The Mesa Community College library is pretty ridiculous. When you have to use the computer there to do work for your ~online classes~ because your home Internet connection is no longer there due to financial fiascos… and everyone is chatting away, boyfriends and girlfriends meeting up and smooching and talking all lovey-dovey. People on cellphones, talking to their freaking doctors… nutjobs watching stupid YouTube vids and laughing their asses off. Girls huddling around chittering about something-or-other. And if you turn the music on your iPod up loud enough to drown them out, one librarian or another will come hassle YOU and tell YOU to turn the music down and be quiet. They will do this right beside those idiotic couples with their blood made of highly-concentrated sugar liquid, the chattering boys sharing their dumb videos. And not say a SINGLE WORD to THEM. Hella tempting to just netsend every freakin user telling them “This isn’t your damn coffee house”. But sadly, can’t find a list of the non-admin users, and way too chicken to just do /users cuz then the entire network ALL OVER THE CAMPUS will probably get it!
Damn right, kill all those fuckers!
I have good one. At my college we had one of those “screaming street preachers” that would hang out at the entrance of the library way too damn often. You could hear that fucker 5 stories up inside the library.
No. He doesn’t. College libraries are supposed to be quiet. Mine was, and the librarians enforced it. College is about studying; that’s your entire purpose for being there. I don’t think you should make noise in regular libraries, either, but I understand that’s a little different.
We will never defeat the zombies.
A couple of weeks ago I was in South Jersey and had a few hours to kill, so I went to the library. There was a serious noise problem. Why? The fucking librarians were the loudest, most obnoxious people in the place, calling to one another across the room, gossiping with every regular who came through the door, and talking loudly about things that are really none of my business. I moved no less than three times to try to get away from them, and I was not the only person having issues. I ended up in a single chair behind some bookshelves where I thought they couldn’t get me… but they ended up stopping about five feet away from me and talking, in a normal volume, about something completely unrelated to being a librarian. Then when they started talking about personal stuff, they lowered their voices to a whisper. :rolleyes:
Bah. A Faraday cage (AKA a heavy-duty chicken wire cage embedded in the outer wall concrete) should do the job. Look, ma, no transmitters! 
ETA: Darn! Note to self: Next time, read the friggin’ date before answering in thread!
I’m curious about what brand of cell phone has a vibrate function that is EXTREMELY LOUD? The vibrate function isn’t inaudible, but I don’t recall any as being loud.
One of my fondest memories of college was studying for finals in a library room full of hundreds of study carrels (this was at a very large public university known for its successful but crooked football program). All you could hear was the gentle rustling of paper, until…the sound of loud snoring resulted in much tittering.
But between undergrad and grad school, something changed in the student population. There seemed to be a lot more people who considered the rules optional. I remember people eating their lunch at study tables. One guy was reading his textbook in a stage whisper.
One of my all-time most embarrassing moments was at our public library. This library has a no cell-phone policy which I am careful to honor. I was there with my kids and a nice lady asked us if we would like to sit in on a harp recital. We had time so we said what the hell, and took seats near the front. A visibly nervous 12-year-old was introduced to give her very first public performance. About halfway through the first song MY FUCKIN’ CELL PHONE STARTS RINGING. I ran out, briefly considered suicide, then answered the phone.
And to add to this very worthy Pitting - a public library is not a baby sitting service!! If your children are not old enough or well-behaved enough to know proper behavior in a library, do not leave them alone.
If the school has a snow day, find a babysitter. Do not drop your half civilized offspring off at the library and drive to work. If you cannot be contacted, the police will be called and you can explain to them why you abandoned your children.
In my experience, it’s been years since public libraries have considered quietness a necessity. Not in Xenia, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; Ottawa, Ontario; St. Louis, Missouri, nor even St. Louis County, Missouri.
The last time I was in a library that even tried to enforce silence was in Fort Collins, Colorado in 2002, and even they ignored the noise coming from the in-house coffeeshop.
Leave a cellphone on a hard surface like a desk or a table and it can sound ridiculously obnoxious. The atmosphere can also affect how loud a sound seems. I usually don’t notice my phone vibrating in my pocket during the day but at night wrapped in the pile of jeans and shirt at the foot of my bed, it will wake me right up out of a sound sleep.
Last week I went to the local branch of the library (in Denver, Colorado, Frank!) to do some work. I haven’t worked in a library in a while, not even the one on our campus, so I honestly thought the reports of the Death of Library Peace were exaggerated.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
Children whining at the top of their voices to their parents talking on cell phones in outside voices while surfing the Internet. People asking librarians questions from the other side of the room. Change machines for the printer dropping coins into metal receiving slots from what sounded like the height of the moon.
I actually did manage to find a semi-quiet area with some carrels. In that area, I asked one of the librarians to tell me where the bathrooms were (and I whispered). The librarian said, in a normal conversational tone, “Oh, you don’t need to be quiet.”
THE FUCK I DON’T. I actually said to him “oh, I’m one of those people who think that libraries should be quiet places, like they used to be.” He said I was one of the few.
Now get off my lawn.
The OP didn’t mention any condition like that, and you yourself said your phone is apparently quiet during the day. He describes the vibrate function as “Extremely Loud”. I suspect that this is either hyperbole or he is mistaken about the phone being on vibrate.
Do you have a cellphone? Take it to a library and set it on one of the tables with the alarm set to go off in vibrate mode in a few minutes. Start reading a book. I guarantee you, when it goes off, you’ll jump, mutter a swear and fumble to turn it off.
I’ve seen and heard some of that including the ringtone so loud i almost thought it was someones radio; the dumbasses yakking away to plan their next kegger,
The moron who brought a roast beef sandwich that i could smell on the third level,;
the daft Romeos and silly Juliets but at least they weren’t noisy just vomit inducing.
I couldn’t hear squat, but then it occurred to me that my phone is in a soft case. I took it out and put it on the table. I could hear it vibrate much better but it still wasn’t loud. My phone is a Samsung Juno. YMMV.
I hated holding my phone without the case. It felt much too slippery.
You aren’t the only one to feel this way:
Yeah, “The Library as a Quiet Place” has been dead for a decade, maybe more. The new trend in library services is to become a community gathering place, which means the community actually comes into the library.
But does everyone want to know the real secret of why libraries used to be quiet? Because they were fucking EMPTY. I’ve looked over the usage statistics for the library I work at. In 2011, more people walk through the front door on a really busy day than the library would see for an entire month in the 1950s/1960s.
Also, children used to be shuffled off to an isolated and dank “children’s area” (more or less a single room with a small collection of ratty materials) that would keep them away from every other adult patron. No library could get away with that today. Community leaders and politicians would be calling for our heads.