Ok, I understand that I’m actually in the ‘cafe’ portion of the library, and the general volume here is slightly louder than the rest of the library. However, when you come over to talk with the girl sitting five feet from me about your poly-sci paper, and get into a passionate explanation of your viewpoint while facing me, and go on for almost an hour, I think you’ve gone too far.
I can filter out general discourse really well, but your blabbing practically within arm’s reach has permeated my consciousness. I’m trying to write a paper, but all I can do is listen to how you feel that a congressperson ought to be more responsive to his/her constituents than to his/her party, and how the constituents are also to blame sort of, and how fillibusters are a turning of one’s back on one’s role as congress person, and how you’re from RI, and how people voted your guy out because of the ® next to his name even though he didn’t vote ® and people loved him but voted on party lines.
You also made motions to leave about 20+ minutes ago, and I thought, “ah, sweet relief,” but you just kept talking and talking and talking about how you didn’t think you’d get your work done tonight and might just do it tomorrow morning instead. You left while I was typing this rant, finally!
Well, maybe if you decided to shut the fuck up and write your paper instead of chatting for an hour in the library you’d be done with your paper.
Yes, I know I had many options available to me if this was really an issue, ranging from getting up and moving to asking them to move to throwing a heavy object at them. Instead, being the martyr that I am, I suffered through it and am ranting about it here instead.
One of those options would have been to get up and move ten feet, so you were on the other side of him. Wouldn’t have bothered you nearly as much. :rolleyes:
Which would have involved me picking up all my stuff, finding a new outlet for my laptop, whine whine whine, whine, whine whine!
They were both shes. And no, they weren’t particularly hippie looking, but, and maybe it’s all the time I spend on the Dope, at times I was really resisting pointing out (what seemed to me) obvious flaws in her logic.
The non-talking one was, but of course my perspective might be slightly skewed by the fact that the one doing all the chatting made me want to kill someone. As for her, well, you know what they say, you can’t put lipstick on a pig.
Racist!
I mean, sexist! (Alaskanist?)
Generally speaking the coffee house part of a library is specifically not a study area or quiet area, and there’s usually signage to the effect. The stacks are usually your best bet for peace and quiet.
Eonwe, I have the perfect solution for you. Install one of the open source text to speech apps–Sayz Me is one example–and get a few appropriate voices. Cepstral had one named “Damien” which was perfect, sounded just like Satan in the South Park cartoons. Most of these things will speak anything you type into, say a Notebook window. As the bloviator impinges on your consciousness, start typing stuff into the notebook window like “Blah, blah, blahdiddy blah,” “Oh god, will you SHUT UP?” or “Who cares about your paper? Eff off and die already!” Escalate your rhetoric, and occasionally change the voices, maybe have two voices arguing over what to do about the loudmouth–ooh, also look for a voice named “Shouty,” that one’s brilliant! Anyway, after a while you can work up to “Kill him, your master commands you!” Just play it really cool while all this is going on, don’t let on you even hear the computer saying all this shit, keep your eyes down and keep busy. After a while the guy will probably get freaked out and leave since you yourself aren’t actually saying anything and most people are completely unaware of text to speech in the first place. It’s like being insulted by a ventriloquists dummy! Try it, you’ll feel much better…
Actually, you can put lipstick on a pig, it just won’t make you want to kiss it. Unless you already wanted to in the first place, in which case the lipstick thing is kinda squicky.
To the OP, instead of stoically ignoring the obliviously overloud, listen to them closely and be as obvious as possible at it. Make sure they know you are listening intently to their every word. Usually, they’ll speak more softly or move. Sometimes, they’ll confront you about it and you can tell them that they were speaking so loudly, you assumed it had to be something important. This also works with people carrying on loud conversations on a cell phone.
Don’t get me started on Nalgene bottles.
“But they’re unbreakable!”
Oh yes, because eveybody had such a problem with standard plastic bottles exploding into a million pieces when they dropped them.:rolleyes:
OK, that part gets me right here. Damn it all, this is a freakin’ LIBRARY, why do you have to have a “cafe section”? Why not a scrap metal recycling center section? A jet engine test facility section? A jackhammer concerto section?
When I went to UVM, the Bailey library (Not the Bailey-Howe, this was before the Howe section was built) had no cafe section, no comfy armchairs, no Internet workstations, just plain damn books.
The library I used to work for put one in as damage control. Management figured that a cafe would keep the loud-talkers and food-eaters out of the stacks.
It seemed to partially work.
There are some people who just don’t care. Like the person who left the remains of their meal: 4 chinese food containers, plastic cutlery, used napkins, and puddles of soy sauce in one of the study carrels.
Although that’s better than finding used condoms, used tampons, or poop, which I have been unfortunate enough to encounter.
Slight hijack…
Everybody might not, but I sure do. I was so happy when I finally got a Nalgene bottle. You’d be surprised how brittle that plastic gets when you leave it in the fridge all night to make your morning supply of iced tea.
And juggling one bottle of iced tea, my purse, my lunch, the door, and trying to keep a sneaky dog inside the house resulted in many plastic bottles being broken and much tea being lost.
Nalgene is great.
</hijack>
I want to execute whoever thought it’d be a good idea to copy the bookstores and not only have coffee bars at their library (really, what a fabulous idea, liquids, idiots, and books. I’m sure that none of your books will be ruined by those same idiots who take their coffee into the stacks), but live music. A string quartet, playing quietly, sure. A live band? Not so much.
Dude, you are the [del]son[/del] herald of Manwë, and mightier in arms than any other in Arda. You simply must stop restraining yourself. The Balrogs are laughing at you and everything.
To the OP, your rant is actually pretty mild. One senses that you KNEW you could have chosen a better place to work, or that you were too lazy to pick up your stuff and move, or that you could have asked him to turn down the volume-- or shut up. This is more a rant against your own ineffectualness.
We had this discussion last night in a class at library school. The general consensus among library directors who put cafe sections in their library is because patrons take books home and do god knows what to them (like cat piss).
So what’s the difference if they spill coffee on a book in the library? 99% of the time, the people that would pay for a book they ruin at home would pay for a book they ruin in the cafe. And those that would fight it would fight the fine wherever they ruined it.
If you were in the cafe area of a library then you should expect pretty much the same sort of behavior as in any other cafe. If the girl was being noisy then I’m sure it was annoying, just like a noisy patron at Starbucks would be annoying, but the cafe isn’t a quiet study area and it’s foolish to expect it to be one.
Now, if people in the cafe were being so noisy that it was bothering people in other parts of the library then that would be a different story. As it is though, you picked a bad place to write your paper.
At the library where I work, we have a large room on an upper floor designated as a space to work on group projects. It was specially designed with rolling tables, chairs, and even movable whiteboards to allow groups of all sizes to meet and work together. Yet every so often some genius who wants to read or write in silence will choose this room rather than any of the many other quiet spaces in the library and then come complain that other students have dared use the group project room for the purpose of working on a group project.
Well, tough. It’s fair to expect that most of a library will be quiet, and I can and will “shush” people who don’t respect this. But if an area is clearly intended for something other than quiet study purposes then the normal rules don’t apply.
