every library has one: a know-it-all, loud-mouth employee. ours is in her early thirties. today she pissed me off.
she is a smart girl and she makes sure we all know it. she is very plain, never wears make-up and dresses poorly. she often wears faded t-shirts to work and short pants that i would not even wear to the supermarket (and i am NO fashion plate). she often tells bizarre tales that always put her in the most radiant light. for instance, her gorgeous dentist has asked her to coffee several times, once immediatley after he did some dental work for her. he asked her to join him for lunch. right. she knows the firemen in her town and several of them have 'looked at her' and flirted with her. when she pulls in to a certain gas station, a policeman she knows will personally pump gas for her...and this has happened frequently. we all let it go over our heads. oh, did i mention she has a mustache?
once she told us that a cop pulled her over because, he said, her car was the same make, color and model of someone who was 'wanted'. not only did the cop apologize profusely for stopping her, he flirted with her and asked for her phone number! did i mention she drove a blue Hyundai? is Hyundai the new crookmobile?
she has been pissing off a cocircworker ever since we had Millennium up and running. the circworker would ask the lady who trained us a question and the loud-mouth would stop whatever she was doing and proceed to tell her coworker what to do. she has done this to me, too. the other day, the lady who trained us found out a new 'trick' we could use as a shortcut when filling holds. she told me. when my cocircworker arrived for her shift, i asked our trainer to show her the 'trick'. loud-mouth, who was not included in the conversation, piped up, "oh, i already knew that. i showed so-and-so last night." we all rolled our eyes. she has said, "i already knew that" more times in the past couple of weeks than i care to count.
the reasons why she pissed me off today are relatively minor: she would not place a hold for a patron and insisted the patron write down all the info so she could place the hold later. what really got me about that was she told the patron that's the way we do it now with the new system when infact, we have been placing holds for patrons as they stood before us, waiting. i did several holds today while the patron waited and so did she. She cancelled a hold on a patrons DVD because we no longer can put holds on our DVDs with the new system, yet we have been honoring holds that transferred over from the old system. she refused to hold the item which made no sense to me and i told her so. little things like that.
at one point we were talking about which place we would order-out from tomorrow. the last saturday that we ordered out, eveyone else wanted pizza though i was dying for a club sandwich. no problem. i ordered a spinach pie from the pizza place. i ended up getting sick. still, i was glad to compromise. today we were lamenting the fact that so few places deliver. i mentioned that we could always have chinese food and the loud-mouth shot me a sarcastic, "i don't DO chinese!" well, fuckin-la-di-da. if everyone else wants chinese on ONE freakin' saturday, buck up! compromise! that's what set me over the edge.
the last thing that pissed me off and often pisses me off is the way she makes announcements over the PA. she screams them. SCREAMS! i cringe. my ears ring afterwards. we have a small library. everyone else speaks over the PA in a slightly phoney, cheerful voice, at an appropriate decibel level. her voice is harsh and the announcement sounds more like a threat than a request or a reminder.
so, this is what ticked me off today. tomorrow, we shall see....
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