For us librarians, or people interested in librarian embarrassments

[thewayne]

Reddit has a page for Librarians, actually several, but this is the one that I read daily. And someone asked for people to post their most embarrassing moment(s). And boy, did we reply!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Libraries/comments/1hwl1az/embarrassing_moments_as_library_professionals/

Comments

[disneydream06]

I read through a few and LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Pretty good stuff!

[devilc]

CRYING LAUGHING

[thewayne]

Oh, I knew you would. :-)

[darkoshi]

I had a good laugh at some of those last night. Had to finally force myself to close the page rather than keep scrolling down, so I could go to bed.

[thewayne]

Yeah, that's the problem with some Reddit pages.  Still, fun stuff.

[silveradept]

Those moments are…tame. But the really good ones only come out in person, among colleagues and practitioners, and often times only after there's been a little drinking. Because nobody is going to be the person who posts about the embarrassing thing and have someone at their workplace recognize it and ask why they posted it on Reddit.

(Also, many of the embarrassing stories are stories that involve the person who deliberately shows the ladies hardcore pornography under the excuse of needing help with their computer, or are the ones where the ladies had to throw the man out because he was deliberately masturbating in an unmistakable manner around them, or the one where the black clerk had to absorb racist and sexist language from a man she was throwing out for racist and sexist language. The kind of stuff that gets solidarity from other workers and frustration that library management refuses to permanently ban someone who is very clearly doing it to antagonize library staff, or who manages approximately two weeks of decent behavior after their latest ban and then returns to form, or the people who refuse to acknowledge they've been banned, proclaim loudly that the library staff are lying about them, and then steal library and other materials on their way out the door because their cards are blocked (because they're banned) and then come back in a few weeks and do it all again. Those are embarrassing, but not amusing in any way.)

That said, I have had wardrobe malfunctions happen at work through the mere act of sitting in a chair. I was wearing clean underwear, and I made a call as soon as I got off the floor to have a spare pair of trousers delivered from home. (This has happened twice to me in my career.)

[thewayne]

Fortunately, being an academic library, we don't really have much of a problem with people watching porn on our systems.  I'm ever so glad that I was so lucky to get my start at a university, I'm not sure I could handle the crap that you public librarians have to put up with.  I've only had one trouser tear, and it was back in the late '80s, IIRC, maybe early '90s.  Had to take an hour or so to drive home and change.