Will this day never end?

A little while after the events in the previous post I got a call from our alarm company for a burglar alarm. Went to the alarm panel and it said there was a techician in the building, but I could neither find him nor re-set the alarm panel. Called the alarm company back and found out they couldn't reach him, either. He finally got the message from them and came and found me - he set off the alarm and cost me about 30 minutes wasted effort trying to figure out what was going on!

THEN, three of our printers pooped out. What a day.

It just keeps gettin' better

I have been at work exactly 24 minutes today and here is what has happened so far:

A taxicab was just sitting in our entryway as I was trying to get into the parking lot. Had a nice little confrontation with him to explain how he was snarling up traffic and needed to find an actual parking place.

When I walked in the building a woman I have never seen before had removed stacks and stacks of things from our community information display area and had them all over the floor. I ID'd myself as the branch manager and asked if she had cleared this with the person in charge of displays. She said "No, but I'm just getting some things for my community and rearranging things better." I sicced our display person on her.

Read my email to discover major changes in upper management which of course will affect me because now I will have yet another new supervisor. I was just getting used to the last one (who is nice but not too bright) and now I'm not sure who my next new boss will be. Very unsettling.

I guess the upheaval we're experiencing at my branch, and in the library system as a whole, is reflective of what's going on in the larger society. Things are going crazy these days.

I've been thinking about how nice it would be to go on walkabout or become a hermit somewhere, away from all this madness.

Public service isn't for sissies

Librarians who think public libraries are these wonderful places where people can have free access to information aren't in public service. People don't come to the library to be enlightened, they come to use the free computers. They come to check out DVDs. They come to steal from us. They come to break things. They come to yell at the poor clerks who are just trying to do their jobs. They demand to be waited on RIGHT THIS MINUTE and cannot seem to grasp the concept of waiting their turn.

At the moment I am completely and totally sick of public service. I cannot wait until I can retire and not have to deal with these pigs who come in here every day and trash the place.

Ah, the sweet smell of tobacco, and other random thoughts

One of the clerks came to my office today to say that a woman was complaining because some guys were smoking cigars outside. Instead of saying "So what?" (which was of course my initial response), I said "Okay, I'll go check it out." Walking out into our lobby I noticed a slightly sweet smell and thought, "That smells good." I walked outside and saw no-one, but then noticed the woman who had complained coming out. I thought I could avoid her (sorry, this is the real me here - I do things like that now and then) by coming in the other door as she walked out the main exit but no, she had to come around and intercept me. Drat. She said "Do you smell that?" and I thought it would be better to say no than to admit that I thought it smelled good. She pointed out two young men who had just walked into the library and said they had been standing outside the exit smoking cigars and that was offensive to her. "I mean, there are children walking in and out of here!"

Now I am pretty much an anti-smoking fanatic - I hate being around people smoking cigarettes and go out of my way to avoid it wherever possible. But this woman was complaining about these guys smoking OUTSIDE, an area over which I really have no control. If they just HAD to smoke, at least they weren't trying to do it indoors - now that would have gotten a reaction from me. But as it was, there was little I could do but tell her I was very sorry about what had happened.

Why do I always have to apologize for everything anyone does that offends someone else? I'm getting mighty sick of these holier-than-thou people who think the world revolves around their preferences.

Today was pretty sucky from the get-go, though. Our accident-prone children's librarian (well, she always seems to have something wrong) called in to say she couldn't come to work because she was on medication for a pulled muscle. I didn't say to her, "Now what were you doing that caused you to pull a muscle?" No, I was polite and thanked her for letting me know, then hung up and cursed her with all my might. We were already short-staffed due to someone on vacation, so I had to re-work the schedule to fill in at the children's desk. I ended up being on the desk nearly the whole day. Which is totally exhausting at my library (remember, we get at least 30,000 people coming in this building on a monthly basis - sometimes more).

Add to that, the issue that I talked about in an earlier post about our renewal limits has reached the attention of the director, who wants to FORM A TASK FORCE to look into it!! Rather than just making a decision, she wants to form a committee that will endlessly argue about this issue (oh, a recap - some staff have taken our 2-renewal policy a step further and will not allow customers to check items out again or transfer them to another card when the renewal limit is reached because "it's not fair - other people should have a chance at finding this material on the shelf." It's my position that as long as nobody has placed a hold request, who gives a crap - let 'em have it! I don't understand why some staff want to argue with customers about something this inconsequential - I just want the circs!), and then make a recommendation to the two circulation-related committees WE ALREADY HAVE!! And guess who she was hoping would be the chair of the committee - me!

Luckily I am not being forced to chair the committee and it's a good thing because I don't really believe it's necessary. Just make a freakin' decision already. She keeps talking about getting "buy-in" from the staff, but I don't believe she's serious about doing whatever the staff would actually recommend, so the buy-in is just a sham. I guess it would depend on who is selected to serve on the committee - I mean, if it's all people who already agree with what she wants to do, then I guess she can pretend she's getting buy-in, but what if the committee recommends something that she doesn't want? Will she go with what they say? I seriously doubt it. In this case, I don't think buy-in is necessary - the current practice at many libraries is causing a great deal of customer dissatisfaction, so the administration just needs to clarify the policy regarding renewals so staff won't keep making up their own procedures.

There's of course a larger issue that somehow this tiny controversy has gotten linked to, and that is the serious divide between the librarians and the clerks, to which I have alluded before. In this particular controversy, most of the librarians tend to be fairly flexible about allowing people to have a new checkout of materials they've already renewed twice, and most clerks are adamant about NOT allowing the new checkout. So it's becoming a divisive issue and this task force is supposed to be some kind of an attempt to start somewhere in addressing this issue.

Which makes me even less inclined to want to chair it. I'm no negotiator and have no wish to mediate between the two groups. I just want to do my job, get my work done, and go home when I'm done for the day. Now I wish I had never opened my big mouth and brought it up with the circulation manager in the first place. Crap.

Update on meeting room snafu

After our stressful morning the other day, things started looking up in the afternoon when the organizer of the group whose meeting somehow got deleted from our meeting room schedule came over and apologized for getting so angry. It's amazing what a difference a few hours can make. We were both so antagonistic in the morning during the inital confrontation but later on we had both calmed down and were able to have a cordial conversation. This is not to say that I no longer have bad feelings towards this group - with them it's always something - but at least this particular crisis was resolved with nobody going away dissatisfied.

My own difficulty with remaining calm in the face of accusations and verbal abuse is part of the problem, of course. My response to their belligerence was anger, and showing that only escalated the unpleasantness. When am I going to get control of my quick temper?? Gotta work on that.

Ommmmmmmmmm....

Sometimes people are just grumpy

Every now and then we have a day where people (customers, patrons, whatever you want to call them) are just grumpy. I've said previously that the library where I currently work is very busy. This summer we have seen our highest gate count (close to 36,000 in July), highest circulation (over 86,000 items in July - yikes!), and highest program attendance (nearly 2,000 in July) that we've ever seen. On top of that, we are quite short-staffed due to unfilled vacancies (hiring freeze, you know), vacations, and a staff member on bereavement leave. We're all totally freakin' exhausted! So when customers have a grumpy attitude from the get-go it's very difficult to be calm and remain professional.

Take today, for example. Today I had 4 grumpy customers in a row, and it was a challenge to be polite 'cause they were all acting like jerks. #1 was a lady who insisted that she had already paid her $25.20 fine over a year ago, even though it was not marked paid in the circulation system. Of COURSE she paid with cash, of COURSE she didn't keep her receipt, and of COURSE she didn't pay it at my library. I was supposed to just take her word that she paid it even though she had no proof and there was no way for me to check cash register records since it wasn't my library. I'm a reasonable person; what I offered her was splitting it in half - we would "forgive" half and she would still be responsible for the other half. This was not acceptable to her and she argued and argued and argued with me about it, while other customers piled up, waiting for someone to help them. Very unpleasant. I did not budge, though. (Honestly, I thought forgiving $12.60 was quite generous). Afterwards I saw her on a computer and it looked like she was filling out our online survey. I'm sure what she had to say was not complimentary. (That's the problem with the online survey - the only people who are motivated to fill it out are the ones who are pissed off!)

Anyway, immediately after her I had to deal with an irate man who had been in one of our computer classes. He was upset because the person sitting next to him in the class was "clicking too much" and distracting him, and he also thought the instructor was moving too fast for him. He really NEEDS this instruction and was just SO unhappy that things weren't just exactly perfect for him. What a baby. It's a FREE class, man - you should be grateful we're offering them at all.

Oh, and then there was Bridezilla! She was trying to print stuff from a Web site for her wedding - I guess honeymoon destinations and such. I showed her how to do a print preview so she could make sure she was printing what she wanted, and I also explained that only the first 5 pages were free and for anything more than that she would have to add money to her printing account. She said that was "just stupid." Really, that's what she said. I didn't know how to respond so I didn't say anything at all. Later I found out that she brought two pages up to the desk and said the computer printed the wrong pages so she wanted her money back. Obviously she wasn't watching when I showed her print preview! This woman was one of the most unpleasant people I've encountered in a long time - really a bitch. I truly feel sorry for the guy she's marrying - he's in for an unhappy life.

Then I had a guy who swore up and down that he returned all six of the DVDs that were checked out on his card. He was just absolutely, beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt certain that everything had been returned in our bookdrop over the weekend. Now I can see where a staff member might miss checking in one or two items, but six in a row? That's unlikely. Plus, if they HAD been returned, wouldn't I at least be able to find ONE of them? I could not find a single one. Where the hell did they go?

We have lots of people swearing that they returned items that we can never find. When I check for these items on the shelf, I PRAY that I can even find at least one of them but I seldom do. Are people just lying to us? Are we that incompetent? Do we have someone coming in when we're not open and stealing things from the bookdrop? It's a constant problem, and it makes people really grumpy, staff and customers alike. Most of the staff are convinced that people are just liars, but I don't know what to think - they all seem so certain! My strategy has been to renew things for people and ask them to really check around thoroughly, but in following up I have found that most of the time, the items still have not been returned, nor can we locate them anywhere in the library. Where they are is one of the great mysteries of the public library.