How to Alienate a Girl in Ten Minutes or Less

You may notice that the following post is not actually about the library. This is mostly due to thefact that since I moved to days, nothing very exciting has happened at the library. I mostly sit at my desk and hammer our the student workers' schedule for the millionth time and print out timecards. That being the case, I've decided to just write in my blog about stuff. Enjoy!

I have met many people in my travails through this existence. Some of them were cool. Some of them were weird. Some of them were Kevin Murphy.

One of these is Kevin Murphy. Chose wisely.

But as I meet people, I'm always amazed by the strangeness in the interaction between men and women, especially within the first few minutes. Making a first impression is important. In a social setting, it can mean the difference between being boon companions which you would venture into the Fires of Mount Doom and being Facebook friends that you put at the bottom of your notification list.

Disclaimer: This is mostly addressed to men. This is not to be an all-encompassing guide. I mostly focus on first interactions between men and women. I can only write from my experiences as a late-twentysomething woman living in a college town. Some of the men I've met, actually behave like polite, normal human beings interacting with a polite, semi-normal human being (me).

Talk Down to Her

Maybe you're an expert in cooking. Maybe you know all the names of the background characters in Star Wars. That's great! Talking to an expert can be a lot of fun and a learning experience; however, just because you happen to know all of the words to every Queen song ever and I only know about half of them does not mean I'm stupid and you're somehow superior. Nice people, in general conversation, don't belittle people, especially people they've just met, because they don't know something. From personal experience, I know that it's a little hard to hide contempt when someone doesn't know something very basic to being a human being like when my freshman roommate told me she didn't know who Peter Pan was. I'll let that sink in for a moment. But Peter Pan and a supporting character from a steampunk novel I've never heard of are two entirely different beasts. This is part of the reason I hate your typical hipster, as if knowing something really obscure makes you a more worthwhile person to talk to and know.

The second part that irritates me about a person talking down to me is the assumption I don't know as much or more about the subject as you. This happens occasionally when people start talking about video games, assuming that, as a female, if I play video games at all, it is mostly likely something fluffy like Diner Dash (though that game is fun to play, from time to time). In reality, girl gamers are as varied as male gamers, with some of us enjoying first-person shooters like Modern Warfare and others enjoying adventure like Skyrim while other's of us enjoy, inexplicably I might add, Duke Nukem Forever. My irritation stems from the stupid assumption, even when confronted with the fact that I am playing Assassin's Creed III or something similar, that I'm not really a gamer because girls can only really be casual gamers.

How to do it wrong:

Talk just about your interests, inserting lots of "but you probably don't know about that" or "I'm pretty much an expert at this". For bonus points, add "no one really understands how important this is". Additional points if this statement is attached to a conversation about manga, anime, TV, movies, video games, and/or comics.

How to do it right:

Find something you both enjoy talking about, like you are talking to any other normal person (or abnormal as the case may be). Maybe you'll both like long boarding or tap dancing or have borderline unhealthy obsessions with the TV series Game of Thrones. Whatever it is you talk about, talk about it as equals. If she asks you to tell her more about something she's not overly familiar with, inform without condescending and keep it brief. One-sided conversations are only fun for the person speaking. You wouldn't enjoy a girl talking your ear off about an original character in a Harry Potter/True Blood crossover fan fiction she had written, would you? Maybe you would, but that's besides the point.

Talk About Bodily Functions

There's a time and a place for everything. The first ten minutes of meeting someone is not the time to discuss this subject, especially with girls. I do not enjoy bodily humor, for the most part, though I did have some choice fart jokes in my repertoire when I was a kid. I am not exaggerating when I say five minutes after I met a friend's roommate he announced "I have to fart". Wonderful. Were you assuming I was some sort of flatulence connoisseur and that I needed an announcement to prepare myself? I might add that I had not mentioned anything that would have suggested this or that I wanted to hear that.

How to do it wrong:

Tell anyone you've just met about anything related to your body that you wouldn't bring up if you were talking to your grandmother (unless she's your primary physician, for some reason, then you probably would anyways). Extra points for using locker room slang.

How to do it right:

Keep it to yourself. Maybe your roommates will be fascinated by your new foot wart after company has left your domicile.

Treat Her Like a Piece of Meat

I'd like to think that I get along with people pretty well, though that's only from my perspective. Anyways, I am friends with girls and guys in equal measure. When I meet a new guy, unless he is ridiculously good looking, I'm not thinking "I hope he asks me out" or "I wonder if he's my future husband". I base my friendships off of mutual likes and dislikes. I cannot stand when I meet someone and they immediately judge whether or not I'm date-able and then ignore me if I'm not their cup of tea (which I hold no grudge as not every guy I meet is my cup of tea either). I'm not saying that it is wrong, neccessarily, to put people in categories like that, in your head. I am saying that it's not a particularly nice thing to vocalize or show in your actions. Perhaps you are attempting to avoid an awkward situation of having a girl you don't want to date mooning after you, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be polite. We, as a species, are slowly losing the ablility to interact with each other without a screen in front of us and some of us mistake manners for flirting. That doesn't mean give the cold shoulder to a girl who bothered to stop playing Minecraft and show up to a party to meet a bunch of people she doesn't know.

How to do it wrong:

Ignore her, especially when she directly addresses you. Bonus points if you talk across her to a different girl, pretending she is invisible.

How to do it right: 

Talk to the girl as if she was a human being. Just because you talk to a girl, doesn't mean she thinks you're going to ask her out (unless she's unbalanced, then you're on your own). If you don't really even want to be friends with her, perhaps because of her affinity for all things Miley Cyrus related or something equalling disturbing, politely get out of the conversation without looking like a jerk.

Tell Her What She Thinks

I have never declared that I understand the male brain at all, though I have been told it has something to do with a "nothing box". I get incredibly irritated by people who presume to know how I feel or think based on their interactions with other girls. Sometimes this is due to very bad experiences with women that left them with skewed views of the female brain. A bad breakup can ruin a guy for a long time, which I have witnessed on many occasions. If this isn't the case, some guys seem to think that all girls are the same. We all love shoes and shopping. We all love Justin Bieber and Twilight. We all dislike working with our hands or getting dirty or driving sports cars/trucks. Wouldn't the world be a boring place if that was actually true?

Let me give you a scenerio I've been in that illustrates my point more fully:

Me: I think a guy can get out of the friendzone. I've thought of a guy as a friend and then thought of him as something more later on.

Guy: No. Girls don't change their minds. Once they've put you in the friendzone, that's it!

Me: But that's not true in every case.

Guy: It is. I've dated long enough to know.

In this case, I have voiced my opinion and then immediately been shot down, because he's known some girl who wouldn't take him out of the friendzone. Maybe she didn't feel that way about you. Or maybe it's because you tell her what she thinks even when she has said otherwise.

How to do it wrong:

Start sentences with "all you girls are like this". For bonus points, throw in a heap of mysogny.

How to do it right:

Speak from your own experience as a man. Talk to the girl about how you perseve the world and let her voice her views without correcting her.

In conclusion, you might want to try to go the extra mile when you meet people. Or at the very least, keep your fart jokes and your condesending tone to yourself.

Thanks for reading and remember: don't fold down the pages of your library books.

Ode to the Reference Librarian

I hope the librarian from Ghostbusters doesn't show up.

This week, instead of my usual diatribe about patrons and their lack or sense or decorum, I have decided to spotlight my favorite kind of librarian: the Reference Librarian. For those of you unfamiliar with reference librarians, these folks have gone through an Amerian Library Association accredited school to get a master's in library science. Now, get in the time machine with me so we can visit the Reference Librarian of Days of Yore. Before Microsoft and Apple products were in every home and Al Gore invented the Internet, library patrons around the world use card catalogs to look up books. That's right, you had to flip through a drawer by author or subject or title to find it. Reference librarians also served as founts of knowledge when you needed to know about certain subjects or needed help narrowing down a topic to study. Need to know the population of the Republic of Chad? They knew where to find it. Need to find out about daVinci? They knew which books art anthologies had chapters about him. They were human Google.

Reference librarians today are still crucial to any library. "But what about the Internet?", I hear you cry. For the answer, I give a quote from Neil Gaiman, creator of the Sandman graphic novel series: "Google can bring back a hundred thousand answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one." Go open Google, or another search engine of equal or greater value, and type in "the history of golf". You will get tons of hits (over 30,000,000 when searched), including two Wiki articles, a video of comic Robin Williams talking about golf, and some guy in Canada who wrote a brief history of golf and then tried to make the website more legit by adding an animated gif to the end. Now, you can spend the next two hours either tracking down a somewhat reputable source and probably watching that Robin Williams video or you can go to your library and ask a reference librarian for help and spend the next two hours actually writing a paper that doesn't use eHow as a source.

The moral of the story: The Internet, as wonderful as it is, cannot replace the brain of human being who actually knows his/her stuff. Hail to thee, Reference Librarian!

Thanks for reading and remember: don't fold down the pages of your library books.

I'm Sorry, I Thought You Were Joking

In my job, I directly interact with the public, face-to-face, a minimum of six hours a week. This does not seem like a lot of time but it seems like enough time to come across some rather unusual questions and statements from our patrons.

Let us start with the most frequently asked question: No! Not "do you have 'Catching Fire'?" It is in fact, "where is the bathroom?" It is not the question itself that is so strange but rather how the question is asked, the most bizarre being "do you have a bathroom" and its variant statement "you don't have bathrooms, do you?". This might be a viable question in a small store or a questionable-looking gas station, where space is limited; however, in a five-story building you would hope that there would at least a toilet in a broom closet. There are ten bathrooms (twenty counting men and women separately) in our library, so I think it is safe to say, we do have bathrooms.

The next category of questions is the main feature of this blog: questions better not asked. I had a student approach the desk with two books in hand. I checked them out and handed them back. He thumbed through one of the books and asked "is it okay if I write in the book?" I was rather shocked that anyone would write in a library book (sacrilege!) but even more so that someone would ask if it were okay to do so. Many library books have crossed my path, whose once clean pages had been marked with pen, pencil, or highlighter, but I ad never been asked if this act was acceptable. For the record, it's not okay and I have never heard of a librarian that would find this behavior acceptable. In this case, "it is better to ask for forgiveness, rather than permission". In other words, what I don't know won't make me go screaming into the night...

The last category is "questions that are not in fact meant to be answered but merely asked to raise my blood pressure to pre-hypertension levels for the amusement of the asker". These would include "what would happen if I never returned this laptop" and "didn't you stay 24-hours last finals week". The first question, I can't explain. What would do you think you would happen? You would get to keep it forever? You would be granted three wishes? The second is the type that seems not to be a question but a challenge to my knowledge of actual library policy and an attempt by the asker to be granted special "all-night access", if the question is phrased just right.

Moral of the Story: The adage "there are no stupid questions" does not seem to always hold true. And, by the way, the closest bathroom is in between the elevator banks.

Thanks for reading and remember, don't fold down the pages of your library books (or write in them).

The Pet Shop Sketch and Other Nonsense

This week, I had the mother of all strange and rude complaints. A patron, who we will call Franklin, for a sense of clarity later in the story, came to the desk and wished to complain. I put on my happy face and braced for the bizarre. I've had a cornucopia of assorted and varied complaints come to me from overflowing toilets to a vehement dislike of the new library website, so I'm never really excited when a patron wishes to register a complaint. Franklin, our complaining patron, launched into a description of a homeless man on the third floor who was "really smelly and loud". I, being aware of exactly which man he described, as he passes through the library frequently, was a little confused. I knew that this man was indeed pretty pungent smelling from personal experience, but he was usually very quite and studious. Franklin then told me that he "didn't think it was fair that [he] have to share the library with him because [Franklin] was paying for it and he wasn't". He went on to dig himself deeper into the pit of my disapproval by rattling on about him not deserving to be in the library. I explained that the building was a meant for public use and that I couldn't remove the man simply because he was homeless. I did promise to look into the noise complaint, which I did a few minutes later, though I found no noisy person on all of the third floor, homeless or otherwise. I also threw in the fact that Franklin's student fees did not pay for the whole of the library and that paying fees didn't entitle him to decide who stayed and who went. After this explanation, Franklin demanded to file a formal complaint, my action apparently not sufficient, and I gave him my boss' business card. I noticed, as he walked away, that Franklin was clutching a Bible in his had. I think Jesus said something about being nice to people...

This got me thinking about the Pet Shop Sketch (aka The Dead Parrot Sketch) from Monty Python I recited and watched several times over the course of my BBC-influenced childhood. Those of you who have not seen this sketch, I have embedded the video for your viewing delight. To summarize, a man attempts to return a parrot that is in fact, stone dead. "I wish to register a complaint..." never leads to happy places for the person on the other end.

Why must many of the patrons I deal with think that because they register a complaint, no matter how ludicrous or borderline discriminatory, the "problem" will just go away or be changed in their favor. If the homeless man had been vocally disruptive or violent, I would have stepped in immediately, as is my job, but did Franklin honestly believe that his complaint would elicit a response of gathering torches and pitchforks to expel the homeless man to the curb? As far as weird, non-student patron's are concerned, the man in question is one patron that I rarely worry about having problems with. He's actually polite and soft spoken and always says "good afternoon" to me. He also is not a patron who stays until we peel them from the desks and push them out the door. As for the smell complaint, if I removed every person that was aromatic, I would be kicking people out right and left. Whether it's the guy who is wearing a gallon of bad aftershave or the girl who just came from a PE class, there are lots of pungent people on campus.

Moral of the Story: Don't judge a book by it's cover and don't be a jerk. Nobody likes a jerk.

Thanks for reading and remember: don't fold down the pages of your library books.

I've Always Looked Like That

Every week I get people trying to use ID cards that are not theirs. The thing that surprises me is the fact that people think I don't notice that a 6'1" guy is not in fact the 5'6" woman in the picture on her ID card. "Hmm...you don't seem to look like you have highlighted blonde hair and sparkly lip gloss." The fact that they get upset when I stop them, is what really gets me. I think if the University really wanted students to swap IDs like baseball cards, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't include an ID.

The following reason patrons have actually given me as why they don't seem to match up with the picture:

• "My girlfriend/boyfriend is just upstairs. What's the big deal?"
• "My dad works here and I have a huge fine, so can't I just use his?"
• "I've lost my ID card and I didn't bring any other photo ID, so my buddy said I could borrow his."

Reactions to my negative response in the mild identity theft department ranges from a "oh, I didn't know" to "you guys are a bunch of jerks for making me do this". I don't like to check IDs but I've had too many patrons that have "borrowed" their roommates cards to not stop people from doing it. I've also had plenty of claimed returned items that go something like "I never checked this out. Maybe my roommate stole my card".

Moral of the Story: Be smart enough to not use someone's ID, especially if you look nothing like them. The photos are to protect you. You'd want me to stop you if someone used your driver's license or passport if it wasn't you, wouldn't you?

Thanks for reading and remember: don't fold down the pages of your library books.

Be Kind to the Workers, Please

My sister and a poster in an Underground station in London

I work at the circulation desk at the library for a minimum of six hours a week. I know, not a lot of hours at the desk, but still, enough to be insulted at least once a week by someone who thinks they are better than me because I work in a service position. For example, last week I was yelled at by a patron because we didn't have the book that was supposed to be on hold for him. Frustrating, yes. Annoying, yes. Worth scolding my student worker and myself and then getting mad that department actually responsible for the mix-up is not there on a Sunday night, no! I will move heaven and earth to help someone, especially if it is our fault, but I am less willing to help when you scream at me.

A few weeks ago, two of my student workers got screamed at because they were doing their job. A patron sent several print jobs to our desk, which have to go through a digital cue before they are actually released to the printer. One student worker, from past experience, knew that there might be an issue with the formatting because they were PowerPoint slides and wanted to send a single job through to check before sending all of the print jobs. He refused and told her "he was in a hurry" and walked away while they printed. She sent the printouts and, surprise!, they weren't formatted correctly. Ninety pages later, the patron refused to pay for the printouts. I am a big believer in do-overs but not with this number of pages. The other student worker informed him that he needed to pay for the printouts. Enraged at the worker's unmitigated temerity to ask for payment, the patron told both student workers they had "the worst possible approach to humanity [he] had ever seen" but he pulled out his credit card to pay. The student worker ringing it up the transaction pressed the wrong button and had to void everything and start over, to which she was berated with "she gets a do-over but I don't?!". What a charmer.

In this digital age, I also get insulted via email. I was told in a reply from an automated fine notice that the phone number for our Media Collections desk listed on his notice was "not valid" with a "Come on.. try to show some professionalism" attached to the end. After some minor sleuthing, I discovered that the phone number was not invalid, we were just closed because of President's Day at the time and he got the answering machine. And he wanted a waiver on his fines. Not the best way to approach the situation, I think.

The sad thing is, I know that being verbally abusive to those who serve is not limited to library. I see people being rude to restaurant servers, grocery baggers, and bank tellers every day. The kid who stocks Macey's doesn't control what flavor Doritos are available and the girl working the drive-thru at Burger King doesn't control price increases on you large Double Whopper meal. They're just peons.

The moral of the story: Treat people in service positions kindly, even if they are dumb, surly, or obnoxious. They're people, just like you, not your personal whipping boys/girls. Kill 'em with kindness if their mean. Let them make the scene, don't add to it.

Thanks for reading and remember: don't fold down the pages of your library books.

Dude, Where's My Book?

In the course of my job, I receive a lot of email. I have three work emails that I check every day that I work: one assigned by the university, one that receives claimed returns/book search requests filed by the student workers, and one that is connected to email notices that no one is supposed to reply to but does anyways because literacy and comprehension are clearly no longer required to enter college. The last email account always gives me the most grief with patrons' elaborate (and sometimes fictional) tales of why they couldn't return a copy of The Uncanny X-Men on time or why they need just six more weeks for a book they've had a year (please see So many books, how can you have the time? from last week for more rantacular details about grad students treating their checkouts like hostages in a bank heist).

This week, I received an email from a patron who could not return his books. Why, you may ask, could he not return his books? Was he out-of-town? Did his roommate steal his books to sell on Amazon for pizza money? Had his books been abducted by evil, book-thieving aliens, who are attempting to learn more about human culture? Nope. They were in his car, which had been impounded because he had parked it on private property while he attempted to sell it. You would think that he would go and get his fossil fuel-based vehicle out of the impound lot, but he said that the fee they proposed to him to get said car was "more than the car was worth" and he, therefore, did not plan on retrieving his car. He also said that the impound lot would not allow him to retrieve his possessions from the car. Don't get me wrong though. I am totally against the iron grip that parking enforcement companies have on my city, but why would someone leave library books in a car that was going to be unattended for a good amount of time? He might as well have put a large sign on the car that said, "I will be leaving this car in this lot for several weeks completely unattended. Feel free to rummage around inside for loose change and library books".

The reason the patron emailed me was to ask how much he would owe the library to replace the books. After much consulting with the Great Oracle of Gore (a.k.a. the Internet), I priced his books and the grand total came to almost $90, which I'm sure he will be less than thrilled with if he's upset about impound fees. And now, the library does not have the books he "lost" and we probably won't order it for a while, depriving some poor student of the joys of stealing a few passages from the book and then slapping on a citation in his/her research paper.

Moral of the Story: Don't leave library books in a car you are attempting to sell on property that is not your own.

Thanks for reading and remember: don't fold down the pages of your library books.