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.
2 Comments:
Why on earth would the library not simply set up some comfy chairs in the quiet sections? Surely there must be an outlet that could support a powerstrip and could have chairs near it for patrons to charge and relax in the quiet zones. That would stop the complaints and serve a clearly needed purpose. Could potentially even just take some chairs from the teen zone.
I am going to tell myself that anonymous is a smart-ass teen who happened upon your blog.
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