Hiatus

Apologies for the long hiatus. Perhaps I'll come back soon with some tales of woe and griping from my library...

Patron Privacy for the Young Ones

The Young Ones in my title aren't Mike, Vyvyan, Neil and Rik from the British sitcom (as much as I love that show), but the young patrons I deal with in my library. Today I decided to ditch the unclaimed reading records from our summer reading program. I held onto them until school was in session for a couple weeks because I knew a few kids would come in looking for them, to be able to tell their teachers just what they read over the summer.

Discarding the records was an involved process because I can't simply throw them out. Each record has the child's name, address, phone number, age, school and grade on the top. I can only imagine some sicko coming across them in the garbage and targeting these kids with the help of all their info spelled out. No, I needed to shred them. Of course, these records are not on regular weight paper but a heavy stock. While we have a new super-duper shredder that can even handle credit cards and cds, I didn't want to be the one to break the darn thing with too many reading records in one day. So I took the time to rip the personal info section off the top of every one and they wait in the back to be shredded. (I got a few shredded and the shredder got cranky, so I'll leave the rest until Monday.)

It's the kind of move that parent's won't thank me for simply because they don't know I handled the disposal this way. They probably didn't give the disposal of records a second thought. But I'll sleep easy at night knowing that I didn't leave any of my young patrons open to exploitation by carelessly throwing away records with all their info in one place. While it might not have been likely that someone would find the records, you just never know. And patron privacy is foremost in this librarian's mind.

Scenes from the Life of a Children's Librarian #1

Driving down the highway, singing along to Raffi's "Down by the Bay" to learn it for story time. Then as I slow down for a traffic light, turning the music down as I'm a grown woman in the car by myself listening to Raffi.

One of My Least Favorite Things

Is when you tell tweens to keep it down and they either a) just ignore you or b) have smart ass responses. It makes me feel so impotent. I dread disciplining them because I fear feeling useless after.

Some days I kinda miss old school libraries - where your ass got tossed out if you talked above a whisper. I just laugh when people say to me, "Oh you work in a library. It must be so peaceful." Har har har. Not in youth services, baby.

What a Day

With every passing day I learn something new about serving the public at a library - after all I've been working full-time as a librarian for less than a year. Today I discovered that, yes indeed it is the stupid parents who let their kids wait until a week before school starts to do their summer reading.

It was priceless when this idiot woman comes to me and asks for the two books required for 6th grade. I let her know that we keep the summer reading lists at the front desk if she needs to see the list. She tells me that she's already looked at the list but still doesn't know what two books are required. Right. So I have to get up, get the list and look at it - there's one book that's required across the board, and then they're required to pick two additional books from a list. What needs to be done is spelled out explicitly - not once but TWICE on the reading list. I explain it to her in the simplest terms I can think of, inwardly shaking my head at how stupid this woman is. Of course her son wants the shortest books as he has so little time to read three. Not my fault buddy.

Then there's the kid going into sixth grade who was getting books off the fifth grade list and then trying to tell his sister that she needs to read the third grade books since she's finished third grade. Unbelievable. The whole summer reading thing is the same every year - has this moron been reading the wrong books? And was his mother the person who taught him this? She just stood idly by as he tried to give his sister the wrong info. Even after I pointed out his folly he took the two fifth grade books that I had found for him earlier. Guess he didn't believe me. Well he's in for a rude awakening as he starts sixth grade.

Today seemed to be the day for every stupid parent to bring in their stupid, ugly, loud children to the library. All of these people came from shallow gene pools -and quite frankly most of them should be mercifully drowned in said gene pool. Another mother, a semi-regular with a pug-ugly child (looks kinda like a young Christina Onassis beat with a massive ugly stick) had to have "double-click" explained to her three times to get one of the kid's games to open. (I've seen this woman use the internet from afar. I wonder what she manages to get done when she does use it.) Soon, she was on our second children's computer herself, fully immersed in Dora the Explorer and telling her child to, "Come look at this!" She made her kid wait while she finished playing.

Nuts. It's been just a nuts day. I'm so glad to be home.

Things I Sometimes Wish I Could Say At Work

"I'm sorry you're bothering me, too"

"Hi, can you keep quiet as there's a program going on IN CASE YOU DIDN'T NOTICE ya freakin' ugly brat!"

"Can you keep your ugly-lookin' brat quiet during the program please? You really don't want her to grow up as rude as you do you? Oh and by the way your other daughter has her hands in her diaper under the table over there. Can you please wash her hands before she touches any of my books?"

"We don't allow cell phones or stupid, rude people in here. Will you please take it out into the foyer, permanently?!"

"I'm going to shove that cell phone up your ass if it rings one more time."

"No wonder your kid can't read if you only let him take out one book at a time."

"Are you always this stupid?"

"Do I look like the computer technician?"

"I'm a librarian! Bow down to my incredible informational skills, peon!"

I Survived!

I have now survived my very first summer reading program! Thank god that's over. It went well and I have some ideas for refinements next year. While the young adult program was a lot of work I had more fun with it than the children's program. (Yes, I run two.)

I have a couple of weeks to finish planning my fall programs. Mostly I'm done with planning for the rest of the year and just have to work out details, such as books to read at story time, crafts to do at each craft program.

Now I deserve a good night's sleep.