• she/her

healthcare bureaucrat in philly, v adhd, orthodox jew, ect ect, im love my wife



shel
@shel

I'll teach a class for-credit called Miscellaneous Thing You'll Need to Know that covers things such as:

  • Cutting up really good scrap paper
  • Administering Narcan in bathrooms
  • Explaining a complicated principal of library science to a non-librarian coworker in under 15 seconds when they ask that you justify your decisions.
  • Deescalating conflict
  • Escalating conflicts
  • Labor organizing skills
  • Maintaining boundaries around what office supplies you'll let patrons use. Including: why rubber bands are a sacred, valuable, and non-renewable resource you must never give to a patron under any circumstance.
  • What to do when a patron recognizes you outside of work
  • Talking to the press without authorization from the administration in order to put pressure on the administration
  • How to affect municipal elections without violating laws against participation of librarians in municipal elections
  • The best self-defense weapons to keep at the reference desk and where to hide them
  • How to stop people from stealing your disinfectant wipes fucking constantly
  • Graphic design
  • Marketing
  • A guided meditation on finding contentment with your newfound status as a strange public community figure who is not allowed very much privacy and is inevitably easy to doxx.
  • How to work three jobs at once.
  • Let's learn how to be a library assistant even though that's not your job but you should know what they do.
  • Managing vicarious trauma
  • The best ways to use your status as a librarian to get people to do things for you for free
  • How to shut down the people who are weirdly amazed when they hear what you do for work so that they don't force you to just talk endlessly about work when you're not at work and trying to not think about work for one fucking second of your life
  • The best podcasts to help you fall asleep instead of thinking about work

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in reply to @shel's post:

It depends on your jurisdiction but typically you're not allowed to vocally support a candidate or work for a campaign. Obviously you can vote, but you can't say who you voted for.

Making my first chost on this entire danged web site to say that it's because if you're a public librarian, you technically work for the government even if there's some really arcane bullshit about how you don't COMPLETELY work for the government, but one of the ways it matters is that you are a public employee on government payroll in a nonpartisan position so you are held to restrictions, both explicitly coded in law and via soft power expectation, on what you say or endorse as a representative of public government that isn't actually running the organization.

Like, my job is part of the government, and I am allowed (tenuously) to grumble and shit-talk about vague, large swathes of the government (most especially explaining to patrons that State Department immigration procedures or welfare programs are fucked up bureaucratic hells by design), but I am extremely not allowed to endorse a local candidate because suddenly that looks like part of the local government is endorsing a local candidate but I didn't actually get my director's sign-off, which would never happen anyway because we're allergic to picking a side in partisan fights 99% of the time because the state legislature could, immediately or in a few years, decide to gut our funding because they're annoyed we stepped out of line and tried to put a thumb on their scales. Also something something "providing for the entire community" being held up as both noble goal while also being an excuse to just not look at all the edge cases of that too hard because that's scary.

jazz hands

So yeah in short public libraries are stuck in a View from Nowhere hell even if internally we have system-wide strong feelings or leanings about things, which the employees generally learn how to express in the manners which are acceptable via getting stuck in a profession best described as a soft power pear wiggler.

If you see a public library taking a loud and principled stand about a flashpoint topic in politics like a lot of us did after George Floyd's death, it's because the people inside the system are more pissed than you can really comprehend and the administration is either on their side or making that statement to prevent the staff from rioting. (Collection challenges aka book bans are their own kettle of fish I could write a few paragraphs on the internals of.)

This and also even non-public librarians theoretically have to abide by the ALA Code of Ethics which also forbids involvement in political campaigns during elections, though to a lesser extent.

In-depth topics include:

  • Explaining the fundamental roots of disruptive behaviors to your coworkers so they can learn some god damned empathy rather than assume anyone causing them personal frustration was sent by Satan himself and deserve a wretched fate (that's only some of them)
  • How to pick at your manager's facade and see if they're a hollow husk of a human following the policies to the letter, or if they too in fact are capable of realizing some stuff is Just Bullshit and will gleefully scheme with you the moment they realize they have a henchperson
  • What to do when (not if) you end up being the person in charge on a day you weren't supposed to be and you have to be the one to deal with cops
  • What to do when your local police have acquired some sort of grudge against your branch and slow-roll every single call you make, always showing up 45 minutes late even when you make it very clear someone is a clear and immanent danger to the physical safety of the public
  • What to do when the police are actually TOO INTERESTED in your branch
  • How to run a system that is largely electronic in modern implementations when the power goes out and the central administration refuses to let your branch close for Reasons
  • Dealing with reasonable requests from phone callers that give you the creeps in ways you can't pin down, and thus you're kinda obligated to help them and you don't know if it's just you, but like the vibes are wretched in ways you didn't know were possible until now

the esoteric and secret art of saying "damn thats crazy good luck tho" without using those exact words or annoying the patron, and having it actually make them wander off/let you scuttle away like a business casual crab to pretend to shelf read

To the last one - "Piano guy". Everyone who sounds like a woman on the phone has complained about him. We've set up unified way how to deal with Billy Joel. Sadly he's "Unlisted" on Caller ID, so we can't definitively figure out who he is.

Just want to say I am VERY vibing with this post.

We have a patron whom we've had to put hard limits on so she doesn't take up all our time. Two calls a day with three items per call. We have an Excel sheet in SharePoint for it now. She'll call other branches too, but that's their problem. She's seriously whole percentage points of our yearly circ.

WE HAVE A GUY LIKE THIS TOO

We call him "library guy" because his questions are always like "how many libraries are there in the country" and if you answer even one of his questions he very forcefully asks increasingly nonsensical questions like "and does every city and every state have one hundred libraries?" And gets irritated and agitated if you say no. He will call you nonstop over and over if you hang up on him. One time he called fifteen+ times in one day. And of course calls every library in the area now

He's fully banned tho the policy is you give him the number for a social worker, tell him he's not allowed to call the library, then hang up

Thankfully our lady is mostly harmless. Just mildly irritating and takes up a lot of time. I doubt she calls other systems if only for the fact that her sister probably won't drive her all around the county to pick up her dozens of books and CDs. Us and the neighboring two branches are taking the brunt off of the next county's and big city's systems. :P Though J said they can't take the calls anymore because stuff has to be said out loud that's inappropriate around kids. Thankfully she's fallen off asking for CDs by half remembered lyrics. That was always a pain. I'm sure it will swing back around though.

I need a workshop on identifying knicknames for patrons. :P Internally, I have Grumpy, (lady who uses the computers in the teen area,) hacky, ('Nam vet with a persistent cough,) Hair Hat, (you can probably guess,) etc. Then there's and Chuck, a name for a guy that always leaves at the last possible second, I learned from others. Turns out that's not his name.

We have some...interesting banned customers too. Some rude, some inappropriate, some thieves, some smelly. Nothing truly "wtf" off the top of my head though. Knocking on wood, no stabbings of staff like some of our branches in less good neighborhoods have had.

Sorry, this turned into a commiserating ramble. I guess Mastodon's good in that it keeps my concise. :P

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