Seriously, like any other library in the civilized world, our card catalog hasn’t been updated in about fifteen years, because we have joined the 1980’s. The fact that you had to move a damn book that was displayed on a partially-opened catalog drawer should have been a hint, you moron. You then complained that you couldn’t find anything in the card catalog. I explained that our catalog is online. You bitched at me that…we’re forcing people to use computers. I resist the urge to say we’re not forcing you to do a damn thing; only if you want to find a book do you need to use a computer.
And no, I won’t go and get them off the shelf for you, not when you’re standing right here, I’m the only one at the desk, and you haven’t made any effort since you walked in the door.
The machine that accepts money for one of our two copier machines is not working. There is a big sign, written in red marker, taped over the coin slot, saying “OUT OF ORDER”. I can deal with people who ask if we have copier machine (even though they just walked by them!), and people who yell at us for not making change/giving free copies (policy/common sense).
But the unspeakable idiot who ripped off the big red “OUT OF ORDER” sign from the machine, dumped four quarters in, and now wants a refund - and for us to make copies for free? No, you fucking dumbshit, I’ll give you a refund and try to kill you with my brain.
THIS IS A LIBRARY, SO TURN YOUR FUCKING CELLPHONE OFF YOU HORRID LITTLE MAGGOT.
If you are standing at the circulation desk, and you ask to borrow a highlighter, I will unthinkingly hand you one. If you then proceed to highlight inside a library book, I will grab it out of your hand and tell you “No!” much the same way I would discipline a puppy - only I assume that the puppy is smarter and not an asshole. Saying, “Oh, I’ve written in books before and you guys never noticed” does not make it okay; that means I’m taking your name and leaving a note for my boss, and you’re probably losing your borrowing privileges, you book-ruining asswipe.
(All of the above actually fucking happened this morning. Is there something in the air today?)
There’s a guy I used to do homework in college with, who underlined all the important parts with a pencil in his book. And mine, too when I let him borrow it. And drew rectangles around all the equations, even though they were already highlighted by the publisher. It used to piss me off pretty good. In retrospect, whenever I need to look something up in that book, I have fond memories of the guy, so it’s not too bad. I also have the phone number of the gal I’m probably going to end up marrying one of these days, because she gave it to me when I was working on homework in that class. Unfortunately, I seriously doubt such fond memories will come back to you in several years when you’re out of college and see a book with highlighted text. :smack:
Oh, highlighters. I hate highlighters. The people doing the highlighting have no clue what they’re doing or what’s important most of the time too. It got so bad that if I could only get a textbook used that I would stand there in the bookstore and flip through all of it until I was sure there was no highlighting present.
Now, fixing errors, taking some small notes in pencil? No problem (at least not in my own books.) Heck, one of my organic books was published so full of errors that probably every other page has at least one correction. But highlighting a library book is grounds for severe punishment.
Ugh. my Explosives Engineering book (aka Cooper’s White Book) has a lot of stupid, stupid errors. Luckily the numbers given in the examples work out, so it’s just the printing that was in error, but it’s still a pain in the ass. :mad:
I’ve always thought that a library wouldn’t have the usual rude, stupid customers, because library patrons are readers, and readers are smart, and polite. Sigh.
(My local library, a nicely-sized building, recently remodeled, adding a big comfy coffeeshop and a DVD/video game rental area that combined fill the first floor, bigger conference rooms and computers on the second floor, a child-play area in a wing, and the books, periodicals, specialty databases, and microfilm machines in a small second-story corner. I know with so much text being accessed electronically, it makes sense to reduce print holdings, but reading seems to be an afterthought when you walk in there.)
While reading The Sound and the Fury checked out from a local library branch, I discovered that on every page where one of Faulkner’s narrators used the word “nigger,” some self-appointed civil rights crusader/language maven had circled or underlined the word multiple times in addition to covering the page margins with editorial frowny faces and comments, e.g., “NO!!!” It was distracting, but I guess I’m lucky they didn’t tear out the pages or disappear the book altogether.
The book I was thinking of had lots of pentavalent carbons, wrong ring sizes in bicyclic compounds, stuff like that. I agree wrong data in an explosives textbook is more troubling than an obvious mistake like pentavalent carbon.
The patrons at my library generally fall into three categories:
Students at the college. For the most part, since we are a college of book nerds, they’re not too bad, but there are sometimes some library etiquette issues.
Summer conference visitors. These are mostly middle-aged people who are not familiar with the program at the college and for the most part unfamiliar with both academic libraries in general.
Members of the community who have paid twenty bucks for a year’s membership, who think that they therefore are our Most Important Patron and are entitled to whatever the hell they want.
Today was just a bad day; we decided that there was something in the air or something.
Also, there really really is a special place in hell for those who in any way intentionally deface library books. Stop it!
When I was younger (but not much poorer :() I would take Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt books out of the library. Several of his earlier books used the metric system, because he believed that Americans would be rational enough to switch completely over. (He writes fun books, but he is obviously not a close observer of human nature.) Some had went through all the books and crossed out the metric, writing in the english equivalents.
Not as bad as the an exhibit I saw in the Cultural Centre at the Uluru - Kata Tjuta National Park. On the part where it told how it took millions of years for the Uluru monolith to be forced up out of the earth, someone had scratched all over it and scratched in words about it being a lie by humanists, the earth was only 6,000 years old.
My father is trying to convince me that I want to go to library school and pursue a career as a librarian. His reasoning: “Well, you seem to enjoy it now.”
My response: Yes, I do enjoy it as a student job, because it’s extremely convenient both location and hour-wise, I like my coworkers, and shelf-reading in an air-conditioned library is a much more pleasant way to earn money than shoveling popcorn at a movie theater or standing over a hot greasy griddle at McDonalds. However, based on how much faith I have lost in humanity in my year-and-counting working in an academic library at a small, book-oriented school, I believe that it would be more pleasant to be eaten alive by fire ants than to spend the rest of my life working in a library.
Honestly, I do enjoy a lot of the work (there’s something viscerally satisfying about walking into the A/V room, seeing the DVDs are a complete disaster, and then putting everything where it belongs), but I just do not have the patience to do it for more than a few months at a time (ie, summer) on a full-time basis.
Bonus: this afternoon we got a reference question from our local looney, who calls every week or two with some insane question that can be Googled in twenty seconds, asks us to print stuff out for him, and never comes to pick up the goddamn printouts. My (male) coworker picked up the phone, and apparently, he asked for me by name “because she has such a pretty voice.” His question was about the Srebrenica massacre
You gave them a refund after they did that!? I work at a hotel and when our guests ignore the out-of-order sign on the vending machines, I certainly don’t refund their money. And yeah, they bitch and complain about it, but I just say, “Sorry, there was a large out-of-order sign taped right there on the front of the machine.” And if I had a dollar for every time they replied, “But I thought maybe it would work for me…” :rolleyes:
I hate pretty much all writing in books. A book I’m reading right now is pretty much a textbook. It was not written to be a textbook, but it could be used as one.
Well, a person before me has gone through about the first fourth of the book making tiny parenthesis and arrows. Now, I’d’ve probably not notice it, except the pencil parenthesis look just like the ones around citations in the book. Plus, the person did this to the beginning of every paragraph for 100 pages. A few times they didn’t even close them, which caused even more mental anguish.
My boss is too nice for her own good. Sometimes this works well for us (eg, “you guys are doing great with this big ‘moving every damn book in the library’ project*, so I went and got you all lunch from this great cafe”). Other times, it just indulges idiocy, like giving refunds to people like Copier Guy.
That’s very very weird. I keep hearing about such things, and I keep relating it to the recently (last three years or so) opened Grande Bibliothèque du Québec, which has all the modern, fancy computers, electronic references, software/DVD/CD libraries, multimedia viewing stations, laptop-friendly carrels and desks, conference rooms, auditorium, museum space, a café… and a circulating and reference collection of some three million books, besides the million-volume non-circulating National Collection of all books published in Quebec since 1968 along with complete newspaper archives and rare books.
So today is my day off - I work Tuesday through Saturday - but since I live approximately thirty seconds from the library, I stop by to drop off a DVD I’d had out and get another one. There’s an older guy, obviously a community borrower or conference guest, just finishing up browsing the DVDs when I go back there. I grab what I want and head up to the desk…
…where crazy old man is, completely inexplicably, berating my coworker for having a lot of Russian-language films in our collection. It’s UnAmerican to have so many Russian movies! If my coworker was older, he’d understand that!
Now, we don’t actually have a lot of - well, any movies, our video collection is fairly small. We do however lean more towards classics than contemporary stuff, and so mixed in with the classic westerns are Battleship Potemkin and a bunch of Tarkovski films (which, for the record, were donated. And also are awesome).
Secondly…seriously, what the hell. The Cold War is over. If my coworker was even older, he’d remember World War Two and then he maybe would mindlessly hate Japanese and German people!
I was incredibly glad I wasn’t working, because that meant I didn’t feel particularly bad about actually laughing at this guy.
I feel your pain. Some despicable person–who is going to Shepherd Book’s special hell for sure–has the habit of checking books out of my local library and correcting the characters’ grammar in pencil. I can’t tell if this person has very similar tastes in books as I do, or if she does nothing but sit around and deface countless piles of library books all day, but I’d say that one in every six or seven books I check out has been marked up this way. I can’t tell you how much I loathe this person.