I have absolutely no right to complain. I did this to myself. To be perfectly honest, my ever becoming a librarian was a complete fluke. I went to college to become an English Professor, not an Information Guru! I admit it was laziness on my part that I didn't fight harder for a GTA position and that I breezed through my MLS, but the full implications of becoming a librarian did not hit me until it was too late.

Librarianship is a Service Industry: we provide the service of information gathering and delivery to every walk of life to grace the building. And we must do it with a smile and an approachable attitude.

You might be in a different situation than I have been. Maybe you work in a University library, where your patrons are students on a mission: retrieve the required text, no more, no less. Perhaps you work for a law firm where self-righteous lawyers and paralegals hound you for a reference they're "too busy/too important" to fetch themselves. Or possibly you work in a public library like I do, where you are inundated with mundane questions that make your head spin. Wherever you work, it's still a Service Industry and you must simply grin and bear it...

• Asking if you need your library card when there's a sign saying so between you and me
• People who think everything can be found online
• People who ask how secure my job is now that the Internet has taken off
• "Do you work here" while I'm sitting behind the Reference Desk
• Patrons who expect me to:
  • Do their research
  • Write their paper
  • Fill out their income tax forms
  • Tell them everything they need to know about getting a divorce (to save $ on a lawyer)
• Parents who think a library is a daycare, leaving their children:
  • Alone for hours on end
  • To be watched by staff, the glorified babysitters
  • Screaming bloody murder
• TAX SEASON
  • Every patron that walks past the forms table and asks me to print out the already-available-and-free form, then balks that they must pay for it, is taking chances with their health

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