Miss Information is annoyed by the young people
The next day, Miss Information is again in the teen area. Instead of teens, however she is faced with more old people and the brothers.
The brothers drive Miss Information insane. There are 3 of them and because she is terrible at judging these things, she's going to say they range in age from 5 to 11.
The 11 year old tends to settle in with the X-Box. The middle one sits around and looks bored. The little guy always wants to use the Wii and he does--completely unsuccessfully. They are frequently joined by their father--he seems pleasant but never says anything.
At this point Miss Information should mention that she isn't doesn't understand much about the library's gaming systems. She has had a variety of handheld gaming devices, she likes PC adventure games. She has occasionally played first-person shooters. However, she is completely unequipped to deal with a 5-year-old's Wii issues.
She sets all the systems up and heads back to the desk. After 5 minutes the little brother shows up.
"Sorry. Can I change games? It doesn't work."
"Hm. Ok. It worked for the last guy, though. Maybe you haven't done something, like pressed the right button?"
Miss Information returns to the gaming room and changes games. Does it work? She has no idea. She returns to the desk for 5 minutes of peace.
"Sorry. It's not working."
Miss Information is sorry, too. She accompanies the kid back into the room. She makes some vague suggestions about pressing buttons. She reloads the disc because, why the hell not?
After much fiddling, the bored brother comes out of his coma, grabs the controller and presses the button that makes things happen.
Miss Information wants to kill them all. She gets that the little guy is high maintenance and kind of annoying but surely the older kids could help him out. Miss Information has a bad knee right now and all this walking back and forth, crawling on the floor to change games/fix things/fiddle with wires has set her recovery back months.
If only actual teens would occasionally come in, Miss Information would be happier. Either that or she'd be annoyed with them, too. Yeah, probably that second thing.
Miss Information is annoyed by old people
It's weird because Miss Information is one of the old people. She keeps herself youthful by being a bad influence on her nieces--letting them watch The Walking Dead and forcing them to listen to hip hop in the car.
"Oh, Kanye," one of the nieces recently sighed. "What are you mad about now?"
Also, moisturizing is important.
In any case, Miss Information generally likes the youth and that's good because tonight she's in the teen area. It's unfortunate that the Teen section has many things that attract adults to the department. Things like chairs and power outlets are like catnip to the olds and most of the time they outnumber the actual youth who are less impressed by furniture.
On this evening Miss Information plays host to about a dozen teens playing some annoying game on the library's Wii. Also in the department are some feisty old people.
"There's too much noise!" one women complains.
Miss Information replies that this is the library's place for teens--a place where the library provides gaming consoles. Of course there's noise. She refrains from rolling her eyes.
"I came here because I wanted a quiet place to relax," she replies.
Miss Information points out that there are many quiet places to relax in the rest of the library--7 floors in fact--that an adult might find less noisy.
"But I'm charging my phone!" the woman says. "You tell them to be quiet!"
Miss Information repeats the words "this is the teen area" until the woman gets tired and goes away.
A little while later a couple of youth from the nearby shelter do a freestyle rap as they're leaving and yes, Miss Information should have shushed them because even in the teen area, this sort of thing is frowned upon. On the other hand they weren't bad and included Miss Information's nice smile in their rhyme, so she let it slide.
After they'd left another of the tiresome old people came to the desk.
"I think those people were up to something. You should check the security cameras. Mark my words they were doing something."
Well, yeah. They were doing all sorts of things. They were converting oxygen to carbon dioxide, they were hanging around, they were interacting with each other....
"They were swearing! Check the security cameras! They were using the f-word."
Oh. Right. That. Miss Information is pretty sure the security camera wouldn't catch that unless the fellas wrote the word down on a piece of paper and held it up directly to the camera.
She repeats that line about rules being relaxed in the teen area and reminds the man of the adult parts of the library--that is: basically everywhere except where he is. He's actually a good sport about it. He goes back to his seat mentioning that he doesn't like hearing the "f-word" and thinks no one should be allowed to use it in the library.
Miss Information promises she'll pass it on to the head of youth services but since he's been known to use that particular word himself, she doubts that it will get anywhere.
