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Anonymous  writes:

My boss at a former job was a very devout religious man who had previously worked for a university run by his church, which had a strict code of conduct for students that was assiduously enforced. When he came to a secular institution in Las Vegas, a city not generally known for high morals (in case you hadn't heard), we discussed setting up a fenced-in outdoor reading area where the students could take non-circulating materials outside to picnic tables and enjoy the sunshine. When I pointed out that they would simply toss them over the fence to their friends, he was shocked and flabbergasted to think that anyone would do such a thing. I believe I may have said out loud, "You're not in Kansas anymore! They don't call this Sin City for nothing!" He is a very lovely person and I hated to see his faith in humanity even somewhat tarnished.

Brian  writes:

My job as a researcher with a firm was eliminated as part of a reduction in force for my group. I was given a rather generous period of paid job search time, but as I was axed my boss' boss also handed me a big envelope of stuff that included a copy of Job Hunting for Dummies. Message received: "You no longer have a job. Oh, and you're stupid, too." (The others who were riffed also got the book. Good thing we were able to laugh about it.)

Anonymous  writes:

My boss gave me an assignment a day before my one week vacation. I was to look up some genealogical information for a man that lived out of state and e-mail it to him or snail-mail it as soon as possible. I found some wonderful pictures of a house that he wanted to visit. I completed my work, but I ran into a problem and my boss wasn't there to give me her opinion. I didn't have access to a scanner at the library, therefore I couldn't email the pictures to him. I left my boss a note explaining that I thought the pictures should be sent snail mail to the man, but I wanted her authorization before I mailed anything. I left all the pictures and info with the note, thinking that if she did decide to mail it someone would do it while I was on vacation. Apparently, she never thought of this.  I came back from my vacation a week later with the information in my mailbox with a note attached. It read: "Please mail this." Apparently, I'm the only employee at the library who knows how to address an envelope. That information sat in my mailbox for a week because everyone else was too lazy to take 5 minutes to send it off.

Anonymous  writes:

When I started at a school library, there was a large, locked, glass-fronted cupboard full of books opposite the circulation desk. I asked my library assistant why those books were locked in there. I was told that my predecessor had come up with this idea, as "these were popular books, and everyone wanted to borrow them." Really.  I kid you not!

My second day on the job, I told the assistant to unlock the books and shelve them with the rest of the collection. Interestingly, the books are still being borrowed...

Anonymous writes:

During a budget presentation to the city council, I once had a councilman ask why I felt we needed to increase the book budget, after all I'd already purchased several hundred titles this year and had nearly 10,000 already on the shelves. One of the few times in my life that I couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't get me fired. 

T.B. in Georgia, USA, writes:

My first job in a library was in a rather, um, "rural" town in Georgia. ... The staff was okay to work with, but intelligence was not a commodity among these people. One woman in particular had a stock answer for any computer-related question that came to the desk: "Aw, I don' know nuthin' 'bout computers." She'd almost say it with pride, much like your typical moron who can't read an instruction manual or on-screen instructions and say, "I don't even know how to work my VCR."

But I digress.

My favorite anecdote from my (thankfully) short stay at what may as well have been the Mayberry Public LiBary is this one: Although I was a college graduate, I had just started out in the library field, so the position I held was also held by two high school seniors, both female. No, these were not cute southern belles with a demure charm; think more of a character from Fox's "King of the Hill."  I tried being friends with them, but sometimes their lack of "smarts" would annoy me too much, and I think they considered themselves somehow above me because I was "too weird." Behold my weirdness: When business was slow, it was perfectly alright to sit at the circ desk and read a book, magazine, newspaper, etc. My weirdness often led me to the books. One of the "Betty Louise"s would often use such time to talk on the phone or sit there saying "I'm bored" over and over or announce what time it was, that is, "It's only 4:30! I'm bored!" One afternoon, I was reading, and she actually asked me, "Why are you readin'?" I think she thought she was picking on me, but I really was just stunned.

A couple of weeks later, when I had landed a new job at a university library in the city, I was very grateful to be getting out of the sticks. On my last day working with her, "Betty Louise" again interrupted her announcements of what time it was to try to pick on me again. "Quit reading!" she said with a smile. "Quit reading! Why are you reading?"

"Because I can," I said.

Anonymous writes:

This incident happened at my previous place of employment, a public library in another Virginia city.

There was a campaign to get the public more interested in using the library as a resource for information as well as being a source for recreational reading, etc. We were all given buttons to wear while on duty that proclaimed, "Get it at the library!" We all dutifully pinned them on every morning and went about our daily duties. However, it wasn't long before some female members of the staff declared that they were no longer going to wear the buttons because they were tired of the amused looks and barely concealed grins of some of the patrons. All of these staff members were visibly pregnant and they felt that the buttons made them targets for unwanted comments, laughs, etc. When the director noticed that they were no longer wearing the buttons, he demanded to know why. When it was explained, he just could not accept their reasons and demanded that they continue to wear the buttons. Needless to say, he didn't win that one. The buttons remained in the desk drawers of not only those pregnant employees, but others that refused to wear them in support of their colleagues!

K.W. in Australia writes:

I used to work in a public library that was experiencing an attack of Outsourcing -- the company AIDS of the nineties. Being part of the local government, when the government IT staff was outsourced to a bunch of cheap monkeys in suits, the library IT hardware support got outsourced too. Interestingly, we still retained all of the in-house IT people that we started with. This meant that for any problems with the library software or actual content that trots about on the network we had to ring up our own guys, and any hardware problems or non-library specific software such as Windoze NT we had to call the crazy monkeys in the suits. Neither of the two groups would admit to having any control over our Internet connection, which we had a lot of trouble with. It was generally easier to wait and see if it fixed itself than to call anyone. In the end the monkeys admitted that it was a problem of theirs, which would be fixed after they installed new cables. (They were doing all the government IT hardware, and we were way down on the priority list.)

After this success story, it was decided to streamline the workforce, give lots of us upgrades, and employ a whole lot of juniors to put the books away. This was a lovely idea, and might have worked if there was any money. Even after reducing staffing levels by paying some people large amounts of money to leave ("Packages"), which was necessary for the library to be able to afford the staff upgrades, there just wasn't quite enough to pay for a good outsourced shelving contract (i.e., we pay them to hire cheap labour). And so ... behold! It came to pass that each high school student was paid per book they put away, and they had a daily quota of books to do, no more and no less. They could leave when they finished. We found books in all sorts of places...

The current thing is that they're getting a new branch built, and based on the success of the previous outsourcing the gov't has decreed that the new branch will be outsourced and yet also remain a part of the rest of the integrated library service. I'm watching to see how this might pan out. It's not my problem anymore; I've outsourced myself. 

D.M. in Wales writes:

Prompted by a tale from a US medical library setup on the Web site, I recalled an amusing tale related to me by a security system engineer as he was fitting a new system for us.

He had previously been installing a system in a nearby medical library which was available to doctors, nurses, etc., 24 hours a day, but only staffed 8 hours a day. As a consequence illicit removal of materials was a major problem, and would remain so despite the presence of the security system. The librarian asked whether the system could be modified so that if it alarmed when there were no library staff present the door handle would become live. The engineer pointed out that this could kill someone.

The reply? ... "So what!"

K.S. in New Jersey, USA, writes:

During the winter months of early 2000, a local newspaper ran a series of articles exploring the issues of providing Internet access in the public library. Pornography being a topic of concern opened the door for an amusing tidbit. Apparently, a nearby county library had placed all of their Internet accessible computer terminals in the basement of the building, away from public traffic. The librarians, were shocked and dismayed when they discovered teenagers (in their nicely secluded environment) surfing porn sites and downloading pictures. The decision was quickly made to move the computers upstairs to a more public area. Duh.

A director in Illinois, USA, writes:

How do you suppose one goes about changing the toner in the public copier at the Muskingum County Library System, in Zanesville, Ohio? It's harder than it might appear...

Let's say, for instance, that you are on the reference desk of this wonderful institution, when you notice that the toner light is on. The first thing that you do, is to call the Manager for Maintenance and Support Services. She, then, calls the Head of Building Maintenance, who pages a Maintenance Tech on the loudspeaker. The Maintenance Tech comes to the reference desk, takes the old toner out of the copy machine, and puts it in a plastic sandwich bag, which must be signed and dated. Then, and only then, the Maintenance Tech can open the unlocked cabinet behind the reference desk, take out a bottle of toner, and put it in the machine.

I'm not making this up, though my information may be out of date. I left the place back in 1993.

Anyway, the predicable result of this was that it might take a week to get the damn toner changed. The copier might literally run out and quit, and then stay down for a couple of days, while the various Managers and Heads played phone tag with one another.

Oddly enough, the Manager for Maintenance and Support Services was constantly bitching at meetings about how no one would follow her policies and procedures...

T.L. of Illinois, USA, writes:

This happened when I worked at Benedictine University in Lisle...

One day, our connection for our OPAC's went down (they used a special connection outside of our LAN). So, my boss, the head of Access Services, decides she might be able to fix it. So, she gets down on her hands and knees, crawls under the computer desk and starts wiggling the cable that connects us to the OPAC system. This wasn't the bad part.

She proceed to to check the LAN connection, which wasn't a problem since they were two separate systems. The kicker was when she then checked the power cables! It was fairly obvious that this was not the problem, because the computer was on and running!

Needless to say, I don't work there anymore ...

J.G. of Ontario, Canada, writes:

It was my first year working in an elementary school library and as part of the "Freedom To Read Week", I wanted to draw attention to the fact that many well known and popular works of fiction had been censored.

I started out my announcement something like:

What do the following books have in common:

Little Red Riding Hood
Huckleberry Finn
Little House on the Prairie series
etc.

I went on to list about ten books. I then said that these were items that were in our library and that each one of them had been censored at one time or another, blah, blah, blah.

After running it by my principal (it was my first year, after all), I was told that I could not do the announcement as it would cause a controversy, drawing attention to the fact that we hold censored material in our collection.

So in fact, I myself was censored!!

Anonymous writes:

A local newspaper picked up the story that the Main library on campus was one of the top places in the U.S. for students and other folks to stop by for um ... sex in a public place. The public information librarian was later quoted as saying, "I don't think this keeps people away from visiting the Library."

Anonymous writes:

Our administration has begun enforcing a policy they're referring to as "100% customer satisfaction." What they mean by this is that the staff has to enforce all of the library's rules and policies--unless the patron complains. In that event, we're supposed to do anything to make him/her happy.

So, we strictly enforce overdue fines for materials, unless the patron complains, in which case the fines are deleted from his/her record. Reference books may under no circumstances be taken from the building -- unless the patron complains, in which case they're checked out to him/her. Photocopies are $0.15 apiece -- unless the patron complains, in which case we use the pass key to make his/her photocopies for free.

You get the idea. And yes, certain members of the population have caught on to this and are now happily walking all over us.

JF from Wisconsin, USA, writes:

I work for a medical library outreach grant project, where I provide library services for a lot of small hospitals, clinics, etc. in a rural area. One of the services I provide is online cataloging of member collections.

Most of our member sites don't have professional librarians, but one is lucky enough to have one, in addition to a nice collection. The librarian, however, is very isolated and aged, and is not very much in touch with her users or her collection. When I asked her to match her shelflist to her collection prior to putting her catalog online, she agreed to do this, then called a month later in tears to say that she could not locate the books to match some of her cards.

"When was the last time you matched cards and books?" I asked. "Only about four years ago," she replied. "Okay...how many hours a week are you in the library?" "12." "Is the library locked the rest of the time?" "Yes." "Can anyone get a key?" "Oh, the whole staff can use their key cards to get in," she explained. "But I don't understand what has happened to all those books!"

She's a good-hearted soul to be so trusting of the hospital staff...! When I explained to her that there was obviously some theft going on, she rejected this idea out-of-hand. "No one here would do that." We haven't talked about it since. Denial is a powerful thing.