Librarian Ire

A new insult record!

Had a patron break the insult record lately. I couldn't decide if I wanted to award him or kill him. Three insults in about 8 minutes.

He had been sent over to the library(first trip by the by) to get a specific edition of a book for his boss.
First of all he didn't know the title. He did however know the editor's name. But he told me it was the author's name.
I finally find it, by using the call number which he also had, yet didn't think was useful.
I see that someone had returned it in the last few days. We invite him to look on the shelving cart, and he pulls the wrong book. He found the 2006 edition.
Which isn't the right translation.
Here comes insult number 1. The library is wrong. How could they have made such a huge mistake as to catalog an English translation as a Greek one! It's a travesty. He shoves it in my face TWICE, probably in order illustrate his point. But really just annoying me. At this point I have to help him to shut him up.

I doublecheck on the screen and see that the book he has is a different call number and a different edition as well as a different barcode.
I tell him he has the 2006 edition. Then he looks over the cart again and WOW there it is.
Insult number 2 was the comment in order to find things here, you have to know what you are doing to find things here. Meaning of course HE knew what he was doing and no one else did.
Then insult number 3 was if I know how to check books out to him. He's lucky he made it out of the library alive at that point. I thought about hitting him, but the boss was in her office and she would have seen.
And the rule is NO WITNESSES!

posted by Nike at 8:51 PM | 4 comment(s)

SSSSHHHHH!!!

I mean it this time. Shut up!!!!!
I don't care that you have run out of milk, or you need to buy a car, or your fiancee is stuck at the airport on stand-by and won't be home to feed your pet lizard or whatever.
Turn the *%$#!! cell phone off.
We here in the library have no interest in your life and all the jetsam that you are currently broadcasting.
And don't give me those dirty looks when I ask you to move it outside. I'll bet you no one else cares either and are relieved someone kicked you out.

Labels: cell phones, sshhsing

posted by Nike at 5:44 PM | 0 comment(s)

We're back

I bet you thought we had given up or went for therapy, as there has been no Ire for quite some time.
Call it a sabbatical. Now we might not have a book or papers but we have observed the habits and rituals of the library users. Both the wild and domesticated.
So watch the space.

And here's the LI contribution to the Vampire Librarian's meme.
"A man is not poor because he has not provided for the morrow. If we only remember what quantity of food the sea full of fish offers, on whose contents each man in Catholic Naples is bound by his religion to feed one day of the week; how profusely all sorts of fruit and garden stuffs are to be found there at every season; how the country wherein Naples lies, has the name of Terra di Lavoro, (not of Labor but of Husbandry), and the whole province has borne the honorable title of the Happy Country (Campagna Felice) now for centuries, we will see how easily one may live there.
One who has lived here long would see that the Lazzarone is not a whit more idle than the other classes, but would also perceive that all in their way labor not merely to live but to enjoy, and that they are quite free from the labor for living." The Early lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson v.II

Labels: meme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, return

posted by Nike at 6:45 PM | 1 comment(s)