The Aviary

Just had a 10-minute phone conversation with a library patron who is (understandably) saddened and upset about some of the recent changes to our website - she was a big fan and heavy user of a lesser-used feature that has gone away with our move to a new system. And that sucks! I have a lot of sympathy for her distress - I hate when stuff I love about a website goes away with no useful replacement.

However. This is about her 10th phone call on the subject, and she keeps insisting that no one has offered to help her with the new system, no one has answered any of her questions, no one is willing to listen to her concerns. At this point, I think everyone at our branch and members of the operating council and someone from the Foundation has talked to this lady. It's just that none of are giving her the answer that she wants, because we're not going to revert the website back to the old system. It sucks, and I'm sorry, but it's not going to happen.

She's cutting the library out of her will, apparently.

After my phone call, I was talking about it to my manager (since I had promised to - once again - pass along the patron's complaints) and my manager mentioned that this patron is a retired librarian from another system. Of course she is. I love my coworkers and I think we're great people, but I have learned in my 18 years working here that anyone who walks up to the desk and says, "I used to work in a library" is invariably going to be the worst patron imaginable. They act as though they're uniquely virtuous ("I never have overdue books!"), they can't accept that procedures might have changed over the years since they retired or be different in a different library system, and they're always convinced they know best. (They also frequently want to reshelve their own books, which I don't understand at all.)

Like, I'm sorry this lady is sad about our new website and I sympathize with many of her complaints but if she became an ebook-only patron I wouldn't shed a tear about it.

We're having one of our 3rd Graders To the Library tours today, part of which involves groups of 8 years olds getting a short tour of the library's backroom. These are the things that happen on these tours every time:

- At least one kid asks about the ladder that leads to the HVAC system maintenance hatch in the ceiling, and then asks if they can climb it

- All the kids are fascinated by how the bookdrops work, especially if we have a volunteer outside to put a book through on cue

- Someone always asks where we sleep

- Most of the kids are amazed by the existence of our breakroom kitchenette

It is always extremely charming.

Starting the day strong with a patron complaint over the phone that came in the very second we opened. He wanted to yell about our new website - specifically, the fact that the mobile website doesn't have a big obvious search bar with the word "Search" in front of it. Instead, it collapses that into a big icon of a magnifying glass. You click on the icon and the search bar appears.

I told him where to find the magnifying glass and explained that it collapses into the icon on the mobile site in order to save room on the screen. He then proceeded to loudly curse at the website designers for using icons because "some of us are over 35 and don't know what they mean." I apologized for his trouble and carefully did not explain that most of our staff and patrons are also over 35 and yet are able to figure out that our new site uses some fairly standard computer/internet iconography that's been used for search functions since the 80s. I also did not ask him if he ever uses any other website with a search function because it probably uses a nearly identical icon.

Change is hard - I get it. I also hate and fear change. It's valid to not like the new website layout. But I would be very ashamed of myself if that dislike led me to loudly curse at someone about it, especially if that person had no decision-making power concerning the changes. And especially if the reason for my anger proved me to be as unobservant as this.

Just had a lady bring her small granddaughter up to the desk and make her apologize for sticking her tongue out at me, a thing that a) I did not see her do and b) I absolutely do not care about*. So I smiled at the kid and say, "Oh, that's okay - no worries." And the grandmother frowned a little and said, "Oh yes there are - I'm very strict about that sort of thing."

Which is fine, I guess - I mean, I don't really approve, but she's not my kid - but if you're going to involve other people in scolding your kids, then you have to accept that they may have opinions about the kids 'infraction' that may differ from your own. If you think the kid has wronged me in some way and should apologize, surely I get to choose how I respond to their apology. If my response isn't part of your script, that's hardly my fault.

Also, just in general, please don't do this, especially not for silly minor things - don't recruit me to be the bad guy just because I'm adult at the library desk. We used to get parents who would bring their clearly terribly guilty children up to the desk to apologize for 25 cent late fees** or accidentally ripped pages, and clearly wanted me to be a Stern Authority Figure at their children. I'm never going to do that, both because I don't believe that's helpful in most situations and because I definitely don't want these kids to think of the library as a place of guilt and shame. And then the parents would get irritated because I wasn't playing my role correctly in this little drama they envisioned.

I don't have kids because I don't want to be a parent. If you force me to act like a parent towards your kids, I'm not going to do it the way you want.




*At the most basic level, I approve of kids acting in small funny harmlessly disrespectful ways towards adults. If I had seen the kid stick her tongue out, I probably would have done it right back. Because it's silly and fun and doesn't hurt anybody.

**If a small child owes a late fee, it is almost never their fault. The kid can't drive or otherwise get to the library on their own. We don't have late fees anymore and this is one of the many reasons I'm glad about it.

We have a library patron who is bound and determined to give our branch a gift subscription to Vanity Fair. This is a very nice thing to want to do! The trouble is that this patron emailed us several times to ask how to donate a gift subscription, was told the procedure involved, and then emailed us again because they didn't want to do it that way. (There's a process and this person just wants to buy a subscription and have it sent to us, which is not the way we do things.)

Various supervisors, managers, and people involved in magazine purchasing have talked to this patron, with no result. They just keep emailing, insisting that they want to give us this magazine but only in the way they want to do it. Finally, we received a notice in the mail telling us that a gift subscription had been bought for us. The first issue arrived in the mail today.

The thing is, the library has a subscription to Vanity Fair, purchased through our magazine department. We've had it for years. We've told the patron this in every communication we've had with them but they insist that they want to buy a second one and clearly, they will not be dissuaded.

So now we're just going to get a second issue of Vanity Fair every month until the subscription lapses, I guess. And that second issue is going to go straight into the community center magazine exchange because, and I cannot stress this enough, we already have a subscription.

As part of my every day opening-the-library routine, I get whatever newspapers have been delivered to us, remove them from their plastic bags, and put them on the newspaper rack. This morning, one of the newspapers had a half-eaten brownie rolled up in the middle of it.

1) While perhaps obvious in retrospect, it had not previously occurred to me that an actual human person was involved in rolling the newspapers and stuffing the bags. I assumed it was done by machine.

2) I don't know what kind of omen this is for the week, but it does not feel auspicious.

Things:

- The spring choir session has started! I usually enjoy the spring session more, because there's more variety in the music we sing (it doesn't all have to be Christmas-related or -adjacent). This session, most of music looks like it's going to be pretty good, which is nice.

- My library is switching to the web-based version of its library software starting in February, so we're all practicing with it now. The switch isn't really going to be that difficult but none of the keyboard shortcuts I know are going to work any more and I resent having to move the mouse more. I resent almost any time I have to use a mouse rather than the keyboard, really.

- I've started doing a thing where, instead of getting up in the morning and dinking around on the internet for an hour before breakfast, I'm getting up in the morning and reading a book instead. I like it, though it does mean selecting some of my reading specifically for qualities like "readable when I am not quite awake yet". More difficult books are for later in the day.

- It's not a morning book, because it's an audiobook, but I'm currently listening to the second volume of Legend of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong and it's great. You can tell that the novel was originally serialized because there are occasional slightly awkward recaps of the story so far, but the serial nature gives the story one of its greatest strengths which is that there Always Something Interesting Happening. Whether that something is a long kung fu demonstration, a tense political scene in which Genghis Khan's generals are challenged to fight a leopard, or the dramatic reveal of somebody's relative that they've thought was dead for years, it is Interesting and it is Always Happening. I have some slight quibbles with the translation (why are you literally translating people's names?) and the audiobook reader (who consistently mispronounces the word "gallant") but in general I really enjoyed the first volume and the second seems like it's also going to be amazing.

This is very petty:

I have a patron who comes into the library solely to pick up holds. She never brings her card and doesn't bother to identify herself in any way when she comes to the desk unless I prompt her. I definitely know her name by now, but because she always acts irritated that I have asked her to do the bare minimum of her part of this transaction, I am never going to admit that. I'm going to ask for her card and then her name and birthdate every damn time she comes in, until she starts offering them herself.

She won't - this method is not actually any more effective than passive-aggressively saying "Excuse me" after someone bumps into you - but it gives me a small measure of satisfaction.

So, having social anxiety generally sucks, but it does occasionally lead to advantageous habits. For example, if I need to talk to a stranger, I have almost certainly decided what I'm going to say and rehearsed it a couple of times before I approach them, because I want my interactions to go as smoothly and quickly as possible. Which means that I avoid stuff like the library patron who just came up to the desk.

What she said: "I'll put this - " (the dvd she was holding) "in there," (gesturing at the bookdrop), "just, I was wondering, seasons 3 and 4," (waving the dvd case so I can't see), "I think it might be here - could you check?"

What she meant and could have said, had she taken a minute: "Hi, I've got some dvds on hold - could you check and see if they've arrived? My name is [insert name here]*."

This is the fourth or fifth interaction I've had today that consisted of people quickly saying a bunch of garbled nonsense and me playing a guessing game to figure out what they want, when if they would just take a breath and organize their thoughts for a second, the conversation would be much easier for all of us.




*She could also have handed me her library card, but that is a rant for another time.

Today, it is one of my coworkers' birthday. She hadn't told any of us, but my manager apparently found out somehow (how? I don't know), and then told another coworkers. Who then bought pastries and wrote "Happy Birthday, [Coworker]!" on the box and told everyone else. Birthday!Coworker came in after everyone else and got greeted by a bunch of people excitedly saying "Happy Birthday!" at her - she keeps saying, "I usually try not to let people know it's my birthday," and everyone else keeps ignoring it.

That's fucked up, right? I mean, it's not just me who thinks that's fucked up, is it? Birthday!Coworker is being very gracious and doesn't seem upset, fortunately, but the whole situation is weird. Also, the pastries are more than we've ever done for a birthday in this branch before.

This is why I always take my birthday off.

From time to time, a patron will tell us that they returned a book that never got checked in and we have to look for it. Often, this involves sending an email to all the branches in case it somehow got returned to a different branch or something, and then every branch responds.

This means that, for the past few days, I have received a series of emails titled "His Unexpected Amish Twins" as each branch chimes in in turn to report that they haven't found the book.

Somehow, that is the funniest goddamn book title I've ever seen. It gets funnier with each new email.

Things:

- The darning loom I ordered arrived last night, so I immediately used it to mend the sock that I've been meaning to darn for about a month. The loom works really well! It makes the process of darning much easier, and the patches look much neater - I'm very pleased with it. Alas, I don't know how much longer these socks are going to hold up in general. They're knit from the very first handspun yarn I ever made which was...not great - there are a lot of thin patches that don't stand up well to wear, so it's not really suitable for socks. But I love them anyway and now I have at least extended their life a little.

- Really, I just need to be better about reinforcing all my socks when I knit them. I always develop holes in the same place - under the ball of the foot - so it's not like the need for reinforcement isn't predictable. Sock patterns always assume you want to reinforce the heels, but I rarely if ever get holes there.

- I also mended my favorite red cardigan, again. I love this sweater, but either it is surprisingly fragile or I am extremely hard on it. In the past two years, I have a) added leather patches to the elbows, because both of them developed holes, b) darned it in several miscellaneous places, and c) darned the underside of the left sleeve between the elbow and wrist six separate times. It sprung a new hole in that same area recently, so I decided to just say "fuck it" and patch the thing instead. So now it has a nice new knitted patch under all that darning and hopefully won't develop any new problems for a while.

- I have to write my yearly self-appraisal today and I hate it and it's dumb but it has to be done so I've decided to give myself a prize for completing this anxiety-producing task on time. I'm not sure what the prize is going to be yet. Probably some sort of fancy food item I normally wouldn't buy.

- I've been kinda mildly depressed for past couple weeks, which sucks, but I'm coping. Mostly, I'm coping by obsessively thinking about/playing my current solo D&D game. Solo rpgs usually help my mood a lot - that kind of creative play is restful for me, and they make me think about stuff that isn't awful or exhausting. It's good.