Although I’ve grown accustomed to the “smell†of the library, and the “taste†of the library water, the overall “feeling†in the library should be more personal. Maybe a day where the library staff takes us out to dinner. Vote Republican. Wash your socks.
– anonymous comment from the suggestion board
While there is never a dull moment working at the library, all that action can still get to be pretty monotonous. Check in some books, answer the phone. Check out some books, answer the phone. Get blamed by a patron because their books are late… answer the phone. It’s like I said before: sorting thousands of letters all day long is what made certain workers of the USPS go postal. Sorting books all day threatens to make librarians go librarial. We’ve learned to break up this daily monotony with weird little games that we play in order to pass the time.
We have a lot of games that we play with the phone. Our phone rings a lot, and since we don’t yet have a designated phone answerer, we’ve come up with various ways to shake up the chore. Our first game that I’ll discuss today sticks someone with the task of answering a ringing phone. Either all of my co-workers (myself included) are very anti-social, or else we simply despise answering the phone. One way or the other, any time the phone starts ringing, we miraculously go deaf. This ailment lasts as long as a phone is ringing. Someone eventually cracks and has to grab the ringing phone, but after a while the same person cracks for eight hours, and that’s enough to crack a person up!
In order to avoid lashing out against innocent callers from having a bad case of “secretarial burnout†we play a game called “not it.†Take a moment to remember back to when you were a kid playing tag. Sometimes, at the start of the game, everyone would yell “not it!†in order to pin the last person to shout with the task of being the first one “it.†We do that for the phones. It rings, and chances are, before the first ring is even complete, a chorus of “not it†will ring out across the front desk. The last person to say “not it†is stuck taking the phone call. If you ever call us, and the person who answers is still audibly chuckling, chances are, they’re “it.â€
We’ve got another one that’s absolutely hilarious to pin on our superiors, but they’re just as quick to play it right back at us. There a certain patrons, (whose names will go unmentioned) that drive us up the wall. Having to talk to them usually means dedicating a good (thankless) ten or fifteen minutes of your day to solving their problems, and it’s gotten to the point that we recognize their voices. Now, we don’t do this every time they call, but once in a while, one of us will answer the phone, know it’s them, put them on hold, and then stroll over to a co-worker. “Call for you on line one,†we’ll casually say, and then break into peals of silent laughter as they answer the phone, hear the voice, and then glare at the perpetrator in a way that could absolutely kill. We all laugh about it over coffee sooner or later.
Next we have intercom games. We usually play these after-hours, when most of the customers have left. Nothing special, really, we just tell knock-knock jokes to someone 500 yards away. The funniest part is when you say “knock knock†into the intercom and someone down at the other end picks up their phone and asks “who’s there?†This is popular on Friday nights when everyone wants to go home, but no one wants to go home grouchy. One of my co-workers also likes to sing those obnoxious songs that get stuck in your head via the intercom, but in my opinion, going home with the B-52s “Rock Lobster†in your head is simply cruel and unusual.
We’ve also come up with creative closing announcements. These also tend to happen when most people have vacated the building, because you can never tell who’s going to laugh and who’s going to get offended. We mean it all in good humor, really we do. My personal favorite took place one day when a few people simply wouldn’t leave:
Your attention, please. Contrary to popular belief, librarians do have lives. It’s Friday. Please go home now so that we can, too.
The remaining customers left the building blushing a violent shade of red.
There’s a game that our older employees play (by older I mean they’ve been working there for a while, not that they’re a bunch of fogies) and I have no idea how they do it. I call it “hide and seek.†The basic premise for this game is that whenever you need an older employee to grace you with their infinite wisdom (or deal with a crazed customer) they will drop off the face of the earth. I don’t know where they go, but wherever it is, it’s an amazing hiding place that I have yet to discover. One of these days I’ll probably be walking down an aisle, minding my own business, and find someone exiting the building via a secret trap-door. I have no proof of this, but I’m pretty sure that’s what happens. Either way, the second the said crisis is averted, they’ll casually stroll back up to the desk as though they haven’t been MIA for a good five minutes.
My personal favorite is one that my co-worker and I call “tetris.†Not all of our staff play this game, because it’s really pretty OCD when you think about it, but some days I wish they would. As a semi-obsessive-compulsive neat-freak, tetris absolutely makes my day. If you’ve ever returned a book to our library, you’ll have noticed that our “return†bin could more accurately be called “the towering mountain of doom†because 90% of our staff shrinks away from the bin like vampires from a summer’s day. On Fridays, one of my co-workers tag-teams this bin-o-terror with me, and this is where tetris comes into play.
Basically, once a book is checked in, it is moved into another bin. Tetris prevents bin-o-terror jr. from forming, because what we do is take every book (and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but like tetris blocks, books come in all sorts of weird sizes) and use them to obsessively fill every square inch of space in book drop #2. The result, if you were to remove the sides of the bin from around the books, is a perfect cube consisting of hundreds of different books and weighing about a ton. I think it’s pretty cool. However, I also think it’s cool that in T9 texting, “book†and “cool†are the same combination of keys (2, 6, 6, 5) …so my definition of “cool†might not be the most accurate…
So now we’ve covered “not it,†“hide and seek,†“intercom entertainment,†and “tetris.†But the absolute crowning glory of our library antics has got to be our book cart drill team. You’re probably wondering what a book cart drill team is. You’re probably a little afraid to know… Well, a few years ago, some other librarian somewhere else in the country was probably trying to keep her sanity (or may have lost it completely, come to think of it) when she realized, to her sheer delight, that book carts can be ridden like scooters, spun like waltz partners, and can be pushed into various formations when you can con other co-workers into joining in on your shenanigans.
Thus, the drill team was born. Soon, in library schools across the country (yep. There are schools people go to in order to become certified librarians. They major in Library Science and actually get a masters in this major in order to be able to call themselves “librarians.†I am truly nothing but a lowly “library assistant.†I’m okay with this.) bright-eyed, hopeful, librarians-to-be form drill teams and compete in national competitions. If you want some mild entertainment, there are videos available on YouTube. But the basic gist of it is that a group of crazy librarians get together with book carts, and choreograph synchronized routines. To music. With costumes. I think it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
Back at the start of summer, it was announced to our county-wide system that any library wishing to compete could form a drill team and perform at our annual “all-staff day.†The winning team would get a paid afternoon off. Okay, I have to admit, an afternoon off was way too sweet a deal to pass up. So I teamed up with five other co-workers (men and women alike) and we formed “the cart-throbs.†We dressed up as old ladies with gigantic booties and shook what our mamas never gave us to a song called “Honkey-tonk Badonkadonk.â€
One day, I will get my hands on the video. You’d better believe that the minute it’s in my possession, that baby’s going up on YouTube and I’ll post the link right here on Re:generator for all the world to see. Needless to say, with a routine like that, we won, and rather than having to dedicate an afternoon to games like “tetris†and “not it,†we’ll be able to save our sanity by simply going home.
