Industrial action

I found out today that the main union is striking for two days over pay. I'm not in the union, I'm happy about the pay situation, so I won't be striking. On a more surprising note, most of the union members at the library where I work are planning on coming in too.

I work directly with out union representative, who's... let's just say annoyed would be understating.

People with diminished mental capacity love the library

Today we had a couple of guys come in who we named "The Chuckle Brothers" due to their inane laughter at the smallest things. Of course, they wanted computer access, and I was the only person on the desk. Their English was quite broken, but it became clear that one was a library member, and the other wasn't, but wanted to join.

The one who was a member had lost his card, but a search on the system revealed he wasn't a member anyway. He then revealed he had a card from another county, but thought it gave him universal access! Anyway, I logged him on as a visitor, and off he went.

Meanwhile, chuckle brother #2 had filled in a joining form. Upon entering his details - lo and behold - he was already a member, so I gave him his card number. He'd also managed to forget his four digit PIN (the one where we ask all members to come up with a PIN they'll find really easy to remember). I suppose when someone can't even remember that they already joined the library, something as niggling as a PIN is easily forgotten.

Anyway, we have a simple policy at our library: If you have your card, but forget your PIN, we can remind you of it. If you don't have your card, we can give you your card number. Under no circumstances can we hand out both (for obvious reasons). This was lost on chuckle brother #2, who continued to argue the point as well as someone who is hard-of-thinking can do. Eventually he decided to share a PC with his partner-in-stupidity.

They were also pretty loud, and had to be shushed continually. It's the first time I've seen them, and hopefully it will be the last. Why do I get the feeling I'm being overly optimistic?

Quizzical

I run a quiz at my local library. There are normally a decent selection of bizarro answers, but this week there was one that particularly stood out. A tiebreak question asked how many episodes of Eastenders there have been (correct answer: 4,810, though they didn't have to get it correct, just get closer than all other teams). The team that got the point guessed 4,200, but one team, in their wisdom, plumped for eight - yes eight.

Maybe they though there was only one episode every two years. The scary thing was that this was from one of the more proficient teams.

I wish I could enter my quiz. I'd win it every time.

Has it really been a year?

As you can see, the idea of blogging my Library experiences didn't really take off. It's not that I wasn't eager to blog, but my starting the blog happened to coincide with a particularly turbulent period in my personal life, so much so that stuff like this really took a back seat to more important things. Another concern was the potential for me to get into serious levels of trouble for posting some of the stuff that went on.

So what's changed my mind, I hear you ask. Well having subscribed to a few other librarians blogs it's become pretty clear that as long as I'm not too specific, and I change names to protect the (not so) innocent, there shouldn't really be too much of an issue.

In the interests of full disclosure, I'm not a "proper" librarian. Over the past year I've come to realize that this is a very big deal for some people. The way I see it, I work in a Library, I do the exact same job as qualified librarians, and I'm on the same pay grade. What would you call me?

No tales from the stacks in this post, and probably not for a couple of weeks, as I head off to America for my holidays. Hopefully my next entry will be in this calendar year!