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I've been a librarian for five years in both academic and public libraries. Oddly, I have more weird stories from the university libraries than the public libraries. At the public libraries it was mostly just mentally ill people, homeless people, drug addicts, conspiracy theorists, and old men sexually harassing and occasionally assaulting female staff. Often various mixes of the above. One of the times I caught someone watching porn in the library, it was a twelve year old kid in the children's section, and it was the most prosaic, poorly drawn and animated, animated porn I'd ever heard of. I almost wanted to tell the kid that if he had to watch porn in the library, he could at least watch some decent quality stuff.
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Oct 23, 2018 18:50
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LizzieBorden posted:What's the most distressing book you've been asked to order in? If I can chime in as a librarian who's not the OP? Probably the book of erotic BDSM retellings of Disney princess stories by Anne Rice under a pen name.
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Oct 23, 2018 21:11
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JacquelineDempsey posted:You, and other library vets, are welcome to chime in at any point! Two years before I started at one of the public libraries I worked at, someone shoved a kitten in through the book drop. The cataloger adopted the cat and Dewey, as all library cats are named, was still doing fine when I started there. Craziest I've personally seen was a blue plastic dildo in an outside book drop at the university I worked at. Around that time, someone was hiding dildos in various places around campus for some reason, staff's best guess was a frat or sorority thing though none of them ever owned up to it. One of the funny things about working in an academic library is that porn is in fact allowed on library computers. There are students who have legitimate academic reasons to be watching it, and as long as you weren't spanking it we didn't have an issue with it. Oddly, it was women much more often than men we saw watching it. One night when I was working the graveyard shift while we were open 24/7 for finals, I even found a student who had fallen asleep in a group of chairs put together like a couch watching porn on her laptop. Also, hands up any other library vets who have caught people having sex in the library.
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Oct 24, 2018 01:17
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Dawwww, I wish I got kittens in my book drops! Instead I just got to clean books after stupid kids thought it was funny to throw in mulch from the flower beds surrounding our drop box. Fuckers. Fortunately my case was not dramatic. I was doing a sweep of the library at fifteen till closing (about 1:45 AM, I was mainly a night shift person) to tell everyone, and passed by one of our small group study rooms - which have extensive glass windows next to the door - and my mind looked just closely enough to realize what two African-American girls were doing on the table before I looked away, knocked on the glass, politely told them we were closing in fifteen minutes, and went on my way. Then back at the desk I called custodial services to alert them to potential bodily fluids in that particular study room that would need to be cleaned up.
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Oct 24, 2018 02:34
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Fwiw, sounds like you did the right thing. That's about the same call I would've made. Though I could be biased because the first time I ever kissed a boy was when I was 8, in the underground parking garage of that library I got my first job at. Had my first cigarette there too, when I was 12. Yeah, I sent an email to my boss explaining what happened (not exactly covered in our policy manual) and she confirmed I did the right thing. It's none of my business, I just want the library to stay clean for everyone. And really, a study room with so much glass for anyone to look in and see is probably not the best place for that sort of thing. For weird poo poo in an indoor book drop, one public library I worked at quite recently has one of those very fancy RFID conveyor belt book sorters. Enter a kid (middle school, maybe early high school) who was a recurring thorn in our side for riding a hoverboard indoors, turning on the volume of his music so loud it bled out of the headphones and could be heard throughout the library, and generally being a troublesome little shithead who gave us lots of attitude when we tried to enforce the rules with him. After we finally gave him a one week ban on entering the library, he came in and spilled some sort of gunk out of a Starbucks cup into the indoor book return onto the book sorter. I have no clue if it was just some sugary horror from Starbucks or something else, but it rapidly congealed and solidified into a solid adhesive goop. Good news was, we caught the little poo poo doing it on camera. Bad news was the shitstorm when we called up his parents to permanently ban him from the library and bill them for the three hundred dollars it cost to repair the book sorter. I think the county legal department was still working on that mess when I was laid off a couple of months later.
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Oct 24, 2018 18:11
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Kid sounds like an absolute shithead either way (riding a hover board? Man, back in my day all we had to deal with were those stupid sneakers with the wheels that popped out), but just to clarify: did he deliberately or accidentally spill the Starbucks cup? Bosses decided it was deliberate given his record of behavior. Management at that library was generally awful, but they did bring down the hammer on anyone damaging library property. I'm not clear on all the details, though, as it happened on a day when I wasn't working.
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Oct 24, 2018 18:34
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My Lovely Horse posted:Just this week I had a job interview where they gave me a scenario: a student needs to use a PC terminal to finish their essay, all the terminals are occupied, but I spot someone playing a video game on one, what do I do? I paused for a second and said, well, there's a chance they're doing that for academic research so first of all I'd go and figure that out, and one of the interviewers kept giggling at that for the rest of my reply. My experience with academic vs public libraries about that kind of thing is that academic libraries have fewer rules, but they enforce them far more consistently and strictly. One public library I worked at, management was completely spineless and didn't want to make an official paperwork record of a patron threatening to come in and shoot us. The academic library I'm working at right now, my boss told me on my first day that we are allowed to tell anyone to leave the library if we think it's necessary oh and the police are on speed dial on all the library phones. I'm only part time for now, but a full time position opened up recently that I applied for. I really don't want to go back to public libraries. One little story from my previous work at a different academic library: "Um, excuse me. Are you the person in charge? The second floor men's bathroom is covered in blood."
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Oct 25, 2018 14:49
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The worst fees I've seen are actually in my current job. That was a fun phone call. Hi, I can't register for modules because the system says I owe the library late fees and need to contact you guys. How much do I owe? Alright, what's your student ID number... you owe $800 in lost and overdue books.
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Oct 25, 2018 15:48
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Bluedeanie posted:It's that time of year. Tell me about your haunted libraries One branch I worked at briefly (I was mainly at another branch of the county) had a phantom shitter while I was there, does that count? Starting about a month before I was seconded over there for a bit, the staff started finding turds scattered throughout the library. Always just one or two, and never in the same place twice. The phantom shitter defied the library's efforts to find them until a couple of weeks after I returned to my normal branch. Turned out there was a woman who didn't believe babies should wear diapers, so turds were just occasionally falling out of his shorts as he and his mom went through the library.
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Oct 26, 2018 02:53
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Rich white people are the worst. Not the hobos. Not the mentally ill people dumped off in the library by their caretakers so they don't have to take care of them for the day. Not the kids. It's the rich white people who are consistently the loving worst.
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Oct 26, 2018 04:54
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Will confirm. They're also always the first ones to break out this chestnut when they're unhappy with your facility/service: Also fun is when your boss points out the elderly guy sexually harassing the attractive new paraprofessional who's stuck at the front desk and says do not say a word to him because he's golfing buddies with half the county commissioners and can easily get you and her both fired or make life hell for the library system. There is one library I've worked at that had more sexual harassment and, once, outright sexual assault from patrons against library staff than the rest of the places I've worked combined.
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Oct 28, 2018 06:14
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This made me giggle. I'm waiting to see if the library I'm currently working at part-time gives me the full-time position that opened up and I applied for before I start seriously job searching again, as I'd love to stay here if I can, but a library not too far away from me must really be desperate. This is the posted description for a job opening they have:Desperate Library posted:Description:
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Oct 28, 2018 14:51
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So I figure it's the time of year for this little story I referred to earlier. Um excuse me, sir, the upstairs men's bathroom is covered in blood When I was working at this university, I had two main responsibilities: I ran all the inbound inter-library loans, and I was our late night and weekend supervisor. My own supervisor would go home around 7 PM, I would stay until we closed at 2 AM with between one to three student workers. Now, 99% of the time, things went dead quiet around 10 PM and we were down to single digit numbers of students. My boss knew full well that I was usually lurking in the ILL office posting on SA and watching Starcraft tournaments on youtube on my second monitor, and she had no problem as long as I was getting all the ILL poo poo done and keeping things calm at night. That 1% of the time though... One night, at around 1 AM, I was manning the circulation desk while the student worker was going through the building taking headcount, and a student came up to the desk and told me the title. The second floor men's bathroom was covered in blood, apparently. When the student worker came back, I chose to go upstairs and check this out for myself. Well, it wasn't the whole bathroom. But blood was all over the sink-and-mirror area. There was blood on the counter, in the sinks, on the mirrors, dripping onto the floors, on the soap and paper towel dispensers. First things first, I checked the library operations manual in vain. Surprise, nothing about this kind of situation in there. The custodial services office and campus police were a tad incredulous when I called them to tell them what happened - the former to come prepared for bodily fluids to clean up, the latter just in case someone was hurt. Then I printed out an out of order sign, slapped it on the bathroom door, and composed a rather unusual email to the entire library staff mailing list. There's a reason my department head told me at one of my performance reviews that she'd grown to dread checking her work email in the morning and seeing an email from me labeled 'Anomalous library incident.' That had become my term of art around this time for "So, something weird happened tonight that isn't covered by our normal procedures. Here's what happened, here's what I did, here's why I did it, please reply if you need further information." Never did find out what happened in that bathroom that night...
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Oct 30, 2018 20:49
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value-brand cereal posted:A question for the librarians here. Is there a particular reason why a bunch of police would come to remove someone sitting at a public computer? I saw that happen a while ago. It was an older asian lady, and they all politely swooped in around her, waiting until she gathered all her stuff to go with them. Actual police, not campus police. Could be any number of things, but most likely the police were looking for her and just happened to find her at the library. There's not a great deal that would make me ever call the police on someone in the library, and all of those situations are the kind of thing you'd know why they're being called. Eric the Mauve posted:My highly professional and educated guess is that alcohol was involved. My guess was a really awful nosebleed, but all my boss told me is that they handled it and I didn't pry further. Going from past retail experience, I could also believe alcohol and a female student getting a sudden and very severe period.
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Oct 30, 2018 22:36
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ninjewtsu posted:What's the most bizarre regular you guys have had, who DIDN'T do something nuts that required a ban/the police. Who's the most weird, innocent regular Assuming you also mean to disqualify people we wished we could ban because we were a captive audience for them (universally old people) to corner and talk to all day? And disqualify the truly mentally ill? Furry gothic girl. She was a student at the university I worked at, and I never saw her not wearing an elaborate gothic or victorian style dress and hairdo - in Florida, including during the summer - with cat ears and a tail out the back. She was pretty normal whenever I had to interact with her, but she was a student there for the last two years I worked at the university and I saw her about every other day, always in those ridiculous dresses with the cat ears and cat tail.
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Oct 30, 2018 23:54
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Khazar-khum posted:In the Men's Room? Like I said, alcohol.
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Oct 31, 2018 14:36
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JacquelineDempsey posted:As for Cythereals's blood bath(room) --- Like I said, I never found out. My boss told me the next day that they'd handled it, and I didn't ask. We didn't have any homeless students at the university. Advantages to literally being in the middle of a swamp - most of the area around the school was federally protected wetland.
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Oct 31, 2018 15:36
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snergle posted:was she short and hispanic? i went to highschool in north ca with a girl who went to school every day in an elaborate victorian dress with immaculate goth make up she put on every day on the bus with me. no mirror no mistakes. She wasnt a furry but this was mid 90s and furries werent huge then. Short, yes. Hispanic, no. She was Asian of some kind, or descended thereof.
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Oct 31, 2018 22:08
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JacquelineDempsey posted:poo poo, I remember that thread, thanks for sharing the link! :hattip: Surprisingly to me, homeless people have never been a regular thing at any library I've worked at, as far as I know. I don't have any problem with it as long as they don't cause problems - the one time I was at a library having problems with a homeless person, it was more because she was very, very drunk than because she was homeless.
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Nov 3, 2018 04:53
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Relatedly, not too long ago a guy out in Kansas filmed himself burning a bunch of books with LGBT themes aimed at kids, including every such book he could find from his local library. He put the video up on social media, talking about how the library wouldn't be able to poison the minds of children with these books anymore as he tossed them into his fireplace. To the surprise of him and only him, the library promptly ordered him to pay for replacing all of those library books he burned, and the local police upheld it.
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Nov 6, 2018 14:44
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AllNewJonasSalk posted:I wanna hear about lovely patrons who refuse to pay fines. You got any stories about that? There's nothing interesting about them, just old people (and it's almost always old people) screaming at circulation staff followed by either management giving in to the temper tantrum to make them go away or it being handed off to county legal to collect the fines by force.
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Nov 6, 2018 21:13
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Ali Alkali posted:616.8524 - Eating disorders! Unusual by American standards, too! Dewey is a thing for public libraries here, universities almost universally use the Library of Congress system.
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Nov 12, 2018 05:41
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Are all American librarians given training on Narcan? No. That's a thing that's happened at a few libraries and been heavily publicized (with good reason), but it's not common. The one public library I worked at that was in an area with drug problems, the drug of choice was completely different.  quote:Are you allowed to veto book choices for kids that seem like a bad idea? Like if a six year old wanted to check out American Psycho? Varies from library to library, but generally no. There's all manner of soft tactics we can employ in cases like that, like asking if they brought their parents' card to get it for them or whatever, but one of the most important ethical rules for American librarians is that you do not judge what people check out, you do not refuse to check out books to them, and you do not tell anyone what someone else may have checked out. We are not arbiters of what people should and should not read or watch or learn, and protecting the right of people do peruse what they wish, and their privacy in doing so, is critical.
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Nov 12, 2018 16:03
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Aunt Beth posted:I love that librarians and park rangers are the vanguard of American liberty these days. Shine on, you beautiful bookworms. This kind of thing is specifically why our computer systems don't track who's checked out what books. We can tell what someone currently has checked out, and we can tell how many times a given book has checked out, but once something is returned we don't keep a record of who's checked it out, or a person's circulation history. And even with tracking what someone currently has checked out, we can't tell anyone who currently has a given book out, or what anyone has checked out right now. Everywhere I've worked, it's been a point during training that we won't even tell the police that unless they come to management with a valid warrant.
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Nov 12, 2018 19:02
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Interesting article this morning about libraries and queer spaces. None of the libraries I've worked at have had any kind of program like that, just the usual LGBT History displays and serving as a marshaling point for Pride parades, but it's interesting to consider.
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Nov 16, 2018 15:35
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JacquelineDempsey posted:That was a really cool article, thanks for sharing it! Something I've seen before was a woman checking out a group of books on how to escape an abusive relationship and how to divorce someone. I didn't say a word.
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Nov 16, 2018 21:12
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JacquelineDempsey posted:As someone horrified by all the wire-tapping and poo poo going on in those days, I was so proud to be a library employee that day. I count my blessings that I was too young to be caught up in any of that, I was still in middle school at the time and 9/11 and the consequences simply weren't important to me. So, I used to post in the venting about student thread over in SAL when I worked at a university library, and I started looking at some of my posts. A small taste of the joys of night shift at an academic library... Cythereal posted:Why did I find a soiled pair of boxers in one of the third floor study rooms in the library when closing the building for the night? Cythereal posted:God drat it, student(s). When students came by complaining of a horrible smell coming from one of the currently unoccupied study rooms (we lock our study rooms and check out keys from the circ desk), I was expecting to find food someone had left in the garbage can, or particularly foul-smelling perfume. I was not expecting to find a pile of literal poo poo on one of the study room chairs. Cythereal posted:When reading through this thread during the summer, I wondered why so many posters talked about developing a drinking habit. One and a half days into the fall semester as the main guy manning the circulation desk at the library during the day shift, I've stopped wondering. So far I've had a student returning a book that his dog had shat on, and a greasy guy in a fedora sexually harassing one of the student workers. The nonstop barrage of students asking the same four or five questions I actually don't mind. Cythereal posted:This is not going to end well. Student entered the library, said he was going to take a two-hour math test in the computer lab. When I noted that we're closing in less than an hour (closer to half), he shrugged and said he'll manage. Also, I'd managed to completely forget about the  worthy levels of racism I saw while working there - not from any of the staff, but from the public. It was a rather rural university and I live in the Deep South (particularly Deep at that time), and a lot of our student workers were international students who had trouble finding employment off-campus.
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Nov 16, 2018 22:28
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Wow, your "returned a book a dog shat in" bit reminded me of something... Some more recollections. Cythereal posted:The library has extended hours during the first two weeks in December. A student just came in with a body pillow depicting an extremely scantily clad underage anime girl. I feel ill. Cythereal posted:Students, if the computers in the library computer lab flash warnings that they shut off at closing time every five minutes starting fifteen minutes before we close, it is not a good idea to start printing 300 pages at five minutes till closing. Cythereal posted:The customer services department at the library had a meeting this morning, reviewing the totals from the public suggestions board we put up during the last few weeks of each semester. By far the most popular suggestion is one I wholeheartedly agree with: ban the theater majors from the library. Somehow, that even managed to outstrip the cries for free food and coffee. Cythereal posted:And in the "That was a very special call to the custodial services department" file tonight, a student pissed all over the carpet in one of the private study rooms. When asked why he didn't use the restroom, the student responded that he couldn't find it. The restrooms were fifteen feet from the study room he was in, had a big lit-up sign, and there are signs on the walls about every twenty feet on that floor pointing towards the restrooms. Cythereal posted:Surreal moments in academic librarianship: looking high and low for weird noises that sound like they're coming from inside the library only to discover that it's a student practicing their sousaphone behind the library.
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Nov 16, 2018 23:37
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Fuckers. Escaping retail did not free me from them. Cythereal posted:Just had a pre-med try to check out every single organic chemistry study guide and solutions manual at the library because midterms are coming up. Cythereal posted:It's getting to be that time of year. An American government class has a paper due tomorrow for which students are supposed to watch and then write a paper about a DVD the professor put on course reserve at the library. They've had the entire semester to do this. I know this because the professor in question teaches this course every semester and hands out this assignment every time. I also know this because I've had nine people today - I've counted - come to the library to check out the DVD in question only to be told that it's currently checked out and has a waiting list (it can only be checked out for two hours at a time, and the movie's an hour and a half long). Which also happens every semester. Cythereal posted:Working Saturday at the library again, just had to save one of my student workers from a nontraditional student. Cythereal posted:A student has started leaving Chick tracts around the library. This is going to be a fun departmental meeting.
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Nov 19, 2018 02:58
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YOU CAN'T POSSIBLY HELP ME, LITTLE GIRL. I NEED TO TALK TO SOMEONE WHO'S FINISHED GROWING UP.
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More from memory lane.Cythereal posted:A student has started leaving Chick tracts around the library. This is going to be a fun departmental meeting. Cythereal posted:One of the more surreal moments of my career so far: a sorority girl wearing cat ears and a tail serving delicious hot Thai food to everyone still working at the library tonight. The sorority is apparently doing this for every office on campus for employees still here late at night. Cythereal posted:Students, I know it's 95 degrees out but please stop walking into the library shirtless. Cythereal posted:It is almost 3 AM and someone just came up to the front desk with a chihuahua they found wandering around on the third floor of the library. Cythereal posted:What on Earth would possess students to walk into the library, see pizza on the table behind the circulation desk in the office space, and nonchalantly walk in and try to make off with one of the boxes? Cythereal posted:There are many acceptable ways for students to get my attention when I am busy with something in the library. Whistling and shouting "Come here!" is not among them. Looking at you, elderly non-trad this morning.
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Nov 26, 2018 04:25
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Schweinhund posted:What is the strangest book in the library that you would judge someone the hardest for checking out? Without question, one of Anne Rice's (under a pseudonym) BDSM erotica retellings of a Disney fairy tale. The Amish romances were weird when I first started working in public libraries, but they're harmless. Written by and for lonely middle-aged women.
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Nov 28, 2018 22:04
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Halloween Jack posted:Those books are more extreme than 50 Shades, but mainly because they come across as having been written by someone who's never had sex or even watched porn. Oh I know, I read one once out of curiosity. It was ludicrously extreme in some respects, but hilariously tame in others. Rice seems to have no understanding of foreplay and even less idea of how penises work. I downright lost it and cracked up when I got to the pony barn part.
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Nov 28, 2018 22:15
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Mr. Prokosch posted:Joy. The subject librarians I knew were horrible book hoarders and would fight tooth and nail to keep a shelf of 100 year old encyclopedias that may have never been touched. By checking out that book, you are validating their instincts to preserve all books, no matter how unwanted, within this sacred space. This. Anyone with 'librarian' in their job title, in my experience, is either an endearingly awkward wannabe hip young person in love with the latest gadgets and technology and wants the library to have a maker-space and a 3D printer, or is a decrepit lich preserved with vinegar who regards anything not written with a typewriter to be fundamentally suspect and of no lasting value. Or they're a completely reasonable and friendly person the public never sees because they're in the back all the time trying to save the library from the previous two types and regard their punishment assignment to the back as salvation from a public they cannot hide their contempt of. I aspire to be that third sort.
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Nov 28, 2018 22:40
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Anne Rice herself is actually astonishingly vanilla so that would probably make sense. She said some time in an interview that she never had sex with anybody other than her husband. I think they even waited until marriage and never bothered to get up to any crazy shenanigans. After he died I guess she had no interest at all in getting remarried. You'd expect somebody that wrote that sort of thing to have first hand experience in the craziest sex imaginable but according to her interviews she just, like, doesn't do that sort of thing. This doesn't surprise me, no one with operational knowledge of a penis was involved in writing those books. JacquelineDempsey posted:Did you guys carry that series of romance novels that were --- swear I'm not making this up --- about Vikings that got time travelled to the present day, and met up with a bunch of Navy SEALS? And all these rough-and-tumble Viking ladies, with their bosoms heaving out of their bodices, seduce the SEALS? Nope, never heard of that but at the same time no disclaimer needed, I believed you right away. quote:The one book I entertained withdrawing illicitly for "reasons" was by Joyce Meyer. I'd never heard of the lady, and I was shelf-reading the 200s and bumped into her "Pack Up Your Gloomies" book, right after 9/11 when, as a former NYer, I was chock-a block full of said gloomies. Fun cartoony cover, looked like some Chicken Soup For the Soul poo poo, maybe that would perk me up. I opened it it up right to the chapter where she goes on and on about what a wonderful Christian she was for not completely abandoning her own son for coming out as gay. He was still an abomination in the eyes of God, of course, but what a fine Christian she was for not disowning him! There's a thriving subgenre of Christian post-apocalyptic books where the apocalypse in question is literally God's judgment on the world and in the aftermath the United States is reborn as a proper Christian theocracy and everyone's been humbled and grown closer to God for the experience build a lily-white rural utopia. Then among this subgenre there are a number that are explicitly romances, almost invariably about people who were proud and materialistic and sinful before the apocalypse but were inspired by the apocalypse to come closer to God and become better people.
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Nov 29, 2018 06:01
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bad posts ahead!!! posted:is there a way to be a librarian who doesn't do a lot of talking to other people? like sorting, stocking, etc? or do librarians generally share duties? Get into cataloging and you won't have to talk to people. Otherwise, you are going to talk to people a lot - either at the circulation desk, doing reference interviews, teaching classes, etc.
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Dec 2, 2018 02:30
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I commiserated this evening with a friend of mine I made at the previous library I worked at, a public library system. She was brand new to working in libraries from working customer service at a grocery store, and if she can survive without her soul getting crushed by the godawful management at that county library system that fired me last year, she'll probably do well. Tonight, when closing, a patron pulled a knife on her and threatened to kill her if she didn't leave him alone. Turned out he was drunk and homeless and the police had to come in, but getting a knife pulled on you seems to be a rite of passage for librarians these days. It's happened to me twice to date.
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Dec 3, 2018 06:16
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Nihilistic Magpie posted:That's scary, but you're right. Violence against library staff seems pretty common. I hear about it more and more from my friends still in the public library system. Yeah, my family was horrified when I off-handedly mentioned the knife thing at Christmas one year. One was while I was at an academic library, a known problem student to us whom I was pretty sure was autistic or otherwise mentally ill - he was extremely rigid in his schedule, and you could set your watch by him doing the exact same thing every day at the exact same time. There came a day when the library had to close early because of some big event or other, and when I swept through the library reminding people we were closing in five minutes, this guy freaked the hell out and pulled a knife on me. The other time was less remarkable, just a homeless guy on a really bad trip who apparently thought I was a giant spider when I was going out to retrieve the outdoor book drop during one of my public library stints. At the same university as the first knife incident, though, I once caught a student with a katana in the library - a legit edged katana. He was a drama student and a member of the anime club. He never caused any trouble, he was just a bit weird and once we realized his katana wasn't just a stage prop we had to remind him that bringing swords into the library wasn't allowed. But it was at the same public library that I was fired from last year and my friend still works at that another coworker and friend was on the phone when a guy called in threatening to shoot up the library. Our branch manager was extremely confrontation adverse, and had to be ganged up on by the entire circulation staff to even make an official record of the incident. Myself and another staff member were able to confirm that we knew who this guy was - he used something to block our caller ID when he called, but we knew the voice and how he only called to ask detailed technical questions about guns and gun maintenance, and would always start rambling about how America needs a revolution and how everyone who works for the government should be strung up as traitors. It was during this time that someone genuinely was shooting at county government buildings with a .22 rifle from out of a car, which had been going on for a couple of weeks at that point.
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Dec 3, 2018 16:03
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So, funny bit from when I was volunteering with my county's public library while attending library school. As part of a supervised work-study thing with the university for course credit, I was doing some original cataloging work for the library under the supervision of their cataloger. A good forty years ago, the library staff at the county public library had started doing annual scrapbooks of stuff going on at the library, including lots of newspaper clippings. Duly assembled, about twenty of these annual scrapbooks had been moved into a back cabinet in the then-new central library building and forgotten about, for 'a project for the cataloger in their spare time.' It ended up getting handed off to me. One year's collection, in the early 1980s, included a set of photos of a pet show hosted in the library. One of the biggest pictures was the winner of the Other category drinking from a water fountain still there and in use in the library to this day. It was a horse.
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Dec 5, 2018 02:57
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Today I got to educate a new fellow part-time worker at the library on a unique aspect of working in the South: when interacting with elderly female patrons, especially those who are black and/or have a palpable Southern accent, don't take it personally when they routinely call you 'sweetie,' 'sugar,' or 'honey' like it's a form of punctuation. It's just a little old Southern lady thing.
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Dec 8, 2018 05:58
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 14:40 |
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I've never seen one here in Florida.
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Dec 12, 2018 06:13
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