I saw a little girl cry today and I wanted to cry too.
If that happened every day, I would need a siphon leading into a bucket under the reference desk because I see a LOT of crying.
This was a little different! I think it was my fault she got in trouble! I had good intentions and taught this annoying little info desk harrasser how to use the catalogue to find her own books. She was cute the first twenty times she approached the desk in her prep school uniform, bouncing up and down impatiently to ask me for the same book she asked me for yesterday and the day before...only to huff and puff impatiently as I helped others...to lead me around and monopolize my time with incessant nattering informing me of this and that and everything that I obviously didn't know, and turning up her nose at every alternate suggestion. It was a VICTORY when I sat down with her at a public catalogue and invested some time into teaching her the catalogue, because before you know it, she was off, search and destroy was her motto.
Well, eventually I noticed that no matter who accompanies her to the library, no one really listens to her or pays any attention to her at all. True her mile a minute know it all dialogue is easy to ignore, becoming a vague humming, but your own flesh and blood??!! They made her! Today I showed her how to do an advanced search and returned to my desk. A few minutes later the mother strode in, found the little girl and said "we don't have time to look on the computer, the book is in the godammed K section where it always is!" (Nancy Drew) ...the girl burst into tears and followed her mother, arms folded across her chest, really quite suddenly upset. Good grief, I was upset by her mother's sharpness!
It was sucky because I felt badly for the mother and for the daughter. The daughter had every right to be taken back by her mother's spaz attack, and the mother had pretty good reason to be annoyed by her daughter (an extremely annoying child) but like I said - You made her! I think her annoyingness must be a plea for attention. Or maybe private school fosters that self-centred-know-it-all-anal-attitude in little girls? I'm not sure, but it was all too much emotion for a girl recovering from the flu. It made my palms sweat more than they already were!
1 comment:
I have sooooo many kids like this one in my teen area ... and I feel the same, because they often annoy the shit out of me but then I realize they are only doing it because they have no friends or their parents are mean. I count myself lucky, because while I was an annoying little girl too, at least I had people who listened to me.
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