LibraryLady: Broadband may be a luxury, but SUV’s are an extreme extravagance by comparison. Too many things have been re-clssified as necessities, from indoor plumbing to refrigerators to (obscenely, thanks to lack of mass transit) cars.

Mark: Thankx for pointing out the effect of value subtraction by signal-to-noise ratio dilution. I got more -done- in 1991 at 2400 bps.

I mean, we all have bad days, encounter difficult interactions with people (customers and coworkers, alike.) We are all entitled to complain. But, when the rants are personal attacks on people based on their weight, how they look or sound, etc., it is not defensible. He slams administrators, coworkers, volunteers, his city, and customers equally. In a few posts, he even goes to the extent of threatening physical violence (kicking people and running others over with his car.) Sounds like he is in dire need of some counseling.

And, shame on him, he did nothing to make his posts private! He used his name, mentioned his city, and basically names people he is slamming. He didn’t lock the posts or make them friends only. Once you make it known to your employer and coworkers how much you hate them, it is time to go. Why would any organization want him around knowing that he hates what he does, who he serves, and the people he works with.

This is definitely a cautionary tale. Be careful about what you do on the internet. It is public. Be mature.

I think that’s a really good point.

A lot of what we call technostress, I think of as really a management problem where people’s expctations of what can be done with technology from a management perspective and what can actually be done with technology realistically by staff are two very different things. When I worked in public libraries I was always beign told to do things with the public computers and the patrons that were totally unrealistic, both in their ideas of how patrons would respond and their ideas of how the technology even worked. When you try to explain that their ideas are unrealistic, you’re branded as “not a team player” which is horrible to hear for someone who works really hard, all the time, with very very imperfect systems.

Every time I see a TV commercial for some new technological marvel, whether it’s a cell phone or an operating system or some feature of something we already have, I sort of wince knowing that there’s a huge gap between the idealized version of the technology presented and how it’s going to work in real life. Just the difference between how our library PCs work and how a patron’s PC works at home is enough to point that out. Every difference needs to be explained to savvy users and is taught to novice users as “this is how a computer works”

It’s terrible and there is no understanding that this is the bulk of what a lot of librarians do with very little training or guidance and even less empathy to how difficult that job is. I made a decision at my job that I would not get yelled at for my job and when someone started yelling, I made them talk to my boss. Not a team player, I guess.

When all librarians hear from administration is “remember customer service” and “the customer is always right”, it makes us feel like bad librarians (or bad people) when we have a frustrating day, or when the cumulative effects of frustration begin to burn us out. I know that (in a past job), displaying any attitude that was not relentlessly cheery and upbeat about all patrons, no matter what the situation (up to and including assault) was construed as “having a bad attitude”. Even asking about how to cope with stress was seen as “not being a team player”, and met with reprisals. The sad fact is that some librarians have few other outlets than the library_mofo community on Livejournal (and other, similar entities). No wonder nathangphd sounded angry and frustrated in his post! (though I’ll bet — without knowing him — that his public presentation took a different tone than did his post)

When you think about it, librarians get little recognition from the public as being professionals, often deal with continually slashed budgets, are vastly underpaid for the amount of education (and student loan debt) that we have, and work in a service profession with plenty of public contact — it is no surprise that we get stressed and burnt out at our jobs. Even the best of library administrations generally offer little in the way of support, and the worst often compound the problem. I think a constructive exploration of ways for librarians and administrations to combat this problem has been needed for quite some time. I’d write it, but I’m honestly as baffled as everyone else.

The point I was making is that richer libraries can afford — if they disagree with the stipulation that they must filter — to forego funding. Poorer libraries can’t, and have to put up with bad filtering, often poorly implemented as Meg mentions above. Most libraries that I have been in that filter have no visible notification that adults can have the filters disabled. Many libraries don’t even have the power to disable the filters at the time a rquest is made.

The Supreme Court case was decided prima facia, basically saying that as the law was written, it’s not unconstitutional. There is still room, according to (I think) Justice Stevens for an “as applied” challenge — meaning that the law as applied restricts constitutionally protected speech. No one has seen fit to challenge the law yet, but data gathered by the ACLU and others seems to point towards the law being applied in ways that violate people’s free speech rights. It’s for a court of law to determine, all I can do is point to what the courts have already said and how that affects poor people.