I’m currently reading Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library by Don Borchert and it’s caused me to muse on one of the memes of our profession that drives me nuts.
A library is supposedly a dangerous place to work.
I’m not going to lie and say it’s all boredom all the time. I’ve seen my share of flashers, drunks, stolen bikes and stalkers. But I’ve never been present at a fist fight and the few times I’ve been around “rowdy teens”, all of them backed down before and acted like the children they were.
So which is it fellow librarians? Am I working in Dullsville, USA? Or do librarians just take any chance they can get to make their job seem more exciting?
Eh, I wouldn’t say it’s any more dangerous than working in any other public place where the homeless like to hang out. This past month we’ve had three guys expose themselves and masturbate at women (some of those women being our shelvers) and a couple months ago we had one homeless guy hit a homeless woman and steal her purse. We have a lot of theft (don’t leave your stuff lying around) and there are some pretty suspicious characters here. We’re taught to be aware of our surroundings and not to get trapped back in the stacks with people who ping our danger radar.
So no, I wouldn’t say dangerous, but I would call it a place you should keep your wits (and your wallet) about you. If I worked in a branch, it would be safer, but have less security. So it’s just a trade-off.
We do have a good security staff, and they do walk us out at night. Occasionally I’ve been in situations I didn’t like, and I called them and they handled it. We have rarely (but occasionally) had fistfights, but shouting matches are more common (and swiftly broken up by security.) Patrons are frequently banned for various offenses - sometimes for a week, sometimes for life.
I think that’s what bugs me about Borchert’s book. His library keeps mutating from a small suburban library to a large city library and back again. Whatever fits the story better.
In one chapter he described staring down 100 junior high gangbangers as one of only four employees… in his small suburban library. A few chapters later, it turns into 120 kids and five employees.
You can’t fit that many people into a small suburban library, tiny gangbangers or not!
I guess that’s what I’m trying to figure out. Librarians have always been quick to claim the job is very dangerous (because of various unsavory characters and other assorted weirdos that like libraries), but I just don’t see it.
Public libraries, being open to all the general public during certain hours, and not being businesses where people are pressured to spend money, are attractive climate-controlled daytime hangouts (with books!) for people who might not be welcome elsewhere, such as the homeless. Also, sometimes, the insane.
I used to work at a public library. The only rule we had against the homeless was, anyone caught sleeping on the premises will immediately be awakened. And we did, sometimes, have to deal with the insane – not, so far as we could tell, dangerously insane, but we felt a need to be wary of them.
It’s not really a stereotype I’ve heard very often; IME people think of the library as a safe place populated by friendly babysitters, and you have to tell them that it’s not.
I’ve certainly never felt that I was in real danger; I’ve been nervous about impeding fistfights and people looking for trouble, but that’s all. Well, once at a library in the Bay Area we found a guy hiding at the bottom of a staircase at closing time. He was pretty creepy. And I’ve had flashers. But nothing actually dangerous.
The Gilroy library was by far the weirdest place I ever worked (not the librarians, some of the patrons). I wouldn’t want to meet a few people from there in a dark alley. But mostly they were pretty harmless, if disconcerting.
Even though I work at the main branch, we’re not in a big enough “city” area to have some of the drug use and flasher issues that seem to “run rampant” in “city” libraries. We do, however, have people with mental and physical problems that come in on a regular basis, and we do occasionally have drunks appear. The last drunk that we had to have escorted out of the building spoke in a voice not unlike Billy Bob Thornton’s in Slingblade; apparently he’d passed out on the railroad tracks because he “ate too many of them Checkerburgers” and somebody had to wake him up. Uh huh, yeah. ::looks over at security guard, who walks up and escorts Slingblade out::
I would say that our biggest problem people are the holy rollers who get in other patrons’ faces about their book choices and opinions. However, we can’t trespass them until they do something that TPTB would trespass them for (and, of course, TPTB have to be present for it). That and the parents who smack their kids in the library and cause a ruckus. We had one father giving his kids Titty Twisters and shooting rubber bands at his kids in the library the other night, and we had to remind him that it’s not allowed in the library. :rolleyes:
When I worked at the old Main Library in Columbia, by virtue of being one of the few men on staff I was occasionally called in to assist the security staff (which at that time was one [del]rent-a-cop[/del] Pinkerton officer) in dealing with problems. The worst problem I ever had to deal with was the night two gentlemen without permanent addresses came to a rather extreme disparity of viewpoints and decided to settle their disagreement by physical contest. One armed himself with a Phillips screwdriver and the other with one of our chairs.
I’m happy to say that I was clever enough to offer to disarm the chair-wielder. Chairs are heavy, and no one wants to just stand around holding one at arm’s length. It was tense, but fortunately neither blood nor chair stuffing was shed.
And not-so-downtown ones, too. The actual scariest thing that’s ever gone down in a library I’ve worked at was a few years ago in my present location (suburban Charlotte), a gentleman with some apparent issues became extremely belligerent and threatening to some staff over a complaint he had about, of all crazy things, our choice of periodicals.
Bingo. I was surprised for a second when I saw the OP as I’ve always viewed libraries as havens of peace and books and general good stuff. However, I know from experience that any place that opens its doors to the public is going to be . . . interesting from time to time.
I worked in a commercial bank and we got the most amazing people rolling through doing the most amazing - and sometimes dangerous, illegal and hostile - things. When I first started I was shocked at how some people behave in a public place, but I did get used to it eventually. I can well imagine that libraries would have a problem with weirdness.
It’s the main reason I went to LIS school–I’m ready to rumble!
<digs out brass knuckles for graduation in May>
I don’t see it as any more dangerous than nursing, my current profession. At least in the library, the chances of a male throwing a full urinal at you is slightly less. I would think the disturbances would be more on the annoying side, rather than the body armor side. At least, I hope so.
That’s exactly it. You don’t get a full comprehension of how weird people are until you get a real, honest, true cross-section. That’s what libraries get, perhaps more so than any other establishment. If something is genuinely for and available to everybody, then everybody will use it, and some people don’t like that.
No weirdness in my libraries, but I work as a law firm librarian. I occasionally have to deal with some pompous jerks, but none of the scary, sad, sick strangeness that public libraries attract.
I work as a virtual reference librarian for my night job, and I must say I’ve very relieved to not have to deal with some of these weirdos face to face. Sometimes it’s tense enough just “chatting” back and forth using our software, and it seems like every kid and teenager I deal with suffers from “Internet Tough Guy” syndrome. I look like a well-dressed bouncer in real life, so I like to think the anonymity makes them brazen and they wouldn’t dare be so rude to me in person.
I’m in an academic library - now, we’re a land grant university and during most hours are open to the general public.
Do things occasionally happen? Yep, there are thefts and confrontations, usually late at night (the library I work in is open 24/5), but in general I think it’s likely less dangerous than the public library. *
That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be more dangerous if someone chose to make it so, but barring a major crisis, no, it’s not particularly dangerous.
*That said, I’m a subject specialist and in the library where I work, we don’t have regularly scheduled reference desk hours. Occasionally the subject librarians will fill in, but I haven’t had a reference shift in months, so I may have a skewed view of the library.
The cafe in our own library got robbed at gunpoint not more than a few months ago. Big hub-bub on campus. We’re a major academic library on a public university (University of South Florida, Tampa), and all sorts of characters can be found around here. We’re also not more than two blocks from a high-crime area, which may or may not have anything to contribute.
I worked at the library when I was in college on a big-city campus. Yes, there were weirdos, but nobody extremely scary. One day, there was a homeless-looking man who stood there, frozen in one spot, not moving or responding when spoken to. My boss was very creeped out by this and was afraid that maybe he was having a medical emergency, so she decided to call 911. Of course, he walked away just before the police came. There was also the mean Russian guy with extreme BO who would harass us about the Russian newspapers not being out on time (usually because they hadn’t arrived yet!) A coworker claimed to have caught a guy masturbating in a typing room to copies of L’Espresso (the Italian equivalent of Newsweek, only it often featured naked boobies on the cover.) Same coworker claimed to have seen two lesbians making out “over in the M’s”.
Periodicals are serious business. Man, that was a fun job!