Can't sleep? Blog!

It's the middle of the night (well, about 4 a.m.) and I can't sleep. I've been thinking lately that I should start blogging about the library again - it's the craziest place!

Here are some random things that have happened recently:

The guy from an earlier post who kept telling me he was moving away and then showing up again has been an almost daily presence these days. I think he has a bit of a crush on me - last week he told me my ID badge photo doesn't do me justice. Unfortunately, he's so weird that I'm not really flattered, I'm uncomfortable. He spends hours and hours on the computer and fills out complaint cards whenever anyone else uses their cell phones or has a noisy child. One suggestion he submitted was for us to configure the computers to allow him to immediately report anyone violating the noise policy to the librarians at the reference desk - that way, he could avoid any possible retribution from the offending party. He's such a tattletale! (And a chickenshit!) And what is he doing on the computer that is so important he has to have absolute quiet? Playing online games. Sigh...

With the state of the economy these days, our computer classes have been full to bursting lately. We have a limited number of seats in our classroom so once the tickets are gone (we start giving them out a half hour before the start of the class), that's that - it's first come, first served. A few weeks ago a woman missed getting a ticket and you would have thought someone died, she was so upset. She was so angry she was actually crying. I was very apologetic but firm - I mean, we only have so many seats! What did she want me to do, kick someone else out so she could come in? She was a total baby about it. When I reminded her we would be repeating the same class next month, she said, "I will never come in here AGAIN!" Perhaps she had just lost her job and was frantic about it - I guess I should be more understanding, but she was hard to deal with.

In other news, I am so SICK of cleaning up after people! Every single day, I pick up all sorts of trash that people leave behind - food wrappers, water bottles, drink cups, you name it. Plus, nobody EVER pushes their chair in when they get up. How hard would it be to simply push the chair back in? People leave stacks of stuff wherever they happen to be - wadded up papers, library books, magazines - and the shelves are always a disaster area. As soon as we straighten them up, I swear, within ten minutes they are a mess again. It's embarrassing to go out to the shelves and see the books falling all over the place all the time. We try to keep up with it but with upwards of 35,000 people in here every month it's almost impossible. People are pigs.

Not only are they pigs but they are also thieves. We've had a big increase in the number of stolen DVDs lately. I think we've been discovered by the thieves who used to steal DVDs from the Main Library but now can't do so as easily because they (Main) put their DVDs back in security cases. Which we DON'T want to do. For one thing, there aren't enough of them floating around anymore - when we got self-check machines, the powers that be decided to put security strips on the discs themselves and got rid of the security cases. Plus, they take up a LOT of room on the shelf and really make it impossible for people to use the self-check, so we can't really go back to them. We don't know what to do about this - we are so busy and aren't getting any more staff, so it's not like we can police the DVD area. And even if we did (I've actually been trying to, but haven't seen anything suspicious at all), I think it would be next to impossible for us to catch someone in the act. What we need is a security guard at the gate. But of course there's no money for that, so we'll just continue to lose DVDs until we don't have anything left. Sigh...

I can't wait to retire.

Crazy alert!

In the last week or so we've had a crazy man in the library. He comes in nearly every day and spends literally all day on the computer working on some kind of complicated-looking spreadsheet, so obviously he has some skillz. Most of the time he's pretty quiet (although he clears his throat an awful lot), but every now and then he starts talking loudly to himself about cell phones and surveillance, so I guess he's got some kind of conspiracy theory that "they" are spying on him through cell phones.

When he starts getting agitated, of course the other customers complain. But he seems to be aware when he needs to calm himself down: he leaves his computer and goes all the way back in the corner of the stacks and lies down on the floor for a few minutes. He always manages to get back to his computer before it times out, though. Must have some kind of sixth sense, 'cause I don't think he owns a watch. I've seen him on the floor and even though we have a "no sleeping" policy, I don't really want to confront him 'cause, well for starters, he's crazy, AND I think he's actually doing something that helps him be LESS crazy, at least for the next little while. So, you know, he's dealing with it.

This evening a guy came up and said he thought he saw this guy on America's Most Wanted, so of course I looked him up right away but didn't see anyone who looked enough like him to be alarmed. At least not about THAT, anyway.

Another guy came up and said he thinks we ought to get this guy some help with his illness. So what, we're supposed to call in a psychiatrist? We actually did call the police the other night just for a consultation but since the guy isn't really doing anything illegal there wasn't much of anything he could do.

The other problem is that he's not at all clean and smells pretty bad. We actually have a policy about that, too (we have a policy for nearly everything), but that's another thing I don't really want to confront him about. "Excuse me, sir, I know you're crazy but I noticed that your body odor is disgusting. I'm sorry, but our policy requires you to maintain acceptable bodily hygiene. If you can't do that you will have to leave." Can you imagine THAT encounter? Not only that, but bathing is prohibited in the library as well, so he can't even GET clean in our library.

All the staff is aware of him and basically our approach is to leave him alone unless he starts getting loud, whereupon we will approach him and politely ask, "Is everything all right, sir? Is there anything I can help you with?" We've also taken to disabling the computers next to where he's sitting to reduce his olfactory impact on other customers.

I've noticed that people like him seem to move on after a while, so maybe we'll get lucky and he'll stop coming.

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.

Why do they care???

My library system has 2-renewal limit policy, meaning that a customer can't renew an item more than twice. It's a good policy; it makes it harder for people to keep our stuff forever simply by renewing over and over.

Unfortunately, over the years, clerical staff have developed an *extension* to the policy that is pretty much impossible to explain or defend when customers complain. There is now a widely accepted practice of not allowing customers to return an item and then check it back out on someone else's card (wife or husband, for example). When customers ask why, they are told that it gives other customers a chance at the material and makes things more fair. I have even heard staff members telling customers that there is a "24-hour waiting period" before materials can be checked back out again.

This is ridiculous - there is no 24-hour waiting period, and we have no policy that prevents customers from switching items from one library card to another. Not only that, but it's truly impossible to enforce. If a frustrated customer left the circulation desk and came over to the reference desk and asked for the item, the librarian would simply do his/her job and go look for the item, and, finding it on the sorting shelf in the workroom, would give it to the customer with no questions asked, allowing the customer to check it out on the self-check with the clerks being none the wiser.

Recently I questioned this practice with the systemwide clerical services manager. Although he agreed with me that we can't defend this practice because there is no policy to back it up, he said that when he brought it up at a meeting of the clerical supervisors from around the system, they absolutely FREAKED about it and were vehemently opposed to changing the practice. They seem to have such a personal stake in it but I don't fully understand why - why do they care so much?

For my part, I just want the circ stats!

I understand the origin of the practice - a concern that people are hogging stuff and not letting anyone else get a chance at it. But if a staff member has that concern, all they need do is place a hold request on that specific item and the next time the customers try to get it, the hold request will prevent them from checking it out again. So in my mind there is a simple solution to their concerns.

My theory is that many clerical staff members feel essentially powerless - they are frontline staff who take an incredible amount of crap from people all day long and have to work so hard moving materials around, but they don't really get to control who gets to do what at the library - the high muckety-mucks make all the decisions. So when they get an opportunity to say "you can't do that," I think it makes them feel like they're in control, EVEN IF IT MEANS AN ARGUMENT WITH A CUSTOMER!

However, in spite of their objections, I understand that sometime in the next few weeks the administration is going to come out with a clarification that reinforces that we have no policy preventing customers from switching items from one library card to another.

At that time I will have to tell my staff that they need to stop doing this, and I'm not looking forward to the resistance and resentment that I know are inevitable. Every time a librarian bends "the rules" when a customer complains, the clerks get PO'd because we're not supporting them. But sometimes the rules need to be bent; everything isn't black and white all the time.

It will just be one more thing to reinforce the divide between the clerks and the librarians, which is truly unfortunate. What I wish is that I could figure out some ways to make us all feel part of a single team that's working together to do the best job we can, but so far I'm not succeeding. Sigh...