The library is a great resource center with invaluable information at the public’s disposal. It’s a great example of well-spent tax dollars. Although, the staff could be replaced by some educated chimpanzees to cut the budget and spend more money on books! When you hire the chimps, strongly consider keeping a zoologist in staff. Just as a precautionary, a caged enclosure might suit the chimps well. Lastly a tranquilizer gun in a “œbreak in case of emergency” glass might also reduce staff temperament. Just an idea.
– anonymous comment from the suggestion board
One fun fact about working at my library is that there are no “slow” days. I have discovered, after being assigned to other branches to help with grand openings, that the busiest days at other locations are still not as bad as our “slow” days. Slow here means that there are only one or two people waiting for you to help them. “Busy” doesn’t even begin to describe our worst days.
Usually, we’re pretty bad in the winter, when we’ve got to deal not only with our local crowd, but with “snowbirds” (the stuffy rich people who can afford two homes and thus only live here six months out of the year when the weather is nice… cheaters…), and the god-awful tourists. Summer time is like a breath of fresh air, bringing in a slow but steady stream of locals who are friendly, laid back, and too damn hot to care that they’ve got to pay a late fee. BUT, there is one exception to the rule of summer, and that exception comes every Wednesday from June through August when we have to deal with the dreaded Summer Reading Program.
The summer reading program is an event that takes all year to plan because of its immense popularity. Every year comes with its own theme (this year it’s “Get a clue at your library,” a detective theme), and to match that theme are book bags, t-shirts (which the staff must wear every Wednesday or face the wrath of the library gods), activity sheets, and other assorted crap.
It’s quite elaborate. Kids read as many books as they can stomach, and trade in their activity sheets for tickets that can (in turn) be redeemed for prizes. Not little wimpy prizes, either. I mean, yeah, we’ve got pencils and key chains and junk like that for the kids who don’t try as hard but still deserve something for their efforts, but for the ones who are hardcore… well, let’s put it this way: the grand prize this year is a Nintendo Wii. You still can’t buy them in the stores. Needless to say, with prizes like that, it’s no wonder the library gets one day each week where we’re actually cool.
Why is it only Wednesdays that are so awful? Well, every Wednesday is when we have our shows, and that’s when things get crazy. We don’t get Geeko the Clown to come to the library and make balloon animals. We get cool performers. For instance, during our first week of the program we had Scot Land Marionettes. Scot Land is the guy who did all of the puppet work for Team America. There are so many people interested in coming to our shows that we usually have to book two performances, a morning and an afternoon show. Not only that, but we can only fit 300 people (legally, anyway) into the room where we do our shows. We have to turn people away at the door.
So there I am. Wednesday morning. All bleary-eyed at 10 a.m., haven’t even digested my pop-tarts yet, and we’ve got three hundred people gathered in our lobby shouting into cell phones and screaming at kids who are in turn throwing tantrums, insisting on doing the limbo under the ropes we use to create the illusion of a line (which never works), having water fights out of our drinking fountains, howling like coyotes inside the bathroom because the acoustics in that place are amazing, racing six other children from one end of the building to the other, and where I stand practicing deep-breathing techniques. Why don’t I shush them? You try shushing 300 people. Even I know when to give up the good fight.
All this happens before the show even starts. At 10:30 the doors in the community room are thrown open and the stream of noise and irritation makes its way toward the other end of the building, where I can no longer hear them, and thus can pretend that they no longer exist.
We’ll get right about thirty minutes of relatively quiet time where we can knock back as many cups of coffee as we can handle without having caffeine-induced seizures, and then brace ourselves. The show ends. We hear the round of applause and the growing roar of the crowd as they make their way back into the library. Babies are fussy from sitting still for so long, the strollers are careening toward the front desk like a stampede of antelope. There are only three stations with which we will check out books to 300 customers over the course of the next hour. Our knees buckle…
Let us fade on this scene and pretend for a moment that it’s not happening. It’s okay, I do it all the time. I want to take some time to talk about our young volunteers. Every summer we get about ten kids, usually around age twelve and older, who volunteer here. Most of them are doing it because at age twelve they are already freaking out about getting into college. I hope I remember these moments one day when I have kids who are twelve, because frankly, any ivy-league school that requires twelve year olds to give up their hard-earned summer so they can face the wrath of the Reading Program is sick and wrong. I wish I could tell each and every one of these kids to inform Harvard that they can take that required list of extra-curricular activities and shove it up their ass. These are really, really good kids. They’ll be getting peptic ulcers and anxiety attacks before they’re finished with their sophomore year of high school because they’re so frantic to make it into Yale. They take all advanced-level classes, try out for every sports team, star in the school plays, and deal single-handedly with the nightmare that is about to unfold. I salute them.
So, we’re armed and ready. Okay, maybe not armed. Probably not even really all that ready, but we’re here and the gas money to get us back home has to come from somewhere, damnit, so we’re going to face this courageously. The volunteer kids are stationed at little card tables sitting under signs marked “preschool through second grade,” “third grade through fifth grade,” and “teen reading program.” The volunteers will be responsible for tallying up how many tickets each kid has earned this week, and running the prize booth while the children’s librarian tries to keep a smile on her face and refrain from running out of the building screaming like she’s lost her mind.
Of course, the kids can’t just come to the library, watch their shows, get their toys, and go home. No, no. Each kid has to check out books and movies, too. The checkout line is unfathomably huge. It spans the length of the building, and don’t you think for one second that I am exaggerating. Our phone is ringing off the hook and no one’s bothering to answer it right now because we’ve got way bigger fish to fry, and we’ve occasionally got to leave the desk to go hunt someone down in the parking lot and inform them that they must check out that stack of books prior to exiting the building, please.
One family unit blends into the next. Irritable mothers stand before me at the counter like the nucleus of a very pissed-off atom, while sugar-wired children orbit her knees like obnoxious little electrons. Each child (and each one of these little electrons possesses their own library card) is checking out thirty items (which is the limit per-person). So… 300 people… thirty items… that’s 9,000 books and Barney DVDs exiting our building before 12 P.M.
Then there’s the business of late-fees. When it comes to late fees, there is a rule that anyone can still check items out as long as the fine is under five dollars. Because of this, we have the option of not telling you that you have a late fee. Sometimes we do this because we can tell at a glance that you will kill us for dropping the fee-bomb on you at this moment in time. Sometimes we don’t tell you because we simply do not want to deal with it. Sometimes we honestly don’t notice the fee, because we only get bells and whistles when they’re over the five dollar mark.
One way or the other, each library assistant must decide in an instant which mothers out of the crowd would rather not know about the late fee this week, and which ones will kill us next week for not telling them about the fine when they actually had the money. This can be tricky. We’re usually wrong. It’s an occupational hazard. We can’t read minds very well, and because of that we usually misread people. We deal with this fact by turning to our good friend, apathy. God forbid one of the kids actually went over the five-dollar limit and we have to inform the mother that little Billy cannot check out his books until she gives us her McDonald’s money. I’ll let you use your imagination on what that conversation sounds like.
By 12:30 the building begins to quiet down again. Most of the families have vacated the premises, destined for far greater places, like the playground, or the nearest department store having a sale. It’s time for my half-hour lunch break where I can go hide behind a novel and pretend I’m not at work for a little while. And eat a cookie. The cookie makes it all worth-while. I try not to think about what will happen after my lunch break is over… because once that time has come, and I go back out to the front lines, the crowd will be lining up for the encore presentation of the morning performance…
