The Regulars: Public Library
I often say my job would be so much easier if it weren’t for those pesky customers. Patrons: can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without . . . their stats. Seriously, most patrons are not a problem, and some are even fun to get to know. And boy do you get to know some of them. In every library, there are the regulars.
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If you’ve never seen one of these, I hate you |
A lot of business at the public library comes from the very young, the very old, and the computer lab users. The very old are desperately seeking the past, whether in actual history or books on tape – you know, cassette tape. If you haven’t ever heard of these, I hate you. Anyway, old people also love to chortle when the electricity goes out and our card catalogs go down, as well as our ability to check out books. In their day, there were card catalogs with actual cards in them, that didn’t disappear with the pulling of a plug. If you don’t remember these either, see above.
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Puppet Master |
The very young, and their harried mothers, are the public library’s next most popular customers. They come for story time, because that is fifteen or so minutes out of their day that the children’s attention is focused on something other than them. Even if it is the children’s librarian. At the library I once worked, we called her “The Puppet Master” for reasons that went beyond her job description. Every once in a while, you’d hear her talking to the puppets. Not for practice, just because.
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How far can I get this into my mouth? |
Anyway, the children are a great help. They weed the shelves (by yanking out books and destroying them), they shelve (the books just about anywhere, backwards, and upside down), and help decorate (once they made a new carpet entirely out of books). Not that they are that interested in the books, because there are two computers in the childrens’ area. They aren’t connected to Internet, so no porn. Instead there’s Barney’s ABCs turned up to full ear blasting volume, which I will argue is even worse, at least for the people forced to shelve nearby. These people are newbie staff, and the children’s section is what we like to call “Boot Camp”.
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Yeah, tell her you’re 25 and a professional wrestler! |
The only time the usual regulars change is during Summer Reading Time (a special hell that deserves it’s own blog entry) when the school children are released from their cages and set free on the library. So the normal library users often head for the hills for their own protection. For the “tween” generation, not quite old enough for a driver’s license, but old enough to make their parents want to strangle them with their I-Pods, the library is their playground. Lots of free fun. There’s the computers that they, with their endless youthful patience, will manage to hack despite our best security measures, downloading bizarre stuff that can take us weeks to get rid of. Yet these same little geniuses would leave their MySpace profiles up on the public computers detailing every last detail of their lives for their future stalkers. If they get bored with the computer, there’s always chair races up and down the library. Thankfully, these patrons are temporary.
There were others, like the guy who tried to convert us to Jeezus (he slammed his hand on the desk and said Jesus was there – I was like, on the Circ desk?) despite the fact that my coworker was already Catholic. And the woman who plowed her car into the side of the library. And the one who swore that was not her son’s library account with the overdue books, but the account of her sister’s son, who happened to have the same name, birthday, age, and residence as her son (the coincidences!). But these people were not, thankfully, regulars, just more of the spontaneous fun you encounter at the library.