You mean I have to sit here and take this abuse?

Oh, fucking christ do I have stories for this thread.

I worked IT in a public library for 7 long, grueling, hellish years before I finally caught a break and transitioned to the healthcare industry (still IT, but a much better industry/field/market/environment).

IT in public libraries inevitably means that, at some point, you're going to have to help the clueless, idiotic unwashed masses in their (generally futile) efforts to use the public computers. And the worst part was that we had to be sunshine-n-roses to them. Mind you, not too sunshine-n-roses, since it was tax money that funded us and not business revenue, but still. On a small side note, it was always hilarious to listen to the library patrons (who too commonly called themselves "customers") threaten to "take their business to another library." Whatever, shithead.

So anyway, being paid to be nice to people sucks. Being paid to be nice to stupid people sucks a whole helluva lot. And being paid to be nice to stupid people who do not fully realize the extent of their stupidity, and all the while being painfully aware of exactly the magnitude of idiot you're addressing, sucks to a degree few can properly fathom (about as few as exist stupid people who understand the degree of their own stupidity...bizarrely enough, it sucks about as much as these users were stupid).

And I need to clarify one thing here. This isn't "smug IT guy calling users idiots." Certainly there was an atmosphere of that, but it mostly was reserved for other library employees who were more like the typical clueless user you hear about in all those apocryphal stories about IT departments. The public users, though...*sob*...oh, god, the public users. Genuinely, truly, mind-bogglingly idiotic. And insane. To varying levels but certainly still insane.

We had the histrionic: A lady, initials of M.F. (I know, I know, too easy, but those really were the initials), would come in about once a week to use the computers to do her resumé or some shit like that. She always carried a fucking 10-pack of floppies, swapped about 7 of them in and out (this was well into the flash-drive era, mind you), and yet I never saw her work on more than one document. You had to be nice to this lady, because when things didn't work, she would break down and cry. Imagine seeing flannel-clad, bemulleted trailer trash cry, and you have an idea of what we were dealing with here. Kinda felt sorry for her, until the 30th time, at which point I had been dealing with her all 7 years of my tenure there and had pretty much entered Gregory House mode. "Yes, I'm sure it did eat your cover letter. Let me just go get the ipecac from the tape safe."

We had the obsessed. I mean obsessed. I dealt with that one both on and off the job as a personal consultant. That individual is one of...three...reasons I don't do personal tech support anymore (alongside a cheat and a guy who expected me not only to give him free lifetime support after the first call, but would literally speak gibberish to me and expect me to fix the problem). I honestly don't want to say much more about this one, partly because I'm afraid she'll kill me in my sleep or something. For serious.

We had the paranoid. This one was actually a friend of the family. My grandmother worked at the same library, and this was her friend's daughter. Suburbs of Chicago and it feels like fucking Alabama. Still. Apparently she went through a divorce and is now mortally terrified of her ex. To the point where anytime something happened that she didn't understand, she cried "identity theft" and threatened to call the police, her lawyer, the national guard... My mother knew this psycho as a kid and when I told her about this lady the first time I had to deal with her, my mum was in tears, rolling on the floor, unable to speak she was laughing so hard. Apparently some people never change and this was no exception.

And we had the just-plain-weird. Take a Zen Buddhist, a Hindu, a hippie, a practitioner of yoga, and a martial artist, roll all their philosophies into one, dress it in a grungy sweatsuit and deny it showers but once a week, and you have an idea of this guy. He once tried to realign the aura of one of our PCs by taping a comb (as in hair) to the monitor while he worked on it. No shit.

As for abusive customers (or patrons, in this case), there were plenty of those too. Mostly schoolteachers from the nearby high schools and primary schools. They thought they were owed something because schools and libraries go together but doncha know, schoolteachers are more important people so we have to be at their beckon call and do what they want because THINK OF THE CHILDREN. And of course I was just some lowly IT muppet, beneath their mention. I loooooooooooved oh-so-sweetly telling them "I'm sorry, that's against policy, you're not allowed to do that." 'Specially the summer right after I graduated, when the look on their faces of "don't I know you? Shouldn't --I-- be telling --you--what to do?" was fresh and delicious. Hey, I'm nothing if not spiteful. What was really funny, though, was seeing the self-inflated sense of importance of the schoolteachers meet the self-inflated sense of importance of the reference librarians. You know that physicists' paradox about an irresistible force meeting an immovable object? Yeah.

Nothing against schoolteachers or librarians on their own, but in the library environment, shit got vicious.

My favourite, though, was during the big fiasco over internet filtering a few years back. We had a toad patron who was very much of the opinion that the Internet should be censored. Some shit about kids losing their innocence (tell that to the pre-pubescent assholes who set the library's dumpster on fire the last summer I was there...yeah, that was a fun statement to give to the police). Calls me up while I'm managing large amounts of entropy in the computer lab and has me on the phone for half a fucking hour, drilling me about our filtering policy.

Oh, right, we didn't have a filtering policy.

Right, lady, that's great that you feel so strongly about keeping people stupid. In the meantime, let me do my fucking job, I'm not upper management and I have to go put in Reader Rabbit Freebases Shrooms for this whiny six-year-old.

So I'm trying to hand out CD-ROMs, sign people up for computers, and generally keep shit together and I'm hearing from the granddaughter of Rudolf Hess here about how it's somehow my fault that children in our community are being exposed to immoral filth on the internet. And she did this to everyone she dealt with: take the moral culpability, if you should choose to call it that, of the entire library and assign it to the individual she's talking to. Because I can help it somehow. Whatever.

I'm really glad to not be working there anymore. For the last 2 months or so I was pretty much in full-on House mode and all but dropped the courtesy bit once people started jerking my chain. Fuck 'em, I should've put on the asshole shoes ages prior.

As for my current job...wow. I'm truly hard-pressed to think of one time when a user hasn't been at least respectful of me as a human being and appreciative of what I can do for them. Amazing how different it is when real money is moving around. And my boss at the library always extolled the virtues of libraries as "low-pressure" environments. Bull bollocks, my blood pressure dropped through the floor when I switched to my current company.

Jam it back in, in the dark.