I work in a library. The building we are housed in is over a hundred years old and hasn’t been renovated, and it was not planned with the vagaries of entitled twentieth-century parents or their badly-behaved kids in mind.

One of the scary things about the reference department is that patrons enter and leave through big glass doors that open out to the stairwell. If you are not paying attention, there is every chance that you will go down the stairs head over heels. It continues to amaze us that we haven’t been sued.

However, I am glad to say that, come the twenty-first century, the administration finally removed the big glass doors and put in heavy metal doors that aren’t easy to open, especially if you are a two-year-old. The new doors are ugly and look like every fire door you have ever seen in old prison movies, but it slows people down and they have to pause before continuing down the stairs.

A young mom who is working on her PhD — I cannot imagine in what, and I hope it wasn’t child care — comes in with a boy who is maybe six and a girl who is four. The two kids have been shrieking all the way up the stairs and they continue to hoot, holler, and carry on. They run from the reference room into our computer room. They run back and into the arts and fiction section on the other side of reference. They play hide and seek by crawling under tables and they play Superman by climbing on top of the tables and jumping off.  

At no time does the mom say or do anything to stop them. She has engaged the services of two librarians and is making them chase down books for her thesis. This leaves me to help other patrons and to chase down the kids.  

Our offices are tucked into a corner of the reference room. The kids have found their way in there and are going through drawers looking for crayons. I lead them out of there and find them paper and the “public” crayons we keep for children whose parents have never heard of bringing things to keep a child entertained.

This occupies them for ten minutes.

The reference director and I keep leading the kids back to their mom, who makes vague statements to them about behaving before ignoring them again.  

The kids play tag by running out onto the landing — it’s a hot day, so we have doors and windows open to circulate the air — narrowly escaping falling down the stairs and breaking their little necks. We shut the doors, but they just bomb right through them, slamming them open and letting them crash shut behind them. Mom makes more quiet vague threats.

Then, they find the piano. It’s a beautiful baby grand donated by a local family and it has just been tuned. The kids start pounding on it and screaming at the tops of their lungs. I collect both of them and return them to their mother.

She just looks at me and says, “I don’t understand. I am trying to write the thesis for my PhD. And I don’t know how I am supposed to do it if you gals won’t do your job and watch my kids.”

My supervisor and I both explain that our job is to help people find information and her job is to watch her kids. She seems stunned to know that she isn’t the only person using the library. I guess she thought all the other people were window dressing? 

She comes back a few times and tries to keep the kids under control, but it becomes clear that her heart isn’t in it. We are glad when she gets all the information she needs and never returns.

My husband and I are making a long drive to visit family and decide to stay overnight at a halfway point. We find a bed and breakfast online and make reservations. The place was clearly nice once but is in a general state of mild and dusty disrepair, and we have a couple of issues. My husband decides to bring this up at checkout.

Clerk: “And how was your stay?”

Husband: “We slept well, but breakfast wasn’t what we expected.”

Clerk: “The full continental breakfast in the lounge?”

Me: “There was a bowl of apples, a plastic bag of cornflakes, a Keurig coffeemaker, and a stack of room-temperature cartons of milk.”

Clerk: “Fruit and cereal and milk and coffee! A full and balanced breakfast!”

Husband: “Also, we have no hot water in our room.”

Clerk: “The sign mentioned that the water takes time to warm up.”

Me: “There was no sign anywhere in our room. We ran the shower for twenty minutes and it never got hot, or even warm.”

Clerk: “Well, this is an old building. You should really just learn to be patient.”

Me: “I would rather be able to take a hot shower than learn patience, ma’am.”

Clerk: “This is an old building! It’s too expensive to fix the water heater!”

Husband: “You have our permission to apply the cost of our stay to fixing the water heater.”

Clerk: “Other guests have found it charming!”

My husband left a polite but pointed online review, and we have not been back. Judging from some other online reviews, the water heater has yet to be fixed.

When our teams work in certain high-risk sites, each worker must wear a gas detector. Due to a number of failures and calibration occurring at the same time, one of our workers needs a detector, and we’re all out of spares. I check who’s on layoff and not needing a detector in the next weeks and start making phone calls. The first guy is a fresh hire and he confesses he left a detector in the shack at a site a hundred miles away.

The human resources coordinator blows a fuse when I tell her. “What? This is not admissible! I’ll write him up!”

“I’d really suggest you don’t, boss.”

“Why not? He signed when we gave him his personal—”

“He didn’t sign because he never got one. He was always meant for [low-risk] site, but a third man was needed at the refinery, so we gave him a random one and sent him with God. Moreover, he was supposed to get safety training within ninety days of being hired, and despite several occasions and several reminders, the term expired five months ago. Of course, you could still write him up, but there’s a chance it comes back to bite us in the back.”

So far, no letter.

I go to a big grocery store before work to buy some food for the day. They have these self-checkout registers and I almost always go there since it is a lot faster with my five items than to stand behind someone with a full cart.

One morning, all four self-checkouts are full and I am next in line. The guy at the nearest register has a six-pack of water, which you can only scan if you find the barcode on one of the bottles and type in six for the quantity or scan the bottle six times in a row. The guy doesn’t really know what to do so he tells the worker — who is there to help — that he’ll need help with the water.

Guy: “Good morning. I think I’ll need some help with the wat—”

The worker interrupts.

Worker: “Everything is in the computer.”

We just stare at the worker, as we do not really understand if she is hard of hearing or is just having a bad day. Around twenty seconds later, as the guy almost finishes scanning all his items:

Guy: “Erm… I would really need some help with the water.”

The worker stares at him and then, after ten seconds or so, she goes to help someone else at another register. Again, ten or twenty seconds pass and the guy only has the water left to scan, and he is looking at the worker, who is helping someone, so I step forward and try to help.

Me: “Don’t worry; it’s not that hard. You just need to scan one bottle and—”

I’m grabbing the scanner and trying to show him when the worker comes.

Worker: *Shouting at me* “Will you step back so I can help him?”

I step back and look at her, so surprised.

The guy even waits for me and wants to thank me for wanting to help him, but as he approaches me, I can only say.

Me: “I think that worker needs therapy.”

He just laughed and agreed and we went on with our day, though I seriously wanted to go back in the afternoon and complain about that worker, and I still regret that I didn’t do it.

I’m working the register like I do every day. It’s after lunch, so we’re slow. I start stocking and cleaning up. The manager is sitting at a table behind my register. A customer is ready for me to cash him out, but his drink doesn’t ring up — “item not found” — so I start typing in the product.

The man suggests a few ways to try to find it but to no avail. We can’t. I turn around to my manager and explain the situation. Still fixated on his laptop, he tells me to do what I’ve already done. I smile and say, “Yes, sir, I’ve already done that.”

“Did you look it up as the product?”

“Yes, name, type, flavor, and there’s nothing for it. So what should I do? This customer wants it.” I ask, rolling my eyes as he remains there on his laptop.

The customer proceeds, “Ma’am, never mind. Sorry to have caused trouble. Clearly neither of us is going to get help.”

“No, sir, here you go. I’ll charge you this price since it’s the same product. I apologize for the inconvenience,” I say as I smile, clearly annoyed. I proceed to finish what I started.

My boss goes to the register and looks it up — it isn’t there. He looks at me and says, “Well, why isn’t it in here?”, obviously irritated.

“Why’re you asking me? You’re the manager!”

Related:
Manager, Manage!