After moving into a new place, I arrived at the local library to find a sign posted on the front door.

Sign: “Any customers who refuse to correct unacceptable behaviour when told, on the grounds that ‘there’s no sign saying I can’t’, will be banned, trespassed, and treated like the misbehaving children they have chosen to act like.”

The number of tales these people must have…

I work at a public library front desk. A patron is reading the sign we have posted about how overdue books will eventually get sent to collections.

Patron: “Do you actually send overdue books to collections?”

Me: “We do.”

Patron: “Has it happened?”

Me: “More than you’d think.”

He went quiet for a second; it looked like he was doing some kind of mental math.

Patron: “Hypothetically, how far back do the records go?”

I just looked at him.

Me: “Sir, is there something you’d like to return?”

Patron: “Hypothetically, if someone had a book, say, six months? Would that go to collections?”

Me: “That would, yes.”

The patron’s eyes go wide, and he rushes out. He comes back an hour later with a book in a plastic bag. He doesn’t make eye contact. I don’t ask. We both just move on.

When a book is returned, the whole thing is dropped pretty quickly, so I am sure he had nothing to worry about, but it makes me wonder; if he knew he had the book and it took the sign on our front desk to scare him into finally returning it, we need to print that bad boy in big bold capital letters and put it all over the library!

I was at the library with my mother and, having picked out the books I wanted to check out, I went searching for her. I found her and a librarian standing together, looking confusedly at the section where they kept newly arrived fiction books. As soon as I was close enough, I grabbed a book from the series I knew my mother was actively reading and handed it to her.

Me: “Looking for this?”

Mom: “Yes! Thank you.”

Librarian: “Someone must have put it back in the wrong spot.”

Mom: “How’d you find it so fast?”

Me: “I just recognized the cover.”

Mom: “When did you see this book before?”

Me: “I didn’t, but all their covers have the same style of drawing, I figured it was the same series.”

The librarian gave a small snicker here.

Librarian: “So you’re saying you literally judged a book by its cover?”

Me: “I guess so?”

Librarian: “I think as a librarian, I’m obliged to tell you not to do that.”

Me: “If it works, it works.”

Patron: “Y’all need to call somebody. You have a big water leak out front of the building.”

Worried, I ask him to show me. He brings me outside and points.

Patron: “See! It’s spraying all over!”

Me: “Sir, that’s a fountain.”

We’re an older building with an old fountain built into the entrance.

I’m a librarian. I work in a library. We have a lot of cool stuff to look at, and we love to give people tours, but 99% of what we have is books. When someone comes in and has a great time, it really makes our day, but that doesn’t mean we don’t also get people who walk in and bark, “What is this? I don’t like it.”

We had one visitor a couple of weeks ago who looked around the library in awe and told me, “You know, this place could be so nice if it weren’t for all these books! No one cares about all this old stuff.”

Yes, he walked into a LIBRARY to tell me to get rid of the books. He called back later that day, disappointed that he didn’t have a direct line, with some more ideas about how to get rid of everything. 

He was also full of suggestions about other institutions he’d visited, and he just couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t get a reply from them when he wrote. It takes a certain kind of person to walk into someone else’s workplace and tell them how to do their job. A lot of people don’t realise, but you need a master’s degree to be a librarian, archivist, or curator. When this guy spoke to our intern and found out she’s currently in library school, he said, “Oh, you can go to school for that?” Yes, mate. Yes, you can.

I thought we’d seen the last of him, but to my horror, he came back the next week. This time, he asked about a very specific subject, and as it happened, we have a book about exactly that. I thought I finally had something that would make him happy. I brought him the book, and as he was leafing through it, he mused, “This kind of thing really doesn’t interest me.”

Some days you just can’t win.