Library Visit

I had a horrible experience with my librarian.  Do you remember the in-class activity we did in our second week?  Well I went into the library under the pretext that I haven’t read anything since high school and I wanted to change that.  There were no signs for the readers’ advisory or the reference desk and there were not any chairs in front of the reference desk for one to sit down and feel comfortable in.  I went up to the librarian and said, “I need help finding something to read.”  He asked me if I liked fiction or non-fiction and I said, “I wasn’t for sure.”  The librarian, Mike Williams, couldn’t handle this at all.  He muttered something like “we have 35,000 books” and his body language indicated he was put off.  At this point I was in complete shock.  I was not expecting this kind of rudeness and remained silent sticking to my story that I didn’t know what I wanted to read.  If he would have asked me I would have told him that I have never read for pleasure but he did not ask me.  He stonewalled me and kept asking if I wanted fiction or non-fiction.  I then asked him, “do you do this kind of thing?”  And his reply was, “I am not a reader’s advisory librarian. I am a reference librarian.”  Of course my character did not know what these terms meant.  Eventually I said, “I guess I like fiction.”  His reply, “well that narrows it down to half the library.”  He was condescending.  He then walked me over to the fiction area.  He mentioned that he like Clive Cussler but after this he said exasperated “but it doesn’t matter what I like.”  He talked about Tom Clancy and then I told him I liked the Band of Brothers series.  This should have been a bright light telling him I liked historical fiction but he just said then you might like Tom Clancy.  I talked about this transaction in my S550 class with Copeland and one of my classmates knew Mike.  She said he was a nice guy and he was really good with computers.  Although this might be true he is hurting his library, the patrons and our profession with his attitude and lack of people skills.