It’s that time of year again, folks! The weather is cooling to a lovely 91 degrees, the leaves are showing no signs whatsoever of changing color, and no cute little fuzzy woodland critters are preparing to hibernate the winter away (although a few snakes might be coming out of their summer aestivation– that’s the seasonal opposite of hibernation for all of you who fell asleep in life sciences). And with the approach of autumn elsewhere in the world brings residents of the Coachella Valley…
This year, your favorite local librarian will be shedding her griping, whining, pessimistic attitude in favor of dressing up not as a retro, 1950s-style librarian, but as a retro, 1950s-style zombie librarian, because it’s Halloween! Duh! Six of the chosen staff of the Palm Desert Library (or… really, those smart enough to skip out on a few hours of time otherwise spent answering phones at the front desk in favor of learning book-cart drills every day) will be suiting up in their zombie gear to march in the parade. Carts will spin! Skirts will blow in the breeze like the ominous sails of a ghost-pirate ship! I’ll probably pass out from heat exhaustion! And best of all, you (yes! you!) can while away the afternoon by standing curbside somewhere on El Paseo to watch me do it! That’s right! You get to see me in action! What better way is there to spend a Sunday afternoon? You don’t even have to get up all that early, since the parade doesn’t kick off until 1:00 PM. So, come one, come all! I cordially invite you to watch me sink a little deeper into the magical realm of the insanity that comes from going librarial.
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As promised, the video footage of the 2007 Riverside County Library System’s All-Staff Day Competition is up and running! While there are other teams that competed, this video is the only one I’ve managed to get my hands on so far, but at the same time, this is the only one that matters. Your humble author can be seen on the far left, with the flowered mumu, silver scarf, and oddly square-shaped buttocks. Watch! Laugh! Appreciate the fact that you’re not a librarian! (By the way, if the video seems a bit choppy, no, it wasn’t tampered with in any way, there just seem to have been a few technical errors at the time that the routine was recorded. Bear with it, you don’t miss much when it does decide to skip)
Best of all, we’ll be in Palm Desert’s annual Golf Cart Parade where a large chunk of our staff will be marching for miles with book carts in tow! (Details on that spectacle are still yet to come, but if you live in the Coachella Valley, mark your calender for October 28th)
Fun Fact: At the start of that video, after the bit about the grant, you can very faintly hear me telling my famous “Pirate Joke” as we frantically tried to stall for more time. To those of you who have never heard me tell my pirate joke (some would say “you’re missing out,” others would say “consider yourself lucky”)…
Did you hear about that pirate movie? It was rated AAAAAARGH!
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Although I’ve grown accustomed to the “smell” of the library, and the “taste” of the library water, the overall “feeling” in the library should be more personal. Maybe a day where the library staff takes us out to dinner. Vote Republican. Wash your socks.
– anonymous comment from the suggestion board
While there is never a dull moment working at the library, all that action can still get to be pretty monotonous. Check in some books, answer the phone. Check out some books, answer the phone. Get blamed by a patron because their books are late… answer the phone. It’s like I said before: sorting thousands of letters all day long is what made certain workers of the USPS go postal. Sorting books all day threatens to make librarians go librarial. We’ve learned to break up this daily monotony with weird little games that we play in order to pass the time.
We have a lot of games that we play with the phone. Our phone rings a lot, and since we don’t yet have a designated phone answerer, we’ve come up with various ways to shake up the chore. Our first game that I’ll discuss today sticks someone with the task of answering a ringing phone. Either all of my co-workers (myself included) are very anti-social, or else we simply despise answering the phone. One way or the other, any time the phone starts ringing, we miraculously go deaf. This ailment lasts as long as a phone is ringing. Someone eventually cracks and has to grab the ringing phone, but after a while the same person cracks for eight hours, and that’s enough to crack a person up!
In order to avoid lashing out against innocent callers from having a bad case of “secretarial burnout” we play a game called “not it.” Take a moment to remember back to when you were a kid playing tag. Sometimes, at the start of the game, everyone would yell “not it!” in order to pin the last person to shout with the task of being the first one “it.” We do that for the phones. It rings, and chances are, before the first ring is even complete, a chorus of “not it” will ring out across the front desk. The last person to say “not it” is stuck taking the phone call. If you ever call us, and the person who answers is still audibly chuckling, chances are, they’re “it.”
The library is a great resource center with invaluable information at the public’s disposal. It’s a great example of well-spent tax dollars. Although, the staff could be replaced by some educated chimpanzees to cut the budget and spend more money on books! When you hire the chimps, strongly consider keeping a zoologist in staff. Just as a precautionary, a caged enclosure might suit the chimps well. Lastly a tranquilizer gun in a “break in case of emergency” glass might also reduce staff temperament. Just an idea.
– anonymous comment from the suggestion board
One fun fact about working at my library is that there are no “slow” days. I have discovered, after being assigned to other branches to help with grand openings, that the busiest days at other locations are still not as bad as our “slow” days. Slow here means that there are only one or two people waiting for you to help them. “Busy” doesn’t even begin to describe our worst days.
Usually, we’re pretty bad in the winter, when we’ve got to deal not only with our local crowd, but with “snowbirds” (the stuffy rich people who can afford two homes and thus only live here six months out of the year when the weather is nice… cheaters…), and the god-awful tourists. Summer time is like a breath of fresh air, bringing in a slow but steady stream of locals who are friendly, laid back, and too damn hot to care that they’ve got to pay a late fee. BUT, there is one exception to the rule of summer, and that exception comes every Wednesday from June through August when we have to deal with the dreaded Summer Reading Program.
The summer reading program is an event that takes all year to plan because of its immense popularity. Every year comes with its own theme (this year it’s “Get a clue at your library,” a detective theme), and to match that theme are book bags, t-shirts (which the staff must wear every Wednesday or face the wrath of the library gods), activity sheets, and other assorted crap.
It’s quite elaborate. Kids read as many books as they can stomach, and trade in their activity sheets for tickets that can (in turn) be redeemed for prizes. Not little wimpy prizes, either. I mean, yeah, we’ve got pencils and key chains and junk like that for the kids who don’t try as hard but still deserve something for their efforts, but for the ones who are hardcore… well, let’s put it this way: the grand prize this year is a Nintendo Wii. You still can’t buy them in the stores. Needless to say, with prizes like that, it’s no wonder the library gets one day each week where we’re actually cool.
Despite my recent reviews, I conclude that the library’s scent is rather dull. I recommend a jungle theme with a real life lion as your mascot. Maybe an “expedition to the library” rather than a book would add excitement to the smell.
Vote Democrat.
–Anonymous quote from off the suggestion board.
There are certain quirks about ‘patrons’ that just crack me up. I think what makes it so amusing is that these quirks aren’t limited to one or two people, but droves of them. The vast majority, in fact. Sometimes I have to wonder if there is a secret meeting hall where they all rehearse, and that maybe this whole thing is really just a highly elaborate hoax.
As we learned in my first installment of Going Librarial, people seem to enjoy standing around in the lobby and watching me work before we’re officially open. This bugs the hell out of me. You may be wondering why we don’t just lock our doors prior to business hours. The reason we don’t is because we also serve as a college library, which likes to keep separate hours. Therefore, we smile at the public beginning at 8 a.m., but will not let them check anything out from the public side until after 10.
But - for a few glorious weeks out of the year (namely, winter, spring, and summer break - autumn is not worthy) the college is on holiday and we get to shut out the public until 10 a.m. These mornings are simply glorious. We listen to music. Good, fun music, not the classical elevator kind - I’m talking about old movie soundtracks from the 80’s. So while we check our inter-office email, we dance around like fools to The Cure, get wired off our morning coffee, and occasionally talk to one another vicariously through paper bag puppets. I suppose we do a little work, too, but if I told you about spending two hours discharging one book after another, you’d start going librarial in a matter of moments.
