Library Rant OR The Book-Check Girl Speaks

I’m a student worker at my college’s library. I work at the circulation desk, which in general means I check out books. I also check in books and put them on the shelving carts, check out course reserve items, fill the copiers near the desk and make change for them, monitor the security gate and make sure no one tries to steal anything. There’s some other things that I do if my supervisor wants me to or if they just need done in that area, but generally, this is my job description. I’ve worked here for 5 semesters, and this semester I got a raise to $5.40 an hour instead of the standard work-study minimum wage. I like my job. I do homework and surf the net a lot (I’m at work right now, actually) and get paid for it. It’s an enjoyable work environment and my supervisor’s awesome. But some of our patrons just irritate me. Here is my first Pit Rant. Hope it doesn’t suck.

Library Patrons, please…

Don’t yell at me for things that I have no control over.
If you don’t have your card, I cannot check anything out to you. That’s the rules. Yes, there are methods of checking things out without your card, but I am not allowed to use them. If you can’t remember to carry your fucking ID, it’s not my problem, and if you get nasty with me because you’re a dumbass, I will care even less. Now, I am a student too and I understand how things are sometimes. If you desperately need a reserve item for a test you have tomorrow, and you forgot your ID and you live in Ghettocrest and we close in a half an hour, if you are nice to me, and do not get in my face and my supervisor is not here, I may just let you take it over to the copy machine without actually checking it out. But if you are bitchy to me about it, Hell no, I’m not about to let you, because I am not going to get my ass fired because you forgot your card.
Also, the fine limit is 3 dollars. If you have more than 3 dollars in fines, I cannot check anything out to you. I literally am incapable of doing it, the computer will not let me. So don’t ask me to. Pay your damn fine. There is no reason that you should even have $3 in fines. We give you a goddamn two-week grace period after your books are due before you even get a fine. You get an overdue notice, either bring your book back or renew it. You don’t even have to come to the library to renew it, you can renew it on the website! You have no freakin excuse for your fine, pay it or you ain’t getting another book. But don’t ask me to renew your books over the phone, because I can’t do that either. There are rules that I have to abide by and you do too, do not yell at me for something I can’t control.

Do not ask me stupid questions
I am here to help you, yes, and if you ask me a question, I will do my best to give you an answer. But I am not the Information Desk. That’s through the atrium and to your left. And that’s what I will tell you if you ask me how to find a book, how to do an ILL, whether or not we have this periodical or that book. I don’t know, they do, and I’ll send you to them. This is not a big deal, but when the same freaking person does it over and over again, i get a little annoyed. Also, while I do have a campus directory behind the desk, and if you ask nicely I will look up a number for you rather than just handing it to you and telling you to find it yourself, I am not your freaking phone book, do not get mad at me if I can’t find the phone number of the computer lab in the langauges building. I am a library worker – I don’t know the hours of the dining hall, I don’t know when the bookstore opens, and I don’t know the name of that girl in your English class with the nose ring. So don’t ask me!

I am not meat
Yes, I sit at a desk and lean over a book or a computer a lot. That does not mean that you should look down my shirt while I check out your book. Do not stare at my ass when I bend over to refill the copy machine. Yeah, I’m sure it’s stunning and beautiful (riiiight) but that does not mean i want you to stare at it.

I am not stupid
All you student athletes who have to spend your 4 hours a week in the library, do not treat me like I am an idiot. If you walk in, I scan your card, and you walk right back out, I am going to write down your name and report you. You think I won’t notice that you sign in, leave, then come back two hours later and “sign out”? Do I look like a moron to you? Yeah, you’re reported, jack-ass. Oh darn, four less hours for you to spend drinking beer and hitting on freshmen. Four hours a week is not a humongous amount of time, and if you wanna keep your ass on our shit-sucking football team, you’re gonna spend your goddamn four hours a week in the library!

I have a life out from behind this desk
And I really don’t want to spend more time here than necessary, especially when it’s eleven o’clock and we were supposed to close two minutes ago and I need to shower and study before I go to bed and get up for my 9am class tomorrow. So when you come in right before we lock the doors and dump 30 children’s books in the return slot 15 seconds after I’ve shut down the check-in computer, at that moment I hate you with every fiber of my being, you scumbag. You couldn’t have returned them tomorrow? They’re not due for two more weeks! But no, I have to turn on the sloooow-booting computer again, and check in your three-foot stack of Seuss and Sendak stuff, before I can leave. I have to double-scan, stamp, and sensitize every one of those fuckers, and I was supposed to be out of here fifteen minutes ago, you ass.

Briefly… library closing soon…

If you want a reserve book, I at least need to know your professor’s name. If we are nine weeks into the semester and you dont’ know your prof’s fucking name, you’re an idiot.

If the copier says “L6” there is nothing wrong with it, that’s standard, don’t say, “oh, there’s something wrong with the copy machine” 'cause there’s not.

I could go on… but I’m leaving. Frustrated.

matt gets a very pleasant mental image

…Oh wait. “Freshmen” is supposedly gender-neutral. Never mind.

What’s with the 4 hours in the library rule? Is it something only applied to people on sports teams?

The four hours is part of their athletics thing, I guess, to make sure that they don’t forget the “student” part of “Student athlete.” They’re supposed to spend at least 4 hours a week in the library - presumably they’re supposed to study (they rarely do, usually they come in groups and socialize or surf the net). They check in and check out at the circulation desk by letting me scan their ID cards. Apparently quite a few of them decide that they can’t actually waste their time in the freakin library, so they walk in, present their card for scanning, and walk right back out. Like I don’t notice. It just pisses me off that they expect that I’ll just let it slide. I usually just write their names down, but once I actually called these three football players on it, and they acted all defensive, like I was supposed to be so in awe 'cause they’re football players (I believe our team won… 3 games this year? That’s up from our 2-win seasons the past two years) that I’m just going to ignore my job and let them blow off the rules. I honestly don’t give a fuck whether they spend 4 hours a week in the library, but I don’t appreciate them thinking I’m so blind that they can get away with shit like that. So I write 'em down and report 'em.

You must go to a much smaller school than the one I went to, AntaresJB. I think that your job was covered by at least three different departments in our library!

Has anyone offered you their own offspring in exchange for a reserve book? It happened to one of my co-workers, I kid you not! This man forgot his student ID, driver’s license, etc., etc., so he offered to leave his infant, sleeping in car seat, at the reserve desk as collateral while he went to Copy Service with the book!

Have you (or any of your co-workers) ever caught anyone masturbating to the covers of L’Espresso magazine?

Have you ever gotten the father who come in with his sullen teenage child on a Saturday morning and expects you to walk them through, step by step, on how to do their stupid high-school research paper? :rolleyes:

Haven’t you ever gotten the really funny stupid questions? Perhaps that only happens in Periodicals–I got some doozies there. “Where are the magazines?” (as I’m reshelving a big cartload of magazines.) “No, not those magazines–the good magazines!” :confused: “I’m looking for a bound journal…No, I don’t know the title, but it was light blue”. “Why don’t you have TODAY’S [newspaper from distant land like Russia or Brazil]?”

Why do you have to reboot the computer and check in books that have arrived after you’ve shut things down? I say, if they were dumped in the book drop one minute after the library closed, too bad–they can be checked in tomorrow morning.

You should make a little sign for over the copy machine explaining the “L6” problem. The area around the reserve desk at our library was plastered with little, helpful signs (for patrons on the outside, and employees on the inside). Some people even read them, too (it was a library, after all).

I can’t even imagine having to police the library activities of student athletes! Actually, I’d feel bad for them–sure, I couldn’t leave the library, either, but I’d at least be getting paid! I knew many successful students who never spent anywhere near an average of four hours a week at the library–why would student athletes be any different? Who came up with this half-assed policy? Ugh!

I guess, after six years, it all seems funnier now. You haven’t lived until you get some high-faluting “professor” so incensed about Reserve’s “three items at a time” policy that he gives you this grandiose speech that includes the words “peon”, “May I speak to your manager?” (as if this were a fast food place) and “You are what’s wrong with this country. You are following the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law.” He actually did come back the next morning to complain to my boss, and I was very disappointed to hear that he had to recycle most of the speech he had given me–Could a professor run out of BS so soon? Yes, he actually asked to speak to her boss–the head librarian of the university. I imagine that the president of the university eventually heard about the matter as well.

Yup, you want to know what’s wrong with this country? Me. Actually, it’s copyright law–that’s what forced his photocopied packet to be split up into so many different packets…one book chapter per packet. I’m not sure what the “spirit” of that law was, but there you go.

You sound like you could use a good Christmas vacation :slight_smile:

??? Four hours a week? I used to spend a minimum of two hours a day at the library when I was in college, just for STUDYING. I must admit that I frequently spent another couple of hours just reading various books, magazines, and browsing, as I regarded the library as a student perk. I saved a LOT of money by reading books and magazines at the library.

My daughter’s in college now, and she generally spends at least three hours a day doing homework, studying, looking stuff up on the internet, etc. Some days she spends a lot more time. She lives at home with us, which is how I know how much time she spends. She’s on the Dean’s List, by the way…gotta work that into conversation whenever I can.

In high school I usually stopped by the public library on my way home and did my homework/research for an hour or so. I felt that I was very fortunate to be able to do so, and then I browsed the mall for another hour or so.

Seriously, if these “student” athletes don’t have to study at least an hour a day, they aren’t taking courses which are challenging enough. How many hours each week are they supposed to spend on football practice and other physical training?

I completely agree with this. If the library is closed, it’s closed. I don’t expect, if I put library books in the slot after closing, that anyone is going to start checking them back in until the library opens back up the next day–I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that, and I don’t think you should have to do it. If it’s not policy where you work, stop doing it. And if it is, see if you can’t discuss it with your supervisor and at least find out why.

My bets are, just from having read some of your posts, that it’s not required, but you’re concientious enough to want to have your work done “right” and don’t like leaving that stack of things for the morning workers. That’s very laudable, and I loved having people like you on my staff when I was supervising student workers–I knew the work would get done, and done right, and didn’t have to worry about what wasn’t getting done when I saw them taking a break. But I had to tell them sometimes that it’s okay not to do absolutely everything every now and then, and they shouldn’t feel like they’d slacked off if they didn’t always take one hundred percent personal responsibility for all the work that needed doing. (I had to be careful, though, not to say things like that around the people who thought that throwing a few tablecloths on the tables and pushing the chairs back constitiuted “enough” setup and who had to be constantly fetched from mysteriously long and frequent breaks. But you’re clearly not one of those people.)

Honestly, aside from the 10 and a half hours a week I spend working at the library, I don’t really go there that often. I’ll go if I need to copy something, I’ll go if I need to get research books or if I need to find a music score. But very often, our library doesn’t have good resource books, so I order them on loan from oher libraries through the PALCI system. I can do that from my room. Every one of our dorms is equipped with a LAN connection for each occupant, so I have complete high-speed internet access from my dorm room.

And as far as studying an hour a day… I’m taking some pretty challenging classes, (and I had 9 classes this semester - but only 15 credits, damn 1-credit/0-credit music classes) and I probably study maybe 45 minutes a day at the most, stepping that up a little before exams. And I’ve got a 3.75 and have been Dean’s List every semester.
oh, and Tamex, my school is really small. Student body is probably around 3000. (I don’t mind, that’s approximately the same as the population of my hometown.) While we do have a lovely very technologically advanced library (The big thing they like to promote is that anywhere you can sit down, you can plug in a laptop computer and hook it up to the internet – and you can, seriously, pretty much anywhere you decide to sit that’s not like, the middle of the floor or something.) and it’s in a very lovely restored old building… in some respects, it does suck.

I have had a professor come in to place something on reserve (yeah, I handle that too- just let them fill out the form and stack it with the item on the shelf for the cataloging person) and he insisted to me that because he already had some things on reserve for that class, that he did not have to fill out a form. In a chinese accent. “No no, I don need form, I have reserve for this class aready.” Repeatedly, as I calmly push the form at him and explain that you still need to fill out the damn form. Argh.

C’Mon - I gotta do something to keep my mind occupied. I mean, this is a library, fer chrissakes. What else am I gonna do?
[Homer]mmmmm…hot librarians…[/Homer]

Last time I dumped a book in the return slot just as they were locking the door (after speed-reading the last chapter and sprinting three blocks), I just got a blank look and, three days later, a notice that I’d accrued a fine. Antares, you’re too nice, and I bet they don’t appreciate ya, either. :slight_smile:

If I was a really, really cute guy, would it be ok?

When sitting at the computer, the information desk is right nearby.
SOmeone called, the man answered, and we heard,
“No, they’re not in the boat together.”
"No, Moby Dick is the whale. "
(laughter all around)

First of all, the jocks are being total jackasses, and I’d report their stupid butts too. That being said, I’ve had a 4.0 for the past four years of college, and I can count on two hands the times I’ve been in my schools’ library.

And my courses are damned challenging (BS Nursing, May 2003, woo hoo).

The library just isn’t a conducive place for me to study, and I only go there when I need something specific I can’t get online.

Add to this patrons who ask me what their email passwords are, or wonder why they got kicked out when I’ve already told them once they can’t be looking at porn on the library computers!

We used to use the library to play D&D. They had these wonderful private rooms you could check out. I’d go there to check out interesting books and novels, but I rarely used the place for actual school stuff.

I graduated with a 3.23 (Poor freshman year. We were 22 miles from the Louisiana border, and Wednesday night was Ladies’ Night at Doomis Walker’s. And J & J’s Drive-through Liquor Store had the best frozen margaritas and daquiris.)

The athlete rule seems very silly. I don’t recall spending much time in the library as an undergrad at all, except for the occasional long afternoon reading stuff for fun. Most of the actual studying I did was in my dorm room or at the coffeehouse.

Another tale from the “I am not meat” department:

Dear Sir:
You may have noticed that this is, in fact, a library. Like most library patrons, I came here to read books. If I wanted to stare at a stranger’s penis, I would have come to a different venue. If you are going to wear athletic shorts and sit with your legs up on a table, please take the trouble to arrange yourself properly and make sure everything is tucked in.

Furthermore, when a person picks up her book and leaves, it should be a clear indication that she does not want to stare at your penis any more. Please refrain from following said person around the library and staring at her through the bookshelves. Thank you.

Grrrr…

Be honest, was it terribly wrong of me to go right down to the bottom of your post and check out your homepage? :smiley:

I work for a college with a student body of about 30,000. I don’t work in the library but in a computer lab. We also check materials (video/audio tapes and CDs mostly ) to students and staff. Students may not remove materials from the building. Staff may check videos out for one week at a time (many keep them for months though). Students are required to check-in when they arrive and check-out when they leave with a current semester library or student body card. Pretty simple rules, no?

“I forgot my card…I left it at home…It’s in my car (WHY!)…the squirrels ate it…etc”. Hmmm, well…TOO BAD. Go get another one. It’s not my problem that you can’t remember to bring your damn card to school. Why the hell did you take it out of your wallet in the first place? Oh, that’s right you’re special, let me break the rules just for you. Oh yeah, and all those people standing behind you who just saw me do it as well. Nope. Next.

The rules are there for a reason (which I don’t have to explain to you). if you don’t like them, go somewhere else.

I see this all the time. It’s not the athletes here it’s the foreign language students. They are required to spend 5 hours per semester in the lab. Most wait until the last week to do this and many try the check-in and sneak out routine. When I see someone check-in and then leave I just check them right back out. Sorry no hours for you. It’s pretty funny when they come back an hour or two later and want to know why they’re not checked in.

No you don’t. Not according to the students and most of the faculty.

We always have a hard time getting people to leave but I lock the doors ten minutes before closing time so that new people can’t show up to “just print” (IOW - I have to rewrite half my paper in five minutes and then print).

And of course there’s always at least one instructor every semester when has to have their own “special” way of having materials cataloged or thinks that they’re students don’t have to follow the rules. “My students don’t need library cards because they’re doing class work” Um, everyone in here must be doing class work and must also be checked in…your students are no different. These people drive me nuts.

Oh yeah, STOP SURFING PORN SITES IN THE COMPUTER LAB! Do that shit at home (where I do it, ;)). The porn people and the chat line people for the most part are idiots. They think that by having an MS Word document (usually not even their own work) open and hitting ALT-TAB is fooling anyone. Nope. I can see what you’re doing right from the comfort of my desk. So when I come up and tell you that chatting is not allowed in here or say that you can’t look at PORN, don’t close the window and say “I wuznt”. Because I have a screen shot of the huge beaver that was just covering your screen. Bye bye, have a nice day, don’t come back. A few months ago, on a slow day, a couple of us were checking on a guy that we thought was chatting (porn chat, wheee). We watched him type “I’m not supposed to be chatting in here” took a screen shot, printed it and took it over to him. See ya guy, time to go. The look on his face was great. :slight_smile:

I’m not a total ass though. I go out of my way to help anyone who is doing legitimate work and I’ll do whatever I can to help out faculty and staff. I’ve stayed woking with students for up to an hour after closing time before. No problem, happy to help. But if you’re breaking the rules or just being an asshole I have absolutely NO sympathy and you can take a flying leap.

Sorry for the long rant and possible hijack…the OP just got my dander up.

Heh heh–I’m the only night staffer here at the Reference desk and I must say that I feel y’alls pain! Here are some of my fav’s:
-The Screamer: Guy went off his meds, spent a week solid in the library without showering (at least that’s what it smelled like), guy freaks out and starts shrieking at the top of his lungs as he does some funky goose-step out the door. When we finally track him down, he claims he’s mathematically proved the existence of Big G and that he’s going to celebrate by sticking his pencil in his eye. Makes sense to me!
-Dr. Strange and his Manservant: Two creeps (one would always walk 5 feet behind the other, very odd) who would not only monopolize two of our PC’s to surf various unsavory porn sites, but they also decided to use a good chunk of our new book collection to build forts. Yea, that’s right–they stacked books around their work stations as if that would some how shield their activities from the rest of us! Got news for ya fellas–people doing research don’t look quite as, uh, ‘intent’ as people looking at porn so can the civil engineering project.
-Nixon: I swear on my mom’s grave that this guy looks exactly like a short, pudgy Nixon. He likes to follow female students and younger staff around and ask them to do slightly creepy things for him (an example–she’s wearing a skirt and he asks her to get a book down from a top shelf) as he’s ‘disabled’. Yea right. One of these days he’s going to get a face full of Mace and his family jewels kicked between his teeth and actually BE disabled. He’s also a security guard–he comes in a lot in his uniform–so he pretty much fits the serial killer stereotype to a ‘T’.
We get one memorable character here about every 6 months so I’m getting about due again. And boy golly, I just can’t wait. :wink:

Well, be fair. I managed to get through four years with a Chem degree and never even got a library card. Most of what I needed was journal articles I had to photocopy anyway, and could then take home and read. If I had to stay in the library for four hours just to stay on the fencing team while I could have been lounging around in my room with a photocopy, I would have been pissed.

Obviously, that probably isn’t the case here, but studying doesn’t just happen in the library.