With hat in hand, I come to you

[spikesgirl58]

I'm working on a story that will center around a librarian. I'd love some little personal, but not obviously embarrassing, stories that I could use for backfill. I know I have librarians on my f-list. Is there anything you'd be willing to share? You can either leave a message for me here or PM me for privacy, if you prefer.

Thanks in advance!

Comments

[threecee]

I'm not sure this is what you are looking for.

My least favorite question was the very common one of "I read a book when I was younger and want to read it again. I don't remember what it was called or who wrote it, but there were these people and things happened to them. I don't know if it was a true story or not. I do know the cover was red." I've never met any librarian who has actually found THE red book, but sometimes you can convince the patron that they might like a different book while you are trying to find the one they remember.

I did get some interesting questions: nutritional aspects of cannibalism, the effect of handedness on response to optical illusions, finding the date represented by a couple specific ancient Mayan glyphs.

I also had to remove 6-ft purple [invisible to me] spiders from the psychology aisle for a patron who was terrified of spiders. I finally got a parrot puppet from the Children's Room to eat the spiders. Then I learned that the patron was scared of birds too.

[spikesgirl58]

This is just what I'm looking for. I'm going to do a story of the library in the UNCLE building, designed to help stressed employees work off a little steam. I love the purple spiders!

[threecee]

The gentleman being bothered by the spiders was seeing them because he was off his meds, but I suppose the spiders might be attracted by being given certain drugs too.

[spikesgirl58]

Wow, that's just. Did you have trouble with folks wandering in from the streets to get warm or anything like that?

[threecee]

When I worked in a downtown business district library, all we had on some days were homeless people. The working folks came on their lunch hours, and a couple private schools brought groups in for projects once a month or so, but otherwise we were a day room for the shelters and a haven for the patients thrown onto the street by the closing of the State Mental Hospital in the city.

It was pretty depressing since all we could do was hand out information on shelters and soup kitchens to the ones who were capable of interacting with us. We'd occasionally call the police to take someone who was becoming unable to function to the hospital for a 72 hour psychiatric hold from which they would emerge very rational until they ran out of the medication again. The police were familiar with them and handled them as gently as possible, but it wasn't what they had signed on for either.

[spikesgirl58]

How sad. I suspect that was the case. It was how it was with ours, too.