At my local library there is a lady librarian, she is old and fat and mean to everyone, especially the kids.
I remember when I was a kid, there was one old librarian who was also old, fat, and mean to the kids.
Today I had to go to two branch libraries and both of them had two fat, old lady librarians yelling at the kids.
Is that like a requirement for libraries? You know, all your librarians must have a BA and at least one must be old and fat and mean to the kids
Oh, THIS is gonna go well. 
I remember my high school librarian. She was one of those mean librarians. She must have thrown me out of the library for forever at least once a week for my whole four years of high school. Heh. I’d just give her a big grin the next time I went in. She was a total card; she even signed my yearbook. (There’s a big grin on her face in the yearbook photo.) So here’s to Emily Mogelnicki!
Ya and they all have funny names too.
What if she’s only old and mean to the kids? Or (insert other possible trait combinations). I mean, two out of three ain’t bad. :rolleyes:
My school had one Orchard Utzinger. Not fat or mean, but rather old. Especially to a ten-year-old.
My grade school librarian was old(60s) and fat, but very nice.
The high school librarian was younger(30s), very skinny, and MEAN!
Maybe years of being a librarian, which is a fairly inactive job, tends to put on the pounds? Most of the librarians I know now are actually rather average sized, and have a fairly even temperament.
Well most people now-a-days are a bit chubby anyway but seems there’s always that morbidly obese one, who’s screaming at the kids.
The other librarians aren’t that fat.
Maybe her personality isn’t directly connected to her appearance.
Or maybe the morbidly obese all carry these traits within themselves, latent, just waiting for the moment they are hired at a library.
Either way.
Oh, I do hope Sampiro pops in here.
Well, I don’t recall any fat, old librarians as a kid, but there sure are a lot of them now.
Actually, that’s not quite true: the children’s librarians seem to be ok (I can think of one who is chubby and middle aged, but she’s soured on life in general). For me, it’s the people at the circulation desk. What is with them? If you don’t like people–why are you working in a service job?
I’m in the service industry myself, so you’d think I’d have a bit more sympathy, but here’s the deal: I have to cope with public strangeness and unreasonableness AND manage health concerns, stat orders etc. All they have to do is check out my books! If I can do my job with a smile, please, why can’t they do their’s?
(this does not apply to all librarians. Marge, I’m looking right at you)
Is there a category for young, slim, crunchy granola but anal and OCD librarians as well? I know a few of them–and if anything, they’re more annoying. Dale–looking at you…
Masters’ degree, asshole. And I’m young and skinny and mean to the kids.
As it is customary on the SDMB for someone to pop in and provide the exception to the rule in every. single. thread, I am patiently awaiting one of our 23 year old Jessica Alba look-alike librarian Dopers to jump in. Any time now.
Don’t think librarians don’t get their share of strangeness and unreasonableness. In addition to dumb questions (“Do you have any books on American history?”–this in a college library) and unreasonable expectations (no, spoiled brat with a term paper, they won’t do all your research for you), there are rowdy kids, odoriferous homeless people, and, nowadays, porn addicts who get ugly when the staff try to enforce the rules on computer use. In my mother’s day, there were card catalogs, and customers who would rip the card out of the catalog and take it with them rather than write down the number.
Yes, Mom was a librarian (and come to think of it, heavy, prematurely white-haired, and mean as hell when she wanted to be). Once she had a guy who asked for the Manhattan White Pages, took it over to a table, and talked to it for over an hour–not only talked, but laughed at it, swore at it, and hit it. He then returned it to the reference desk and asked, “Where are the cookbooks?” Mom pointed; she wasn’t about to go and show him.
Sampiro isn’t mean.
There are a few hot chicks at my library, but I assume they are students doing some sort of community service or something and they’re juuuust this side of young for it to not be creepy that I notice their hotness.
The people checking out your books aren’t librarians; they’re clerks. And they have to put up with a ton of icky stuff (as do we all), so be nice to them.
I am a chubby, young, nice librarian. And our children’s librarian is overflowing with niceness!
In my own small effort to prove that not all librarians are fat (and some are, in fact, hawt), Portraits of Librarians.
I am not the photographer.
And here I am.
I’ve known fat mean old lady librarians. And fat mean old lady physicians, secretaries, lawyers, and veterans. But librarians today aren’t just mean old women who look like Winston Churchill in drag: we’re also gay men.
Of course part of it may also be misconception. Next to the dropping of the first r in Librarian (an offense that should be punishable with a glowing poker to the tongue; we are really not from a nation in Africa where slaves who cataloged books were returned when liberated) one of the most irritating peeves I have about the way the profession is regarded (and this isn’t necessarily addressed to the OP as I don’t the people in Markxxx’s experiences) is the notion that “old lady, works in library… must be a librarian”.
NOT EVERYBODY WHO WORKS IN THE LIBRARY IS A LIBRARIAN!
The other Doperbibliotecarista here will probably know whereof I speak (if they’re not off taking their prune juice suppositories and getting their 11 cats fed before The Best of Lawrence Welk comes on of course) when I say most irritating is when the people who work in libraries but aren’t librarians refer to themselves as librarians.
Or, as one frighteningly brilliant librarian in Georgia put it a few years ago…
Addendum to above:
There are also more than a few libraries here and there, especially in small or rural schools or in small branch public libraries, where there is NO librarian on duty, usually because the job doesn’t pay enough to interest anyone with the right graduate degree. In my senior year of high school the “librarian” had been the lunch lady the year before, but she was referred to as librarian even in the yearbook. Any new book that came in was filed alphabetically [more or less] by author on the “new books” shelf, “new book” meaning “any book that’s come in since we had a librarian who worked here 12 years ago”, and the card catalog basically had the name and title of the book and said “New Book Shelf”.
Also, some of the fat mean old ladies who are librarians might surprise you. Most of the ones I have known who match that description (or who come within a standard deviation or two of matching it) would respond to a patron query of “do tongue studs enhance fellatio for both partners or just the man receiving the fellatio?” by finding the most recent copy of THE JOY OF SEX and THE JOY OF GAY SEX and whatever else was relevant to the question, probably without blushing or making a judgmental comment. You may also be surprised at how many fat old lady librarians are pretty impressive and completely self taught web page makers.
So- they’re fat because they overeat, they’re old because they’ve lived a long time, if they’re librarians it’s because they have degrees, and if they’re mean to kids it’s probably because they’re tired of the complaints that “I can’t study because the kids are being too loud”.
True story: the best example of fat mean old librarian was one of the best librarians I ever knew when it came to knowing her trade and taught me far more about the profession than I learned in grad school. (She was mean, though- two faced biatch also.) She had an odd quirk: she was obsessed with Eric McCormack (Will from Will & Grace, though her obsession stemmed from when he was on Lonesome Dove: The Series) and her entire disposable income went to funding her trips to watch tapings of that show once every year or two and to seeing him in Music Man on Broadway where she said [and this is a Hutt-human hybrid talking] “I thought I was going to have an orgasm when that man sang Marian the Libarian…”.