Does anyone else have the problem with patrons where they walk up behind you (one of our desks makes an aisle with the ready reference and sometimes patrons "cut through") and scare the hell out of you asking for help? I've had two do it today.(Ok, the other was on the other desk, and that person just decided he could see the screen better from right next to me instead of waiting for me to turn it towards him.) It's annoying. I want to backhand them in the nose. Where in the world do these people learn their social skills?

What a strange patron day. I just told a girl three times that the periodical she wants probably isn't in this library if it has a BF call number. She stared blankly at me and said "but can I check if it's here?" Sure, it would be somewhere over there (wild waving of hands). Another blank stare. "It's alphabetical." Sigh...

Before that there was a woman who wanted a local newspaper on microfilm. I helped her find it and load the first one. Then I had the misfortune of getting to inform her that we'd switched to a new copicard system and that, while we could transfer the balance on her current card, she'd have to buy a new one for a dollar. (You get a dollar's worth of copies, but it's still an inconvenience. But hey, I didn't set up the system.) She immediately launched into a rant about how we always change things every time she comes in. (Obviously, we got the new cards six months ago!) I then closed the desk (to my relief). An hour later she knocked on the office door and said she needed help unloading a reel and the other patron needed help loading. Loading wasn't a problem. Unloading turned out to mean she'd run the reel all the way to the end and I had to rewind it by hand. The minute I came out of the office she said she was done and walked away, leaving me alone with the mess. Except that she had to come back to pick up one more print out--complaining all the while that all the copies were either too light or too dark. She wins my bitch patron of the day award.

Weirdo of the day goes to the guy who even said his girlfriend woried that his interest in cryptography means that he's on his way to being John Nash. I'd think a little more of his research if he had actually done some literature searches before assuming that he needed a FOIA request for a logarithm/algorithm (he said logarithm, but most of the journal articles had algorithm in the title) developed by someone at our local national laboratory. (Though a simple literature search also turned up that the work had probably been done long before he became a federal employee.) Should I be worried that well-educated middle-aged researchers think that if they can't find it immediately with Google they have to FOIA it?

Lately I've been worse than the patrons. All I want to do is play games online instead of doing work. I mean, I don't have a huge backlog, I just can't get excited enough about the handful of on-the-flies and the one newsletter I have to stamp and throw on a shelf in closed access. My other exciting options are to work on the subject guides (except that this may be a huge political fiasco if I step on the wrong people's toes--and all I want to do is get the 5+ year old handouts updated and the content added to already existing web pages [note: not added to them as pdfs], so I need to wait on this one) or updating the superduper reference "everything we need to know" notebook, but I'm afraid of screwing that up (getting rid of things too liberally or else not updating enough), so I'm not ready to throw myself at that, either. I have a book chapter that's now three months overdue, but I just can't quite get into that, either.

I've been good and put in a decent amount of hours shelf-reading at the science library so they can (maybe) reopen next week (they're behind because we had a snow day), but they're down to the horrifically overcrowded ranges, and I started to feel claustrophobic when I finished an aisle and couldn't find another one--every range was either done or filled with frantic library staffers putting things right. (Yes, today the reward was pizza.) I'd finally had enough when the woman normally in charge of the shelving got frustrated about the positioning of the wire bookend thingies (Do those have a name? They should.) and had to come tell us each, individually, the way she prefers to have them hooked onto the shelf.

On the plus side, one of my best friends brought me a big fat calzone for lunch. (So who needs library pizza?)

And it turns out that there's a whole phenomenon that describes my employment situation: underearner. It's basically a lack of ambition coupled with the belief that I have to take jobs that are "below my skill level." Basically, this explains why I'm using my library degree from one of the two schools vying for that number one slot to perpetuate my paraprofessional career. I'm not sure how it ties in with the job market (or that right now I make the difference between what I make now and what I'd make as a "professional" is less than it would cost me to move--and this way I have job security), but hey, it's another thing to be aware of.

The wackos seem to be drawn to me when I'm staffing the desk solo. Last night I had a patron who I think just wanted to plop down and bitch, which is fine and good--except that I really don't care. He was supposed to meet his instructor for help with an assignment at the student union; she didn't show (or he was just really late and she didn't wait--he wasn't sure). He wanted help from the campus tutors; I told him that they closed at 6 (it was 7ish at this point) but he could go upstairs and double-check. He was surprised they were gone and more surprised when I told him that the evening labs in the dorms were only for biology, chemistry, physics, and math. (His problem was with nutrition.) He started bitching about how computers had made life worse. (I'm the wrong person to for that rant.) The more he talked about the assignment, the more confused about it he seemed to be. (He mentioned that he has learning diabilities and is enrolled with Special Services, but that may or may not have to do with his need to blame everyone but himself for his problems doing his assignment.) I asked him to see the assignment: it spelled out that he had to go to a particular computer lab (he was mad because he couldn't do it on the library computers), open a program (there were detailed instructions, starting with the start menu), and make sure that he had a disk to save his work. (He was just sure that it had to be the disk that came with his book. I told him at least four times that he just needed a regular floppy disk. He didn't seem to grasp it, though, so finally I gave up.) And he kept bitching about how he'd wasted an hour of his time (Dude, I didn't ask you to sit down and bitch at me about your nutrition class.) and had to go to the drugstore and the grocery store before catching the shuttle. (Why not pick up the car first and then go run errands? I didn't even want to ask.) Finally he decided that he could go to Special Services tomorrow and ask them for help and talk to his instructor after class on Thursday.

Geez... I hope he didn't scare off any real patrons with reference questions during all of that.

Last night I was prey to my least favorite patron again. She was typing up her midterm and managed to reset the margins to beyond the edge of the sheet of paper. (There was no reason to do anything but leave them completely alone.) Then she needed help attaching it to an email for her instructor. (OK, lots of patrons need help with this. Apparently attachments aren't yet part of the collective technological literacy--once they all get office jobs, they'll figure it out.) And then she wanted printing. She printed out the first copy, but "forgot and closed the window" before she printed the second. She comes up to the desk and asks me to print it for her on my computer. I tell her that I'm just about to shut things down but she has it saved in her outbox and can print it next time she comes in. In what was either a glorious display of passive-agression or else her typical oblivion to the real world (I still can't tell), she says, "OK, but can you print it for me now while you still have it on?" I printed it, ignoring her while I shut down the rest of the desk. I just wasn't worth the argument. (Have I mentioned that I suck at saying no?)

This morning I was grumbling to myself about her and wondering how she will ever succeed in her management and/or educational leadership career, and I had an epiphany: she's not actually going to be any less competant, more out-of-touch, or harder to communicate with than any other typical managers or administrators... This didn't give me hope, though.