January 21, 2017

 Today wasn't quite the quiet day I had hoped for. This morning I had to write an incident report and my coworker had to write one. Mine was related to an incident in the technology center when a patron was singing to himself, the patron next to him asked him to stop, and the singer replied as he stormed out of the library: “Next time don't be so fucking rude. That's like me asking you to stop being you.” A great response but not something that should be shouted in the library. Afterward the patron who was yelled at went and talked to one of the ladies in circulation because she was shaken up and said the person working in the tech center wasn't doing his job. She wanted to talk to me (because I was in charge of the building) but I had stepped away from the desk for a minute and by the time I got downstairs she had gone to lunch but said she would be back. She never came back. I went and spoke with the person working in the tech center and he said he had followed the man after he shouted to make sure he actually left and he asked the woman if she was alright. She said she was (before going to complain about him to the lady in circulation). He also said she had been a little blunt when asking the other patron to stop singing. She didn't deserve the reaction she got but she also wasn't entirely innocent.

My coworker had to write an incident report about a patron in the reading room who was talking on his cell phone and then became a tad belligerent when someone asked him to stop. He is one of our regular patrons and generally a very quiet person, usually just falling asleep, but today he must have been a little more drunk than usual. My coworker spoke with him about it and said he would be asked to leave if there were anymore disturbances. Not too much later he did have to go talk to the patron again because he was falling asleep. Technically a separate offense so he got to spend the rest of the day in the library. All this happened during my lunch break so I got to field a few phone calls while eating my Cheez-Its.

Things calmed down this afternoon, thankfully. I would say it took a positive turn when a small boy came and gave me a flower. His mom was there with his other young siblings, giving them flowers to give to the other patrons while telling them to have a nice day. Simple acts of kindness. Our belligerent morning patrons could have used a flower and a kind word.

Today I finished the personalized reading list I started yesterday. I also noticed that the librarian who is currently on vacation had signed up for a personalized reading list that is due on Monday but had never marked that it was completed. I texted her to see if she had finished it before she left, and she hadn't, so I tracked down the original request and spent a decent amount of time creating a list. It was for a teen and when I later showed it to the teen librarian she said I did a pretty good job, so that's pretty cool. Hopefully the patron likes it.

I also made some changes to the personalized reading list notebook. I made a sheet to go on the outside of it where we could mark down how many lists are pending and, more importantly, the due dates for the current outstanding requests. The idea being that we will hopefully not encounter another instance of finding out a list has been sitting in the notebook, unclaimed, for nearly two weeks, and it is due in two days. I originally put the sheet in a plastic sleeve and taped it to the front of the notebook but then realized the notebook with the old lists had the plastic sleeve cover thing going on, so I swapped out notebooks. It looked a lot better and I figured it would last longer. I also printed out a label to slide into the spine so people would know the old list notebook was now the new list notebook. I think the front sheet can be improved, so the current one is just a rough draft, but it is a start.

And we'll say that was pretty much my day at work. I also helped patrons find books and another patron use the computers. And I spent the last little bit of work winding down a little bit and talking to my coworker about a bunch of random things. It had been a long day.

There was a teen event tonight after the library closed and for the last thirty minutes before we closed I had to smell the pizza they had ordered for the event. So my dinner plans changed and I stopped by Little Caesar's on my way home. The pizza had obviously been sitting there for a little while but it was still delicious.

I spent the rest of my night watching YouTube videos and making a grocery list. Now I'm watching season two of The Librarians. I also played a tiny bit of Crashlands and I am going to jump back into it as soon as I finish this so I can record my audio journal and go to bed. My sister and I are going to the grocery store tomorrow at ten o'clock, which means I can sleep in a little bit. It will also hopefully be my first of many trips to the grocery store because I will start to cook for myself more often. Fingers crossed.