5A: Reflection on Class 9-27-16

In the beginning of class, we got into our blog groups to discuss our customer service observation paper. I was surprised to learn that nobody had observed the same kinds of patterns or themes. I had written about customer service/approachability and the physical layout of the places. The one thing that we did have in common though, and so did the rest of the class, was that we all expected better customer service transactions. Not very many of us had follow-up questions from the worker. Follow-up questions are where a person is invited to come back in case they need further help. The worst customer service I had out of the four places was at the academic library. That surprised me. Librarians are trained to perform customer service, so why did it suck? Some of the others also had bad transactions at the libraries. For some reason, there is some kind of disconnect. You go to library school, learn what NOT to do, learn customer service skills, and yet once you have the librarian job, you do what you were told not to do and have poor customer service skills. WHY?! It’s the same thing involving the teaching of history in schools. In elementary through high school you learn a certain set of facts: Paul Revere warned the colonials that the British were coming, Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 and was the first person to discover the Americas. You get to college, and EVERYTHING, I mean pretty much EVERYTHING you ever learned about history is a LIE!!! Paul Revere was NOT the ONLY person to ride out and warn others about the British coming. Furthermore, the colonials did not call them the British (because the colonists themselves were British). Columbus was not the first person to discover America. Leif Erickson and his men had traveled to the Americas hundreds of years beforehand. So you go to college and learn the truth, but then when you go and teach history in the schools, you tell the students the same thing that you had first learned, all of which is a lie. Again, WHY?! What is up with this disconnect of going to college, learning how to do something or about something, and then once you have your job, you totally ignore what you learned in college. It does not make sense, at all.

One thing that has come up in class a couple of times is the name, Stuart Smalley. The professor and some classmates keep quoting him so I decided to look him up. I found out he is a fictional character from Saturday Night Live. The comedian who created him was Al Franken, who is now a senator for Minnesota. I find that funny; a comedian becomes a senator. I wonder if anybody can take him seriously. US politics sure do need a variety of people instead of the corrupt, stuffy politicians who need to retire.

One thing we discussed is that people will never go up to the reference desk and admit something personal, like “I have breast cancer, am I going to survive?” Instead, a person will say it is their friend who has the cancer. This is very true. I do this myself sometimes when I am buying something at the store. If someone asks me why I am buying a toy, I will be like “Oh, I am buying it for my nieces”, when in reality I am buying it for myself. I do not want to admit I have a wolf stuffed animal collection because I do not need to be accused of being childish. Or that I play video games (used to, no time anymore). For some reason, people think if you are not a teenager, then playing video games is childish, yet people older than me play them.

At the end of the class, we had a reference question to answer. It was a very fun exercise, and actually illustrates questions that reference librarians really do get every once in a while. And shows that if reference librarians do not have any knowledge of the question or knowledge of a source that could provide them with the answer then they could have a heck of a time finding the answer to a patron’s question. The question we were asked was this:  “I just heard that there was a president that had a top-secret operation over 4^th of July weekend one time. His moustache covered up the incision. Is this true? Which president was it? What happened?” I had heard of this once a long time ago, but I could not remember who it was and what had happened. Just putting in search terms for “president, moustache, 4^th of July operation” does not bear any results. I probably would have gone to Wikipedia and searched for every president, but my friend got it right away by going to the NPR website. The answer is Grover Cleveland. He had a tumor on his jaw. And that tumor and a piece of Cleveland’s jaw are tucked away in a museum that has also collected parts of Einstein’s brain. It is one thing to collect something that once belonged to a president, but a tumor? Gross.