Old People + Electronics = Problems for me
Sometimes I hate the fact that the children's desk faces the copier. At least 60% of the people who use it are total idiots, even though it's relatively simple to operate. (Want to change the size of the copy? Hit the big button that says, "Reduce/Enlarge." Want to make a color copy? Hit the big button that says, "color.") Now, granted, you have to put your money in the coin box before you can copy anything, and the coin box has a non-adjustable 15 second timer on it, so it can be tricky to set the copier to the desired settings before the timer runs out. I don't mind helping people with that. The real problem comes when old people try to use it. Even though copiers have been around for over 20 years, they always get that wide-eyed look of panic as soon as they walk up to it and start yelling for help. Maybe I'm just not explaining things well enough, but every time I have to help anyone over the age of 65 with the photocopier, there's some horrible problem that inevitably takes at least half an hour to fix. My favorite was the time I asked an elderly woman to go ahead and put her money in the coin box, and while I had my back turned, she folded up her dollar bill so that it was very tiny and stuffed that motherfucker right into the coin slot. We had to find tweezers to pull it out, and she never even figured out why what she did was wrong.
The library is not a daycare center
This one seems to go over many people's heads. The library is a public institution that provides free information to the community, not free babysitting. Unfortunately, there seems to be a large percentage of young mothers who don't understand this. Most of the time, they come in to use the Internet and drop their offspring off in the children's department, assuming we'll just watch their kids for them. It wouldn't be a problem if they simply needed to check their e-mail for 5 minutes, but most of these people tend to spend 4 or 5 hours at a time online. Now, anyone who has ever spent any time around small children knows that they get bored very quickly. It's not fair to take your 3 year-old to the library and then abandon them. They can't read yet and can only color so many pictures before a destructive level of boredom starts to set in. At that point they start messing with the computers, stealing things from the librarian's desk, and running around while throwing their shoes at people. I don't care how poor you are; these days anyone can afford a computer. You can get one for about $300. Anyone can save up $300, it just might take some people longer than others. If you really want to use the Internet for 5 hours straight and you have a small child, don't be a dick and come to the library. Save up some cash and buy a PC so that we don't have to deal with your neglected kids. Also, placing a tracking device on your child that beeps loudly every time he moves more than 5 feet away from you and then coming to the library to use the computer for many hours is a bad idea. Period.Storytime + Child Neglect = FAIL
For crying out loud, if you are going to take your child to storytime, pay at least a little bit of attention to them. Library storytimes are designed to help parents interact with children in ways which promote early literacy skills. It is not time to socialize with your friends. It is not the equivalent of plopping your kid down in front of the television for half an hour. And no, you can't leave your child in storytime and come back when it's over; you are missing the point entirely. I understand that having kids cuts back on a mom's time to do the things she used to enjoy, like talking to other adults or getting to spend more than 5 minutes alone without interruption. Unfortunately, when you have children, you automatically forfeit everything that compromises your life. It becomes your responsibility to make sure that your child grows up to be a functional adult, and to achieve that, you have to pay attention to them. Therefore, if you are going to bring a kid to a library storytime, you can't treat it as social hour or time to escape to the coffee machine in the lobby. You need to sit there with your kid, do the rhymes, sing the songs, and dance the dances. Yes, you will look like a complete moron doing it, but acting like an idiot is a sure-fire way to get your child to remember how to count to ten. Besides, you'll have plenty of time to socialize when they're teenagers and they hate you.
Teachers - brains = a huge waste of my time
It's unfair of me to say that all teachers are idiots. I've met plenty of teachers who are intelligent and excellent mentors. I have discovered, however, that there are a disproportionate number of brainless people who somehow thought it was a good idea to teach elementary school, (specifically 1st and 2nd grade.) It's not that they're all bad--many of them are quite good in a classroom setting--it's simply that they don't seem to understand how the world works once they walk out of the classroom. You would think that if one is planning to become an educator of any sort, it might be a good idea to figure out how a library works. Unfortunately, many of them can't seem to read signs, follow directions, or use the Internet, which means that every time one of these people comes into the building, I have to spend half an hour collecting material for them and essentially doing their job. At my library, we even offer to pull collections for teachers on specific topics, as long as they give us at least two weeks notice, which seems to come as a shock to many of them. One would hope that a teacher would plan out her curriculum more than 2 weeks in advance, but alas, it is usually not so. What we often end up with are people who come into the department, refuse to learn how to use the catalog, and ask me to pull 30 or more books for them. They also always manage to come in when we're busiest, so everyone who has the misfortune of walking into the children's department after the teacher has to wait an unacceptable amount of time to be helped. It wouldn't be so bad if they came in asking for 30 picture books on food, or 30 books on dinosaurs, but they always manage to ask for something that doesn't exist. No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to make these people understand that we don't have books on the cold war at a first-grade level, and there simply haven't been 30 titles on blind African American gardeners published yet. (I wish I was kidding.) And it never fails that as soon as I impart this wisdom onto whomever I'm helping, they're shocked. Really though, who could have guessed that we wouldn't have any fun storybooks on quadratic equations?
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