They wanted everything but sanity
Todd Frei
2.
“Are you a reference librarian?” (Said in restrained anger over speaker phone)
“Yes sir.” (No I wasn't)
“Are you sure you are a reference librarian?” (This time yelled)
“Yes.” (I am sure that I'm not a reference librarian)
Now, you may be wondering why I lied. For while I had never spoken to this man before, as soon as he spoke I instantly knew who he was: Mr. Constantia. Everybody knew who he was. There were numerous e-mails, and pages of documented encounters.
He claimed he had Aspergers. Also, OCD. We weren't sure if this was true. But what we did know was that he liked to yell in the phone. We knew he was demanding, degrading. And often his wife would yell at him in the background telling him to stop yelling at us.
I was there for the first call. It was around 8:30, thirty minutes before closing and Jess answered the phone. Everything was normal, until she repeated back to him his question to verify she knew exactly what he wanted (standard reference interview procedure), and he started yelling: “What are you? An idiot? That's what I just said! Do I have to waste my time repeating myself?” I sat next to her with nothing to do for the next thirty minutes watching her use every bit of her strength not to explode. I watched her dig her fingernails into her hands. I watched her choke a pen. I watched her clench her teeth. I watched her draw little stick figures killing themselves—stick necks in stick nooses and stick guns splattering stick brains. Then he wanted her to e-mail him the information. This meant the next time she worked—three days later (part-time library assistant)—she would have six e-mails from him. The first two asking a follow-up question, then the rest yelling and demanding why she wasn't responding.
So when Mr. Constantia called, I decided to deal with him. Because he was the white whale of patrons—impossible to assist, always destroying whoever had the privilege to talk with him. I wanted a shot. I had learned what not to do, and was convinced I could deal with this man. In the end I had no difficulties. He yelled and was quite angry—due to being run around and hung up on by a “bunch of idiots” at the Department of Agriculture—but never toward me. Maybe because I was a male, and he only felt comfortable degrading and belittling women. Or maybe the numerous threats to ban him from our services had tamed him a bit.
In case you're wondering what he wanted, the situation was this: he had recently been offered a job in a town about 45 minutes away. (By the way the job was as a middle school teacher.) But he needed to know the different routes he could take to this job. And since it would involve driving through country and farmland, he needed to know whether they would be any crop dusting of these fields. And if so, he needed the schedule of the crop dusting and the type of chemicals being used. As he said he had issues with chemicals (due to OCD), and if he couldn't avoid them he wouldn't be able to accept the job and would have to move into the mountains where there isn't any crop dusting.
Personally, (privately) I strongly encouraged the latter, as I didn't feel it would benefit the children to have him as a teacher in such formative and angst filled years of their life.
After I helped him he never called again. After months of yelling and abusing every person that worked at the library he was gone. Nobody talked about it. We were all afraid to speak his name; afraid it would bring him back. The Youth Service Librarians referred to him as He-who-must-not-be-named. Reader’s services called him the Dark Lord. I didn’t play this game. I was bored with all the Harry Potter hoopla. No, I didn’t read the last two books and I don’t plan to…yes, I’m sure they’re great…please praise them some more, that’s not annoying, and maybe we can talk about Lord of the Rings next...
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