I appreciate the threaded string of "reading this and enjoying it" from the last post - it's nice to know that you're following along, even if you feel like there's nothing you can comment on.
This post comes with a content warning for stalkers, creeps, and other people who enjoy the thrill of hurting other people without their consent
[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
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jenett asked a related question to the last one - how do you deal with a situation where a library is helping someone, and then they realize the thing they are giving help on is something they find abhorrent or personally unethical?
The short form of what happens is that the person in question extricates themselves as soon as possible from the situation and passes it off to someone else who does not have that issue. The example in question was helping someone get photos off of a CD and attached to an e-mail, when the photos and e-mail make it apparent that the person has been charged with animal cruelty and is trying to mount a defense, with the photos trying to be attached are the evidence of the charge against him. If it were possible, discreetly waving over a colleague and getting them up to speed on the matter of what is being asked is the best thing to do. As might be taking a break so as to engage with the brainbleach.
This essentially assumes, however, that there are colleagues available with the requisite knowledge, expertise, and lack of getting squicked to manage the situation, and that things can be done in such a way that the transition is smooth and doesn't scream something like "zOMG this person is charged with animal cruelty", because people deserve professionalism and privacy in these matters, regardless of our personal opinions about the thing. It's like the notice that is always by the copy machine which boils down to:
That way, library employees do not also have to be experts on intellectual property law to have a copy machine or software that could be used to violate intellectual property laws. That's what we have lawyers for. (And believe me, your library system has at least one lawyer on retainer. Because we need them to help us write policies and stay in compliance with the law as it shifts around us.) Similarly, we will generally help someone with the how-to of a thing, unless it's flagrantly illegal, and keep our opinions to ourselves about the thing, because we are non-partisan and we assume that we don't know everything about why someone might be, for example, wanting to access websites that promote hateful worldviews, in much the same way that we don't send people away for wearing shirts with slogans for candidates we despise and that we don't censor books in our collection that we personally have distaste for.
However...
There are some people who are not operating in good faith when they ask for help. The current revelations that political figures and entertainers and moguls have been sexually harassing women for years and have been using settlements and the still very true argument that nobody is going to believe those women over the word of a very powerful man have their less-remarked-upon but still equally vile counterparts at the local level. Considering that library desk and paging staff are still exceedingly women, it should come as no surprise that most of them have encountered some form of harassment, whether from customers or staff, and ranging from the subtle and plausible to the outright blatant.
The classic example of this kind of person is a patron who comes up to the desk and says that their computer seems to have frozen or stopped working, only for the library staffer to see on the screen something graphic, pornographic, or otherwise intended to be shocking. These people generally also know that libraries and librarians are committed to access and the right of people to view what they choose to view, and so they feel confident they can hide behind those principles and claim that there really was an issue that cleared up in between getting the staffer and the staffer being subjected to the screen. Once is an anomaly, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action. If a pattern starts developing about how certain staffers always seem to get asked by certain users, the staffers will communicate and mount a defense. Sometimes that means going in pairs, so that when the incident report gets filed, one staffer is being subjected to the screen while the other is looking very closely for signs that the person doing the ask is getting gratification from it or some other indicator of bad faith that will get the offender banned.
Sometimes the defense is that whenever that person comes to the desk, a specific staff person comes out from the back to help them so as to deny them their preferred target. There's a person that calls our branch on the regular who swears and makes sexist statements at any female-type voice who answers the phone, as well as asking questions about STDs and other shock things. The staffers who have encountered them know the number, and since this person is targeting female voices, guess who gets to pick up the phone when they call? Any one of the three dudely-sounding people at my location, if we're in. We still get the interesting questions, but I haven't been sworn at, unlike my colleagues. Someone who specifically asks for men about questions because they don't think women are smart enough to grasp their genius mind is going to find themselves having to deal with women-looking people on staff, not just because that's the majority of people at the location, but also because being a sexist ass is going to get you essentially nowhere and we're going to deliberately force them into having to admit that women are able to do what their genius self requests. Because that will, in the end, make less work for us in dealing with you.
In addition to those looking to get a rise out of us by behaving provocative, there are some people for whom we are their single interaction during the day, or single point of trust. A person who calls the library or comes in with a question gets help. For some people, however, once the question is done, they would like to either get the library to agree with them about an opinion they hold (often in the category of "Times have changed / Our kids are getting worse", "Saying Merry Christmas is the only acceptable greeting for the Vague Early Winter Possibly Religious Festival", or "this newfangled technology is corrupting us from our simpler and superior family ways") or they want to engage in conversation about various pieces of trivia, aspects of life before modern days, or other things that aren't directly related to the function of the library or another question These people will also generally huff at you when you tell them that you have to be available to answer questions or ask them if they have another question for you to answer. Because you're being rude to them by not letting them talk at you for as long as they want to, even though there's going to be other phone calls or people at the desk that you will have to attend to as part of your duties.
A different type of this cycle is the person who calls the library looking for information about moving to another town in another state. This would not otherwise be odd, except that they are calling because the person is quite sure that the property maintenance team is breaking into people's apartments and stealing from them, and that the management is covering it up and trying to shut up residents who complain about it by causing a sewage backup and then refusing to clean it up. When you suggest the police or other government services, you are dismissed because the police are useless or can easily be corrupted into looking the other way by the same management team paying them off with stolen goods and the proceeds from their crimes. The person is asking for that information because they want to move, even as they aren't sure they're ever going to be able to move because of the aforementioned thievery and intimidation by the company that manages their living area. And because they're older, nobody is going to want to rent them somewhere else or get them work so that they can move out. This is not a situation where a person is showing contempt to the library and will receive it back in subtle and plausibly-deniable ways, but it also has the potential to be a thing where a lot of time is expended for no gain as any of the reasonable exit points to this discussion or suggested action plans are sent away because they don't fit the narrative that the person has constructed for themselves. (Mental illness is a thing, it's got the potential for great terrible things happening, and library staff are not generally equipped to handle it in anything other than the most basic of ways. More on that in another post.)
Extricating yourself from a telephone or in-person conversation where someone is clearly expecting you to agree with them or let them ramble on to you without point or purpose is sometimes difficult, as the people who are prone to this are aggressively deflecting the polite signals being put off that the conversation has to come to a close, including reducing responses to a noncommittal grunt to any and all attempts at continuing the discussion by the other person. Often times, the timely intervention of another staffer can help with this situation, by calling the affected person back to the staff room for an important project they need to work on, or by ringing their telephone specifically and repeatedly so as to force the conversation to a close. There may also be staff-wide known emergency signals that can be used to communicate distress or to initiate this form of rescue from inside the conversation that refuses to end.
And then there are the stalkers. Because anyone who looks female in a customer service position has to deal with people who are convinced that the circulation clerk must be in love with them, because of how happy and polite and kind they are to them. Nevermind the wedding band, of course - it's true love and they can't possibly be happy with whomever they are with right now. Or they're someone who feels like the circulation clerk is perpetually rude and bitchy to them and so they want to make their life difficult and get them fired because this person in a customer service position had the temerity to tell them no. Or asked them to leave the library when they were clearly behaving angelically and it was Someone Else (often, Those Teenagers) that were the people behaving badly.
If a library is on their infosec game (or needs to be), if someone calls or comes in to the library asking about the work schedule of a particular person, that person will be subtly put off getting any information about the schedule of the person working, hopefully without them noticing. They may be shunted to voicemail, asked to leave a message and a callback number, asked who is calling and then placed on hold to see if the person is currently in the office as an obfuscating ruse to talk to the person in question and see if they want to take the call, or given any number of alternatives that would effectively accomplish the task of permitting communication if the call or visit is in good faith and the person in question is willing to talk to them. There's nothing that stops a person from being in a public place and observing what is going on, but if things get stalkery or weird in that public place and the staffer (or observing witnesses) files incident reports about the behavior in question, either with administration or (usually by the staffer) the police, there's a good chance that the person who is stalking will be slapped with a rules of conduct ban, if not a restraining order, and where necessary, other staff will know who this person is and will be instructed as needed to call the police to make sure things stick.
There may have been vague gestures at the idea that people going into a job where you have to interact with someone else may have to deal with situations where the other people are jerks or worse. But the overriding hammer of having to help someone can and has been deployed in many a situation to keep people, usually women, talking with people who have already demonstrated that they are not acting in good faith. And while there may have been an exercise or two about how to get out of a conversation that is turning toxic, the variations on the theme are extensive enough, and pessimistic enough, that library school certainly didn't cover that. Perhaps they assumed that since most of their graduates are women, they already have enough life experience in the matter that they don't need to teach them anything more about it.
This post comes with a content warning for stalkers, creeps, and other people who enjoy the thrill of hurting other people without their consent
[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
jenett asked a related question to the last one - how do you deal with a situation where a library is helping someone, and then they realize the thing they are giving help on is something they find abhorrent or personally unethical?The short form of what happens is that the person in question extricates themselves as soon as possible from the situation and passes it off to someone else who does not have that issue. The example in question was helping someone get photos off of a CD and attached to an e-mail, when the photos and e-mail make it apparent that the person has been charged with animal cruelty and is trying to mount a defense, with the photos trying to be attached are the evidence of the charge against him. If it were possible, discreetly waving over a colleague and getting them up to speed on the matter of what is being asked is the best thing to do. As might be taking a break so as to engage with the brainbleach.
This essentially assumes, however, that there are colleagues available with the requisite knowledge, expertise, and lack of getting squicked to manage the situation, and that things can be done in such a way that the transition is smooth and doesn't scream something like "zOMG this person is charged with animal cruelty", because people deserve professionalism and privacy in these matters, regardless of our personal opinions about the thing. It's like the notice that is always by the copy machine which boils down to:
- Copyright exists.
- There are exceptions to copyright for specific purposes.
- If you break the copyright law, it's on your head, not ours. Know what you're doing before you do it.
That way, library employees do not also have to be experts on intellectual property law to have a copy machine or software that could be used to violate intellectual property laws. That's what we have lawyers for. (And believe me, your library system has at least one lawyer on retainer. Because we need them to help us write policies and stay in compliance with the law as it shifts around us.) Similarly, we will generally help someone with the how-to of a thing, unless it's flagrantly illegal, and keep our opinions to ourselves about the thing, because we are non-partisan and we assume that we don't know everything about why someone might be, for example, wanting to access websites that promote hateful worldviews, in much the same way that we don't send people away for wearing shirts with slogans for candidates we despise and that we don't censor books in our collection that we personally have distaste for.
However...
There are some people who are not operating in good faith when they ask for help. The current revelations that political figures and entertainers and moguls have been sexually harassing women for years and have been using settlements and the still very true argument that nobody is going to believe those women over the word of a very powerful man have their less-remarked-upon but still equally vile counterparts at the local level. Considering that library desk and paging staff are still exceedingly women, it should come as no surprise that most of them have encountered some form of harassment, whether from customers or staff, and ranging from the subtle and plausible to the outright blatant.
The classic example of this kind of person is a patron who comes up to the desk and says that their computer seems to have frozen or stopped working, only for the library staffer to see on the screen something graphic, pornographic, or otherwise intended to be shocking. These people generally also know that libraries and librarians are committed to access and the right of people to view what they choose to view, and so they feel confident they can hide behind those principles and claim that there really was an issue that cleared up in between getting the staffer and the staffer being subjected to the screen. Once is an anomaly, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action. If a pattern starts developing about how certain staffers always seem to get asked by certain users, the staffers will communicate and mount a defense. Sometimes that means going in pairs, so that when the incident report gets filed, one staffer is being subjected to the screen while the other is looking very closely for signs that the person doing the ask is getting gratification from it or some other indicator of bad faith that will get the offender banned.
Sometimes the defense is that whenever that person comes to the desk, a specific staff person comes out from the back to help them so as to deny them their preferred target. There's a person that calls our branch on the regular who swears and makes sexist statements at any female-type voice who answers the phone, as well as asking questions about STDs and other shock things. The staffers who have encountered them know the number, and since this person is targeting female voices, guess who gets to pick up the phone when they call? Any one of the three dudely-sounding people at my location, if we're in. We still get the interesting questions, but I haven't been sworn at, unlike my colleagues. Someone who specifically asks for men about questions because they don't think women are smart enough to grasp their genius mind is going to find themselves having to deal with women-looking people on staff, not just because that's the majority of people at the location, but also because being a sexist ass is going to get you essentially nowhere and we're going to deliberately force them into having to admit that women are able to do what their genius self requests. Because that will, in the end, make less work for us in dealing with you.
In addition to those looking to get a rise out of us by behaving provocative, there are some people for whom we are their single interaction during the day, or single point of trust. A person who calls the library or comes in with a question gets help. For some people, however, once the question is done, they would like to either get the library to agree with them about an opinion they hold (often in the category of "Times have changed / Our kids are getting worse", "Saying Merry Christmas is the only acceptable greeting for the Vague Early Winter Possibly Religious Festival", or "this newfangled technology is corrupting us from our simpler and superior family ways") or they want to engage in conversation about various pieces of trivia, aspects of life before modern days, or other things that aren't directly related to the function of the library or another question These people will also generally huff at you when you tell them that you have to be available to answer questions or ask them if they have another question for you to answer. Because you're being rude to them by not letting them talk at you for as long as they want to, even though there's going to be other phone calls or people at the desk that you will have to attend to as part of your duties.
A different type of this cycle is the person who calls the library looking for information about moving to another town in another state. This would not otherwise be odd, except that they are calling because the person is quite sure that the property maintenance team is breaking into people's apartments and stealing from them, and that the management is covering it up and trying to shut up residents who complain about it by causing a sewage backup and then refusing to clean it up. When you suggest the police or other government services, you are dismissed because the police are useless or can easily be corrupted into looking the other way by the same management team paying them off with stolen goods and the proceeds from their crimes. The person is asking for that information because they want to move, even as they aren't sure they're ever going to be able to move because of the aforementioned thievery and intimidation by the company that manages their living area. And because they're older, nobody is going to want to rent them somewhere else or get them work so that they can move out. This is not a situation where a person is showing contempt to the library and will receive it back in subtle and plausibly-deniable ways, but it also has the potential to be a thing where a lot of time is expended for no gain as any of the reasonable exit points to this discussion or suggested action plans are sent away because they don't fit the narrative that the person has constructed for themselves. (Mental illness is a thing, it's got the potential for great terrible things happening, and library staff are not generally equipped to handle it in anything other than the most basic of ways. More on that in another post.)
Extricating yourself from a telephone or in-person conversation where someone is clearly expecting you to agree with them or let them ramble on to you without point or purpose is sometimes difficult, as the people who are prone to this are aggressively deflecting the polite signals being put off that the conversation has to come to a close, including reducing responses to a noncommittal grunt to any and all attempts at continuing the discussion by the other person. Often times, the timely intervention of another staffer can help with this situation, by calling the affected person back to the staff room for an important project they need to work on, or by ringing their telephone specifically and repeatedly so as to force the conversation to a close. There may also be staff-wide known emergency signals that can be used to communicate distress or to initiate this form of rescue from inside the conversation that refuses to end.
And then there are the stalkers. Because anyone who looks female in a customer service position has to deal with people who are convinced that the circulation clerk must be in love with them, because of how happy and polite and kind they are to them. Nevermind the wedding band, of course - it's true love and they can't possibly be happy with whomever they are with right now. Or they're someone who feels like the circulation clerk is perpetually rude and bitchy to them and so they want to make their life difficult and get them fired because this person in a customer service position had the temerity to tell them no. Or asked them to leave the library when they were clearly behaving angelically and it was Someone Else (often, Those Teenagers) that were the people behaving badly.
If a library is on their infosec game (or needs to be), if someone calls or comes in to the library asking about the work schedule of a particular person, that person will be subtly put off getting any information about the schedule of the person working, hopefully without them noticing. They may be shunted to voicemail, asked to leave a message and a callback number, asked who is calling and then placed on hold to see if the person is currently in the office as an obfuscating ruse to talk to the person in question and see if they want to take the call, or given any number of alternatives that would effectively accomplish the task of permitting communication if the call or visit is in good faith and the person in question is willing to talk to them. There's nothing that stops a person from being in a public place and observing what is going on, but if things get stalkery or weird in that public place and the staffer (or observing witnesses) files incident reports about the behavior in question, either with administration or (usually by the staffer) the police, there's a good chance that the person who is stalking will be slapped with a rules of conduct ban, if not a restraining order, and where necessary, other staff will know who this person is and will be instructed as needed to call the police to make sure things stick.
There may have been vague gestures at the idea that people going into a job where you have to interact with someone else may have to deal with situations where the other people are jerks or worse. But the overriding hammer of having to help someone can and has been deployed in many a situation to keep people, usually women, talking with people who have already demonstrated that they are not acting in good faith. And while there may have been an exercise or two about how to get out of a conversation that is turning toxic, the variations on the theme are extensive enough, and pessimistic enough, that library school certainly didn't cover that. Perhaps they assumed that since most of their graduates are women, they already have enough life experience in the matter that they don't need to teach them anything more about it.
