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.

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.

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.

California dreamin' is over - now it's Kentucky woman!

Here's an update on a customer I blogged about in a recent post: he came up to the reference desk the other night and told me that he had indeed gone to California but decided not to stay. Seems his father (who must be pretty old, as this guy has to be at least in his late 50s or early 60s) and he didn't get along, and his father told him to "just go!"

So now he's back. He still hates it here, though, so his new plan is to move to Kentucky to stay with his girlfriend, who lives in Glasgow, a small town in south-central Kentucky not too far from Bowling Green (which is itself a fairly small town, most notably known as the hometown of Western Kentucky University).

It's interesting what customers will tell you about their personal lives. I'm not sure why he decided to talk to me in the first place - to my recollection, I have never helped him with a reference question or had any customer service type of interaction with him - but now it seems he feels obligated to update me on his plans whenever something changes.

I'm not sure when he's actually going to Kentucky, but I have a feeling he will tell me when he does.

Goin' to California with an achin' in my heart

About a month ago one of our regular customers (kinda crazy but pretty nice) was leaving at closing time and told me, "This is the last time you'll see me - I'm moving to California tomorrow. I don't like it here." I wished him well and said goodnight.

The next night he was back again and said his plans got delayed for a couple of days but that he wouldn't be back after that. "Good luck to you," I said, "Hope things go well for you in California!"

I sort of forgot about him until the other night, when I saw him sitting at his accustomed spot at one of the computers. He wouldn't look at me and didn't say anything so I figured I'd leave him alone, but I do wonder what happened. Did he go and find out he didn't like California either? Did something happen that prevented him from going? Is he just so crazy that he made the whole thing up in the first place?

It does make me curious...

Woe the building

I work in a building that's less than 4 years old. In spite of its youth, we have constant problems with the building. Sometimes it seems like it's falling down around our ears.

Our A/C (which I blogged about in a recent post) goes out every time we have a power outage, which seems to be at least once or twice a month. It usually takes an entire day to get it fixed, and since my library is in a very warm part of the country, we have to endure 85+ conditions for way too long. It's been the bane of my existence this summer.

Our outside lights frequently don't work at all. When we leave at closing time, it is often completely dark. Repair personnel have come out more than once to "fix" it but it keeps getting unfixed somehow. We have taken to carrying flashlights with us when we leave.

There's always something wrong in our public restrooms. Seems like there's always a customer screaming at us because the automatic faucets don't work or the toilets flush too fast. (And don't even get me started on the day someone left a "gift" for us on the floor in the men's restroom. Gross.)

Our floor covering is carpet tiles, which shouldn't be a problem except the chairs that were purchased for the computers are very heavy, solid oak chairs that dig in between the tiles and pull them up ALL THE TIME. Why didn't they purchase chairs that would slide easily over the carpet tiles? It drives us nuts and of course is a tripping hazard. City repair people re-glue the tiles but of course they get pulled up again, over and over and over. I report at least three loose carpet tiles every month.

We discovered a few weeks ago that the brick facing on the outside of the building was coming loose. The builders failed to properly secure the bricks so now a whole section is sagging away from the structure. It looks pretty bad. They are supposed to repair it but who knows when they will get around to it.

Let's see...what else? We had raw sewage back up into our public restrooms the other day due to some work that was being done on our outside sewer drain. That was fun.

You would think in a building this new we wouldn't have all these issues. That's what you get when you go with the lowest bidder. Sigh...

The beginning of the end

Lots of people have said that public libraries will soon go the way of the dinosaur as advances in technology change the way we get information and entertainment. Web-based social networking offerings such as MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, Flickr, wikis, YouTube, Google, podcasting, etc., etc., etc., are becoming more and more important in people's daily lives. Even Amazon's Kindle is providing a different approach to reading that moves away from the traditional paper book.

Public libraries recognize this and are scrambling to remain relevant in this changing environment, but it's an uphill battle to prove we can provide real value to the community, especially as funds get tighter and tighter in these tough economic times.

My first indication that we are losing the fight was a recent announcement by our city's IT department that they want us to consider reducing the number of public computers we offer in order to reduce bandwidth demands on the network. We all laughed when we heard this but in fact this is exactly the kind of approach that will kill us in the long run. At a time when we should be looking for ways to increase our ability to provide fast, robust online services that are up-to-date with developing technology, our wonderful city government is making noises about curtailing our ability to provide those services.

Free computing is increasingly becoming the main reason why many people visit us, but if we reduce the quality of computing services, fewer and fewer people will come in, which will make it even that much harder for us to justify requests for adequate funding just to keep the building open and provide materials that people need. It's the beginning of a downward spiral towards irrelevance.

Already the quality of our computing services has gone down just in the last year. Our computers are several years old and constantly freeze up when people are trying to do email, take a test, or fill out a form. Repeated calls to IT have not improved the situation at all. Two of our four public printers are down (one for over a month and a half), making it much more difficult for users to get their prints, not to mention causing a huge amount of hassle for the staff.

Computer services at my library have deteriorated significantly over the last few months and I'm beginning to wonder if it is an intentional strategy on the part of the IT folks (and by extension, city government). They are forcing the issue by refusing to provide adequate support services and there doesn't seem to be ANYTHING we can do about it. We are at their mercy.

They are, quite literally, killing us.

Tech support - ha!

We've had a public printer down for over a month so today I called the IT department to check on the status of the request and they said "huh, I guess we never got around to calling that in to [company X]." (I'll just call them X from now on.) So they called X about it. Now WE are not allowed to call X directly; we have to go through IT. I guess I should have followed up weeks ago. Sigh...

Anyway, a nice guy from X called me back within 20 minutes and asked me to do some test prints and call him back. He said they should be able to tell exactly what was wrong from the test prints, and that's all I would need to do. (Oh - we were getting "dirty" prints with extra ink all down the side of each page.)

So I did the test prints and called X back, was on hold for at LEAST 15 minutes, and finally got a different person. I explained what the other guy had told me to do and after asking me a BUNCH more questions she said, "Now have you cleaned the [something] window?" I'm like, "cleaned the WHAT?" She said, "All you have to do is get your cleaning wand, remove the fusing oil unit and clean the [something] window behind the fusing oil unit, being careful not to touch the [something]." I said, "First, we don't have a 'cleaning wand', and second, I don't have time to do this right now, so when I get off the desk I'm going to have to go over to the printer, take it apart, clean something with a tool I don't have, and then call back and wait on hold for ANOTHER 15 minutes." Her response: "Well, if you had called us standing right in front of the printer like we say in our guidelines you would be able to do it right away instead of having this delay." (Delivered in a sarcastic, snarky tone.) So I said, "Well, I thought YOU guys were the tech support for these printers - so far, it seems like I'm doing all the work and X hasn't done much of anything. We're not the ones who are supposed to be going into the printer and cleaning it out - that's your job." Whereupon she hung up on me.

Now granted, I was sort of a jerk, but what she was asking wasn't within my "realm of expectation," and of course hanging up on me wasn't particularly helpful. I called our IT folks back and told them about the call and they confirmed that our service contract with X only requires that we: fill the paper trays, clear paper jams, and replace ink cartridges. Nowhere in our contract does it say that we are responsible for cleaning the inside of the machine. So I hope to god that somebody comes and fixes the damned machine - our one remaining printer is currently being used by 40 computers and it's wearing out fast.

This is the kind of experience that gives tech support a bad name.