Please take your baggage and problems to the group study area.

I was looking for a small little tidbit to post here and it just came to me at work. A man came to the desk and asked for a phone book. No surprise there. Then he sits down in front of me. No problem, that's what the dang chairs are for. As he's browsing through the phone book, he gets a call from someone he obviously didn't like. He told the women (she was loud) that she should never call his phone. When asked why, he said: "You a bum," and hung up. Nice!

Anyway, here's where the privacy issue comes in. He asked me for the phone book and required no other assistance from me. I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but he was sitting right in front of me, like 3 feet away. A grave situation surfaced. He had locked his child in his car - in our parking lot! He was very calm while talking to whoever he contacted. I wondered to myself: Should I report this to the Librarian in Charge? Should I have told the man that the Southfield Police are like 100 feet away? Maybe the cops were the last people he wanted to deal with. I'm not sure.

When a patron lets it rip in front of me, I rarely shoo them away. I have two switches: "Completely focused on patron" and "Completely ignoring patron" (one of the things I need to work on is a middle ground.) I should more often, because I don't need to deal with their baggage. But when you hear someone has locked their kid in the car, what the heck are you supposed to do?? And this guy's on the 3rd floor while the kid's stuck?!? Argh - what to do?!

In other news, a patron tried to start talking God to me and I cut that off right away. "I don't think I need to be discussing God right now." Besides, it was a REALLY stupid attempt at explaining God.