Reasons why I should never be left in charge

I have never wanted to be President. In elementary school, as my classmates crafted letters to The-Big-Jellybean-Eater-Himself and drew their future selves cloaked in American flags and living in the White House, I was on a different path. I never aspired to be the man, the head honcho, the big cheese, supreme dictator, etc. Sure, I wanted a title, but one of much less importance, less responsibility. When I ran for position in student government or for club chairs I aimed my sights low. Even vice president was too lofty a position, why not treasurer? When was the last time someone looked to parent council representative to make an important decision?

For my graduate school courses I elected not to take any focusing in management because, who are we kidding, I do not belong there. It's not that I don't think I'm capable of doing the job, because I often find myself in the unenviable role of leader, it's just that I'm lazy and don't want to do it. I am the real life female equivalent to Billy Madison -- my ideal life is all about Snack Pack pudding and pummelling small children with dodgeballs while blasting the Ramones.

So you can imagine that I pee a little every time I'm told that I'm the "PIC" or "person in charge" of the building for the day. Every time I'm scheduled to work on a day or night that my branch manager and supervisor are not present, I make silent deals with any religious deity that will listen that during the time I'm in charge the building should not burn down, the internets should not stop working, nor should the homeless get antsy and start throwing books. Hell, I don't even want a kid to have a temper tantrum or see some Starbucks crazed mom bitch about paying late fees. I like living in cruise control, which is why all the things that can go wrong magically happen when I'm left to steer the library boat off course. Such as having a kid throw a rock through a window. Or having an angry and out of control adolescent beating up his tutor and screaming cuss words. Oh the countless joys of filling out legal forms hours after you stopped getting paid! They say you never forget your first incident report...

Should there every be a zombie invasion I will probably be the PIC that day too.
Aw, who am I kidding? I just wanted to show off my nifty zombie librarian Halloween costume...

Virtual Reference Question of the Week

As I have mentioned before, my library system also provides a virtual reference service that our branches take turns manning, which provides email and chat assistance. Unfortunately 95% of its users are using it incorrectly as they are either asking account questions (it says in bold that account and fee questions will not be answered in the service), or questions for services that we don't provide (such as emailing them pdf's of newspaper back editions). It looks like nobody takes time to read the virtual ref FAQ, which explains what the service is for -- ready reference questions, database assistance, readers' advisory, ebook help, etc.
That's why when we get questions in our virtual reference email I just want to smack someone:

Message Subject: Help!
Hello. I need to log into my own account at aol.

I responded, I'm not sure what you mean, could you clarify? and, of course, the email address bounced.

Gems from the children's department

With some more recent staff absenses, I've found myself staffing the children's department info desk often in the last couple weeks.

A little girl approached the desk and asked if we had any books on (*deep breath*) ghosts, mysteries, but not baby mysteries, scary stories that might be true, magic, but no Harry Potter, and stories that involve vampires, but only girl vampires. She held up two books of different widths and said, "If I'm in fifth grade, how long does the book need to be?"

While I was helping one woman and her son (who was old enough to do his own report) find books for his vague American history research paper, I was irritated that the woman's other son kept jumping up and going, "Hey lady! Hey lady!"

He was maybe 5-years-old, was wearing a plaid button-down shirt, and had what looked like sticky jam and toast crumbs making a ring around his mouth. He waved his arms at me like he was trying to land an airplane, so I finally turned to him and said, "I'll be with you in just a minute," kinda giving the mom the raised eyebrow for not stepping up and telling her kid to be quiet. Then when I was finished looking up some books, the woman left with her son and I realized that jam-boy was not her other kid at all, but some random, parentless child.

He grabbed a stuffed toy dog that was sitting on the counter. The children's department staff leave lost n' found items on the desk with the theory that the original owner will see them and claim their blankie, action figure, Barbie, etc. But really what it does is make other children wild for the toy that doesn't belong to them.
"Why is this here?" Jam-boy asked, holding the stuffed dog up in the air.
"We're hoping that its owners will find it," I replied.
It looked like Jam-boy was rolling this around in his head and really thinking about it. Then he said, "Uh, I think I am going to take this."
"Don't you know you're not supposed to take other people's toys?" This came from Girl-Vampire girl, who was using the computer nearest the desk.

Defeated, Jam-boy set the stuffed dog back on the desk, but still eyeballed it. "Hey lady!" he suddenly remembered what he was there for. "Lady, can you find me books on horses, but only teeny, tiny, baby horses?" He held his hands up to show he was only interested in miniature horses no bigger than 4 inches.
"What about books on ponies?" I asked.
He thought about it, "No, just baby horses. Also books on vacuum trucks!"
"What's a vacuum truck?" I was completely baffled.
"A vacuum truck is a really, really big truck!" he informed me.

We found books on baby horses, but sadly no vacuum trucks.

Things not to donate to the library (other than National Geographic)

At our branch we have an ongoing book sale so that we will take small donations from the public to try to raise money. It seems like "small" is a subjective term, where I believe it means a couple of items and may include a plastic grocery bag of books or box that can easily be carried by a normal person. To others, "small" means backing up to the library a medium sized moving truck that was rented for the purposes of donating your dead Aunt Trudy's entire collection of romance paperbacks from the past 40 years that could not be sold on eBay because they are falling apart, reek of Newports and cat pee, and because no one wanted them. And yes, they had the nerve to call ahead and ask if we took "small" donations.
Recently a man came to the library with a small shopping bag of items he wanted to donate to the library. He explained that the bag was filled old dvds that he had only watched once or twice and didn't care to own anymore now that he had Blu-ray. He asked if we were going to add them to the library collection.
Me: Possibly, sometimes we use good donated dvds to replace our scratched copies if needed. Occasionally someone will donate something we feel should be added to the library collection and in those cases we will put it in the catalog, but it doesn't happen very often.
The man just nodded, took his tax credit receipt, and left the bag on the desk.
The shopping bag contained about 20 dvds, containing boxed sets of seasons 1 & 2 of "Hogan's Heroes," a "Saturday Night Live" Best of Chris Farley dvd, and about five pornos -- including the very classy sounding The Erotic Witch Project. Yeah, those porn dvds can't be added to the collection, nor sold in the library book sale.

Other items the library would not like the public to donate:
1. Copies of the Bible or the Book of Mormon
2. Colored in coloring books or solved Sudoku puzzle books
3. Jewel's Pieces of You cd (I think everyone in the US was issued a copy)
4. Expired medication
5. Old textbooks (get over the fact that you paid $100 for it, nobody wants it)
6. 50 copies of your self-published memoir
7. Computer books from the 1980's (or even from 5 years ago)
8. A broken calculator you stepped on
9. Encyclopedia volumes or complete encyclopedia sets
10. (Say it with me!) National Geographic, National Geographic, National Geographic!

Say something!

A comment left on my last post mentioning how the reader wished my updates were more regular made me think about writing, what I like to write, and what's standing in my way.
I enjoy writing and have since childhood, writing stories to accompany my vast illustrations. I also started keeping a diary in second grade, though it was extremely dull. In high school I started writing in a journal, which was more interesting, but also terribly embarrassing to read in hindsight. Back in 2007, I started posting some of those high school journal entries in a now defunct blog called "Mad Super Cool." I stopped posting because I didn't know if anyone was reading it and I felt a little spread thin because I also had a (now very neglected) livejournal account that actually had followers, and just followed my regular life.
I started "shushie" because I didn't want to bore my friends and readers of my livejournal with library stories that seemed to be in danger of taking over my life. Around this time, I also started a side blog with my brother called, "What Mom Had For Dinner," which chronicled the odd restaurant ordering habits of my mother for the entertainment purposes of my other family members.
Since starting "shushie," I've changed jobs, which has put a bit of a damper on my posting, as I had much more off the desk time at my previous library, and have started casually (very casually) modeling -- again eating up more of my free time. In June I was very excited to be offered a writing gig on "closed stacks," another library journal I followed and respected, but now had to think of more topics to write about while my time to actually sit down and write them has been dwindling. I'm also reading horrible books in my free time and writing about them in the "Very Bad Book Blog." Plus after spending nearly 8 hours a day in front of a computer screen at work, I will admit that I'm less than excited to sit in front of my own computer when I get home -- especially if half of the time I figure I'm just talking to myself and maybe two or three other people.
So what does all this rambling mean? It means that I want and hope to write more frequently and I don't want to lose any readers, but it also means that sometimes you have to be patient with me. While it may seem like I just slap some of these entries together, I do actually try to put thought into them instead of just saying anything. So stay tuned (and don't be afraid to let me know you're reading)!

What I'm reading now

Since I think I probably unintentionally do too much complaining here, I thought I could lighten things up with periodic entries on what I'm currently reading. This will be different than the Very Bad Book Blog, because these will be "normal" books and I will try to impart some sort of literary knowledge so that you, the dear reader, will run out to your library to check out this book because I told you to. Or you will avoid it at all costs.

Currently, I'm reading The Year of Endless Sorrows by Adam Rapp. I picked it out because the book literally jumped off the shelf at me while I was trying to do some shifting, but also because the title seemed vaguely familiar and I remembered it came up as a possible match for me in NoveList. So, I'm about a third of the way through and enjoying it for the most part. The novel takes place in the 90's as a recent college grad, his brother, a friend, and a squatter take residence in the East Village. The chapters are linear, but almost like little micro-stories, which make it interesting, but also provide good stopping points, if your boss suddenly appears behind you and wants you to do some real work. The main character works a slave like position in a publishing company, but is writing his own sci-fi novel involving an injured knee and basketball. There have been several laugh out loud parts, probably more that are merely amusing, but my biggest problem is that Rapp seems to be addicted to using similies and metaphors, averaging one third sentence. It's a bit distracting, so we'll see how it goes.

What I won't be reading anymore is the effing librarian, one of my favorite library related blogs, as now it ceases to exist. Too many library blogs out there are stone cold serious and sound like they were written by boring weirdo catalogers (no offense to you personally, if you are a boring weirdo cataloger), or they are constant ragefests that get dull quickly and are depressing. The effing librarian was humorous, informative, nay might I dare say intellectual, and often chock full of made up shiz and crazy pictures. You know you loved it, but it's gone now.

Email Fail

This morning at work, as we are clearing the bins from the mountains of items returned during yesterday's holiday and preparing for the onslaught upon opening, everyone's computer goes "beep boop" indicating a new email.
I was in the middle of printing out the daily schedule and clicked on my inbox to see an email from one of our high up county officials with a subject like "Very Important! High Priority!" So I open it and am greeted to a message that says, "It is extremely important that you not discuss details of this morning's budget meeting with your staff nor reproduce any of the information in the handouts." That last part is in bold. Then it mentions something about the next meeting, yada, yada, yada and I hear my computer go "beep boop!" again.
New email: High county official is trying to unsend previous email.
Way to send out an email about top secret information to all county employees!

A second email fail occurred right before lunch where a patron violently waved me down instead of, oh you know, getting out of his seat and walking the 10 steps to talk to me like a human being. When I ask him what he needs help with he points at the screen, "This, can you make this disappear?" What he wants to make disappear is a name in his contact list in his email.
To verify I ask him, "You want to delete this person from your contact list?"
He nods, "Yeah, that person is me! I don't want anyone to know I am sending them emails."
Of course his email address was the very anonymous "firstname.lastname" format.