The Five Most Difficult Library Patrons

Library patrons! Please do not misunderstand this list. Please do not go away from this thinking that your library staff doesn’t love you. We do! We are at your service and we do what we do (most of us, anyway) because we believe in the concept of shared knowledge, that information should be accessible to all, that media that sparks creativity is not a luxury but a necessity to make life worthwhile, indeed to make living in this crazy, mixed up world make sense.

But.

As in all relationships, sometimes you do things that annoy us. We understand. We’re not perfect either. But let me put you on alert: if you want your friendly neighbourhood library clerk to continue helping you out with a smile on her face, please steer away from doing any of the following…

1. Child in car. This is a parent, mom or dad, who rushes in and wants library staff to do something, whether it is checking him out at the desk instead of waiting in line to use the self check, waiving his fine, unlock his DVDs for him, anything like this but to just do it and do it faster, because he has left his child in the car. He doesn’t have time for your explanations. He doesn’t want to hear about how under normal circumstances he should be doing these things himself. He can’t discuss whether or not he brought back that express movie on time, he just knows he definitely did and he shouldn’t have that huge fine on his account. He wants library staff to cut him some slack because, aren’t we worried about his child he left in the car?? Here’s a tip: NEVER LEAVE YOUR YOUNG CHILD UNATTENDED IN A CAR!!! If you do so, you should go back and get her! She is your responsibility, not ours. As is unlocking your DVDs.

2. Picking up someone else’s holds. This happens all the time. If it’s happened to you, don’t worry, it’s happened to me too, before I started working at the library. If you are unfamiliar, this is what I’m talking about: Your husband places some holds on his account. He’s busy at work so he asks you if you can go in and pick them up for him. You do, only to discover that, unless he’s given you his card, you can’t get them.

If you are not too ticked off at this point, library staff will explain to you that this rule is for your own protection. We might even tell you about the woman who put a bunch of books on divorce on hold for herself and then her husband, who didn’t know what she was planning, came in and found out what she was up to by picking up her holds. And then she sued the library. And won.

The difficult patron, though, will not want to hear any of this. She will just be incredulous and then quickly fly into a murderous rage over staff having wasted her time and gas money by not allowing her to pick up her husband’s holds. She will want staff to call her husband, right now, and ask him, go on, ask him, if she has the authority to pick up his holds. (We don’t do that, by the way.)

Please, don’t kill the messenger! We are not out to make your life miserable! We generally try to avoid that. But being unable to pick up somebody else’s holds without his card is the library rule and it’s there for a reason. We would not be doing our job if we didn’t follow it.

3. Nobody told me. This person is usually a teenager. But not always. You’d be surprised. She comes stalking up to the desk with the air of being egregiously wronged. A seasoned staff member will be able to detect the general gist of the ensuing conversation before she’s even opened her mouth. And it is this: she just got a notice in the mail. The library has sent a collection agency after her. How dare they! Nobody told her she had to bring those Express DVDs and Wii games back on time! This is the first she’s heard about it. Why didn’t anyone tell her before now that she had these fines. And besides, she doesn’t even think she had those things. She doesn’t even own a Wii player. She’s never heard of that movie.

When you sign up for a library card, you are accepting responsibility for all the material on the card, for knowing when it is due and for bringing it back on time. We do everything we can to make it as easy as possible for you to remember when things are due. We offer to print you a receipt. Now you can even have your receipt emailed to you. You can check your account online. You can call us and we’ll check. You can come in whenever we are open and ask us all about it. But ultimately it is up to you. You’re a big girl. Time to learn responsibility!

4. That’s your job. This has actually only happened to me once. But I’m relatively new! This lady lamented the declining service of the library thanks to self check outs. The staff used to check her out and unlock her DVDs. And in some ways, I agree with her. I actually like checking people out, seeing what people are watching, chatting with people about what books are good, which ones they’d recommend, recommending some of my own. Less interaction with our patrons means less fun conversations. Sometimes this means we are only speaking to certain patrons when they have fines – and that’s no fun for anyone! But the idea behind it is that, by having self checkout, it frees up our time to help you do what we do best, things like finding material for you, recommending your next read, telling you how to start a book club or helping you start to use the e-reader you just got for Christmas. This is where we really shine! So we leave checking out to you. And besides, using self check is fun!

But when I told this lady this, in so many words, she insisted that no, unlocking DVDs should be MY job, not hers. That’s what I’m paid for: to unlock DVDs. Is it wrong that I was rather insulted at her insistence that I spent four years at university only to have a large part of my job description include sliding a bit of plastic along a magnet?

5. Johnny come lately. This patron comes in to pick up his twenty-five holds… at 8:59 p.m. He calmly walks over to the self check and begins to methodically unwrap each one. After he checks them out, if they are DVDs, he hands them to his three year old to unlock. When she has trouble he says to her, hm, it’s not working, maybe try it the other way around. If staff is so impertinent as to remind him that the library is now closed and he has to hurry along, he will look down his nose at the implication that he should be rushed by a city employee who, really, he pays for with his tax dollars.

Once the library is closed, staff is no longer paid. So if you are hanging around browsing the Express movies and checking out past that time, know that staff is now only there out of the goodness of our hearts. And we do have goodness in our hearts! But it runs thin at closing time. See 1 through 4, above.