Too many chiefs

The worst thing about telling someone 'No' here at the Circ Desk is accidentally being overruled by a coworker when the patron returns an hour later and asks the next person he catches at the helm. Sure, a lot of our rules are hard and fast, but the problem is that even those are fungible if the patron is persistent enough and the supervisor in a sufficiently sympathetic mood. But this is the basic internal conflict for a librarian (or, in the evenings and on the weekends, the highest-ranking library assistant): you want to remain relatively strict as far as policies and procedures are concerned, so as not to get bullied by every other self-important jerk; but at the same time you do want people to get the information they need, when they need it.

This morning a patron came in wanting to know if he could take a peek at a book that was on the Hold Shelf for another person - apparently he had a deadline for a paper and this was the only copy of the book in the Harvard Library system. I felt bad for him, but I told him that our policy was to treat a book on the Hold Shelf as if it were checked out to the patron under whose name it was filed, and that it was a policy that we were particularly strict about. Well, I guess he didn't like my answer, so he came back while I was out to lunch and tried again with one of my colleagues and managed to get the book in question, which he was busy consulting at the desk when I returned.

Now here I am, feeling like a doofus for having told him 'No' when it's obvious to him that I was just being the stereotypical library ass. Of course there will be times when I'm the benevolent one who unwittingly overturns another supervisor's spot judgement, so it's not all bad. Indeed, it's far better from a 'customer service' point of view for the person on duty at that time to have the ability to discern and decide - it just stings to have someone look at me like I'm Snidely Whiplash for insisting on our policy, that's all!