Theme of the Day: Lazy Idiots

For those of you who have never worked in public service - it always seems that the days have themes... you get one particular brand of idiot, and then another, and another, and another... until by the time you get off the reference desk your ready to stab someone in the eyeballs.

My first joyous encounter today came in the form of a phone call from Mr. TooLazyToUseThePhoneBookHimself. Who called, per the usual, to have the librarian (in this case, me) look up the phone number and mailing addresses of various publications. Other days, it's cities and governmental institutions. Now normally, this is all fine and good. We are happy giving librarians who generally don't mind looking up things for patrons. What sets Mr. TooLazyToUseThePhoneBookHimself apart from every one else is twofold. First - he does this weekly. Ranging from 2-10 requests for contact informations. Oftentimes, asking more than one librarian when he doesn't get his answer immediately. Second - and for me, this is the killer - he then usually shows up in the library himself, hops on the internet and looks up more. For the love of all things shiny and cuddly - JUST DO IT YOURSELF FROM THE START AND DON"T WASTE MY TIME!!!

Mr. Too: I'd like the contact information for "this" and "that".
Me: Sure, it'll be a moment, my computer is rather slow today. (They promise that we'll get more bandwidth, but as I also found out today, the director FIRED our tech person so the city could take over... like hell it's going to happen now....) Is "that-y" the correct publication?
Mr. Too: Well, was there anything under "that" in the right state?
Me: No, Only "that-y". (If your original search string had had a data result, I would have told you. I'm not evil and trying to keep you from the information....) Do you have a pen and paper? Ok. The phone number is....the address is....
Mr. Too: Did they list a 800 number?
Me: No, I'm sorry they did not.
Mr. Too: Are you sure? Can you look again?

ME, ready to kill. I know that in the new modern age of libraries and computers, patrons want to be in the drivers seat and tell you how to do your job, but the whole reason they asked us in the first place was because they couldn't do it themselves. Or, in Mr. TooLazyToUseThePhoneBookHimself's case... he's just too dam lazy and would rather waste the time of the librarians. NO WE DO NOT JUST SIT THERE AND READ ALL DAY, DAMMIT. And don't ask me to look again just because the answer does not suit your needs. It is what it is.

Happy moment of the time on desk today: Avoided questions from TeacherFoiledByPDFs.

And then... oh yes, it was quite a day today - the best bit of the day. The phone rings. All my restraint not to just scream at whoever is on the other end (it was a really busy day, despite my normal hatred of phones) when I noticed the caller ID was from a city phone number. Crap. Better play nice. I noticed that it flashed "(Three Letters I can't Remember) INTERN". Oh, this was gonna be fun.

The "Intern" wanted a "this" book. A book by an author, who we shall call, "InternsAuthor." As names can be very tricky to spell, I usually make a scribbly note, and ask for the title. Things are usually easier to find by the title. "There is no title"..... 0.0 QUE? I verified, there was no title. Fortunately for me, this was just a case of the usual "anything by this author" request. (Phew). We had nothing. I told him thus. He wondered if the neighboring city had it. I checked, and discovered the only place that any of "InternsAuthor"'s books could be found were in Universities and Colleges. I told the Intern this. He was rather perplexed. So he asked me to do a search string for a banal list of words that any person who knows anything about boolean searching would say, "that isn't going to work." It's like searching for "red blue green yellow" and entirely missing the point of finding the rainbow. Regardless, I did what I could modifying the search string to try to pull up something. I did. Again, only in universities. Obviously, what he was looking for is something so technically frightening that only professors who like to torture young minds would be interested in it. Now, it is my own fault for thinking I was dealing with anyone of some intelligence, when he pulled the "I work for the City" card on me. My response was "Yes, I noticed that when you first called from the Caller ID." Honestly, the sound of his phone receiver going cockeyed as he turned to look at his phone, was priceless. What planet is he from, I wonder? Tech Intern, who doesn't realize that in our large scale building there is Caller ID? And yet he wants some sort of massively technical jargon, and cannot understand why the PUBLIC library does not have it? And the suggestion of going to a University (there is one, in either direction, North or South, 30/15 mins away, not to mention 3 colleges in the area as well) is simply out of the question? Mind boggling. In all honesty, we could get the book from him from one of the Universities, it takes a couple weeks, but we could swing it. Unfortunately, he was so stunned by the fact we didn't just have copies of it laying around I never got a chance to explain this before he hung up.

So in summary: 1. Don't ask the librarian to do something you can do yourself. We have true idiots to deal with and wasting our time with you is annoying. 2. Don't tell the librarian how to do their job. They were tortured for years to earn their Masters just to be able to answer your questions, and your lack of faith in our abilities is disturbing. 3. WE DO NOT SIT AROUND AND READ ALL DAY. 4. Give the librarians a break. Even when we know, hands down that your question is impossible to answer, we'll try anyway. Just to humor you. 5. If you do not know the difference between a public and academic library, I suggest you go back to your technical jargon planet and figure it out.