I am feeling peevish today, sorry shiny readers. One of my biggest pet peeves with students is that they don’t bother to learn the names of things. Who is your instructor? I dunno, she’s got brown hair and works on Mondays. What book are you looking for? That business one with the spiral edge. WHICH class that I taught last week that you missed because you went to the beach with your baby daddy?

I teach students that this is akin to calling information and asking for the digits of your friend, you know, she has blonde hair and she lives on the Eastside. Do they really expect that the operator would think that was enough information to locate their friend and connect them to her?

I’m not so concerned about the students I teach, I think they get it, at least judging by the laughs. It’s the students who just breeze by for 30 seconds, deal with a student worker who is happy to oblige their incomplete request, and waltz out again. There’s no room in that interaction for the pushy librarian to start insisting they learn what a call number is. Or a course number. Something specific.

Although I sometimes felt like it was a real barrier to access, I do understand why other libraries I have worked for have flat out refused to aid any student who couldn’t be bothered to learn a call number. “No, we don’t have a course reserve called ‘that one math book’. Please see the reference librarian to learn how to request materials.” Of course that’s fairly pedantic, I think anyone would be right in pointing out the flaws in that method.

But some days, some days you really just want to do it anyway…