Soup For the Soul poo poo, maybe that would perk me up. I opened it it up right to the chapter where she goes on and on about what a wonderful Christian she was for not completely abandoning her own son for coming out as gay. He was still an abomination in the eyes of God, of course, but what a fine Christian she was for not disowning him! As a queer person, I had a really hard time not breaking the spine on that one and going "well, guess we should withdraw this". On the subject of collections and shelf-reading: who other library vets here is old enough to remember having a half shelf worth of space taken up by books about the Y2K bug issue? Even as a new hire, I was all "Okay, it's been over a year now, and the world didn't end, and I don't have anywhere else to stuff all these new-fangled books on HTML in the 000s, can we PLEASE get rid of these?"
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Nov 29, 2018 01:42
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Y'know, usually I have that unfortunate goon luck to learn about celebrity deaths from PYF Funny Pictures. Like, "holy crap, so-and-so died? Aw, that's not funny at all!" Imagine my astonishment when the situation was completely reversed today, and I learned in that thread that Danielle Steele is still alive and churning out shelf-clogging tripe! I just looked it up and she's only 71, so I guess y'all will probably have to suffer for a few more years. Goondolences, library peeps. Unrelated, just remembered another fun animal story after reading other goons' memories of Snakes Alive: But THEY Brought Animals! Another popular, annual summer reading program was having folks from the Virginia Living Museum come in. The VLM is a super cool small zoo; if you ever find yourself in Newport News, VA, go check out their adorable otters. :3 I'm checking them in, helping carry various enclosures with owls and small mammals and reptiles and such, and making sure all their A/V needs are met. The library isn't open yet, but eager patrons with their squirming, excited children are already lined up to see the fox and whatnot. On one trip outside to get more stuff for them, there's a woman who stops me. "Excuse me, can I get inside? It's really hot, and I need to bring my turtle inside to get him some water." She is not wearing a VLM polo shirt nor sporting the lanyards/name tags they all wear. And she's just holding a turtle in her hands, no cage of any kind. "Uhhhh.... Are you with VLM?" I diplomatically ask, knowing full well that the answer is "no". "No, I'm just here for the program, but I thought I'd bring him along. The kids might want to see him." "Ma'am, I'm sorry, but if you're not with VLM, I can't just let you bring a random turtle in." Especially since, being a major nature science nerd myself, I know turtles are hardcore carriers of salmonella, and gently caress if I'm letting you bring that potential disease vector into my meeting room so kids can pet him and then schmear their unwashed hands all over the youth services area. She flips the hell out, yelling how that's unfair, "But THEY brought animals!" I keep my cool (as much as I can both mentally and physically, it was actually stupid hot that day, already somewhere around 90 degrees at 9am and I'd been running back and forth since I got there at 8), and restate, "I'm sorry, I can't allow that ." She storms off back to her car, dragging her poor crying kid who was now going to miss the program, loudly declaring how the director was going to hear about this. Nothing ever came of it, either she chickened out on her threats on getting me fired, or the director just laughed and hung up on her. JacquelineDempsey fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Nov 30, 2018 |
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Nov 30, 2018 22:02
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I lived in Norfolk in the late 80s and, being a small child, the Living Museum was probably my favorite place in the world.  I only moved to Hampton Roads in 2000, but I loved that place. Actually applied there when I started getting disgruntled with the library around 2011 and was shopping around. The nice woman who interviewed me was actually honest enough to say "you sound like you'd be a great fit, and we'd be happy to have you as our volunteer coordinator, but you'd be taking a big pay cut. Think about it, and call me." At the time I was in crushing debt, so I stayed with my increasingly miserable library job. In hindsight, I should've just taken that job and helped inquisitive kids play with starfish in the touch-tank, I would've been much happier.  Well, lesson learned.
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Dec 1, 2018 00:52
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Zamboni Rodeo posted:Not to derail the thread, but this is a story I have GOT to hear. Yeah, as OP and someone who now works in restaurants, permission to derail absolutely granted, I'm dying to hear it as well.
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Dec 1, 2018 17:48
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