Miss Information

Miss Information is annoyed by a grandmother

Up until Friday, Miss Information was less than thrilled with librarianship. She missed her previous job a lot. As the reference desk clerk she got to meddle in everyone's business, picking up the slack, taking over librarian jobs if they were left unattended and criticizing everyone and everything. She was a complete asshole and it was wonderful.

Now she's a librarian and organizational politics prevent her from meddling, taking over other people's work and criticizing everything. She can still be an asshole but only with regard to her assigned collection areas. Only a limited amount of assholery is possible in the photography and French collections, so Miss Information has been pretty bored and depressed.

Friday afternoon, however, Miss Information got to do something more librariany. She was in charge of the branch and something actually happened! The Children's Department staff became concerned about a little girl who had been left unattended and needed the person in charge to make a decision. The child in question was a 7 year old whom we shall call May. May is a regular to the department and is usually accompanied by her grandmother. Today she had come with her grandmother and a friend and her mother. However, her grandmother was nowhere in sight, the other child had left and May was alone and getting hungry. She wanted to go home. The child had been in the library for about 3.5 hours at that point and no one was answering the phone at her house.

The library is not a day care. The correct procedure in an abandoned child situation is to call the police. Miss Information believed that there had probably been a misunderstanding about who was responsible for taking May home. So she decided not to call the police. It was a crappy decision. It basically made the poor, underpaid library clerks in the Juv Department responsible for the life and safety of this little kid. It isn't their job and Miss Information was wrong, wrong wrong. Good to know she hasn't lost all those asshole skills.

The story had a happy but annoying ending. Eventually Miss Information got the grandmother to answer the phone. Since they didn't share a common language the grandmother hung up on her. Next time she gave the phone to May and the child reported that her grandmother was coming soon. Miss Information was covering the reference desk when Grandma arrived but the staff members who spoke to her reported that she didn't take the situation seriously at all.

People think libraries are safe. These people are wrong. Bad stuff happens here all the time. There's a guy who masturbates while reading his e-mail for instance. May was adorable. Miss Information thought she would make a nice companion for her cat and a fine friend for the Duchess of Information. Grandma doesn't realize how lucky she was.

Fortunately, Miss Information is only at this branch for a couple more weeks. After that she's moving to a job which is less public and more electronic service. At least she won't be face to face with the masturbators anymore.

posted by Miss Information @ 2:08 PM