Week 5―4/22 - 4/26
Days worked: 3
Tasks worked on:
shelf reading of
children’s nonfiction (0-600)
children’s nonfiction (601-999)
children’s board books
various tasks L or anybody needed me to do, like locating dead or missing/claimed books
Okay SO. Story time―buckle up folks, it’s a lil wild and definitely a bit bumpy.
It’s Monday right? Early Monday morning―how anyone is functional before 11am is beyond me, especially on a Monday, but I digress. I’m doing my shelf reading, just minding my own business, working quietly while listening to music, as you do. This family comes in―a mom & her two kids I believe, though I didn’t realize it was two at the time. Child 1 is Very Loud when they first enter, she’s yelling (in excitement?) and slamming things (keep in mind, I’m by the nonfiction section, so my backs are towards them & I’m hidden by other shelves, so I can’t see what’s going on even if I had turned around) also Very Loudly. Mom & another staff member ask her to be quiet, mostly unsuccessfully. A little bit later, the kid starts WAILING at the top of her lungs (& I think this made the other kid start crying too).For probably a good 15-20 minutes. Which, fine, okay. These are Very Tiny Children, they don’t really have any self-control over emotional outbursts or anything like that, so I can’t hold it against ‘em. I’m not mad, just wish it was a little quieter, but I can deal, it’s no biggie, yanno? It gets quiet after a while, and now I’m sitting on the floor, going through some of the bottom nonfiction shelves. Still just minding my own business. I pull a book off of the shelf & plan to start flipping through it when it’s SNATCHED out of my hands. By none other than one of the kids that was making noise earlier. Kid1 takes the book and runs away with it―I’m so shocked that all I can do is blink and go “uhh.....”. Meanwhile, kid2 comes over, and starts pulling books off the shelf from in front of me and dumping them into my lap. Kid1 comes back over & tosses the book she had stolen from me into my lap as well. So I reshelve all of these, but kid2 starts to pull off even MORE books to dump on me. I stop her, but obviously she & her sister are displeased with my actions because the next thing I know, they’re running over to the fiction shelf behind me/to my left, pulling books off, and THROWING them at me. Like. Uh. What??? Small children what are you doing. Why are you doing this. Please stop. I beseech you. I try and ask them to stop, but my voice decides, ‘hey, wouldn’t this be a great time for me to disappear? you think so too? Fantastic! See ya later!’ so I’m stuck kind of just staring apprehensively and making half-aborted movements to try to stop them. It ain’t working. So I just take a deep breath and decide ‘yanno what, this is a perfect time for me to take my break. I’ll just... go make a tactical retreat into the staff room and regroup there’, which is what I did. And it turns out they ended up getting kicked out later.
So that was my Monday morning.
But I also helped someone find a couple of books for their nephew! He wasn’t really sure what he was looking for, just had a few vague subjects, so I pulled up the catalog & did a few quick searches to find the corresponding sections, and we managed to find a few books he thought would work! So that was =^D !!
