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Anyone else think this BBC article is in poor taste?

143 replies

cheeseismydownfall · 25/04/2020 07:21

Or am I just being miserable?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-52412655

I don't know, I just really don't like the idea of publicly sharing someone's mistake just to deliver a "light relief". The poor cleaner might be absolutely mortified and it seems really intellectually snobbish to have a god laugh just because someone doesn't understand the bloody dewy decimal system. Really nasty I think.

OP posts:
NOTANUM · 25/04/2020 10:30

When my husband told me this story last night, it seemed heartwarming. A cleaner - trying to go the extra mile - took the initiative and cleaned all the books. So it didn't work out but she's the rockstar for trying so hard. Most, including me, wouldn't.
But it's all in the telling, isn't it?

ProfessorHasturLaVista · 25/04/2020 10:38

Or how about “we have amazing cleaning staff, look how hard they’ve worked doing a deep clean for us! Keeping staff and customers safe when we eventually reopen!”
Cleaners only do bare surfaces in my LA. They wouldn’t be expected or permitted to remove whole shelves of books - library staff would do it then put them back on.

YinMnBlue · 25/04/2020 10:38

How many people here would be OK about their boss or someone in their workplace publishing their mistakes on Twitter?

Wildly unprofessional.

And I agree with the PP Librarian: if you empty a cleaner in a specialist environment (like a library) you make sure they understand about how to handle and clean around books, what to do with any books they find left under stacks or tables and why.

It is a serious training deficiency that shows up the managers, and also demonstrates that they do not see cleaning staff as part of the team.

Snobby on more than one level, and it has come back to bite them.

DrowsyDragon · 25/04/2020 10:43

@EarringsandLipstick hi! And solidarity! I think we can agree that someone may well be embarrassed and also be in the wrong. Especially now it’s so so public. This’ll why if I tweet about something where someone is the butt of the joke, the person who screwed up is me!

I do wish people would stop being so dismissive about the work involved in libraries and looking after a collection. I’ve worked in them for over a decade and yes what’s happened here is more work than what would happen in a normal day browsing and how libraries handle and organise stock is not really comparable to a private collection of books in a house. That all being said, the cleaner does not deserve to be publically embarrassed. And as I’ve said throughout, this is either a failure of training - the job wasn’t properly explained or a failure to comprehend in which case it should have been dealt with ASAP but privately.

NellMangel · 25/04/2020 10:45

Did they expect the cleaner to familiarise themselves with their indexing system after cleaning the shelves and books? Wankers.

EggysMom · 25/04/2020 10:49

I thought the whole thing was fake self-promotion. The other rows of books are clearly not re-sorted to size order.

EmpressMcSchnozzle · 25/04/2020 10:52

The situation could have been handled better, and under normal circumstances the books would probably have been boxed up by the library staff and put back by them as well as it's not fair to expect a cleaner to have to do that as well, they've got enough to do.

From a librarian's point of view (yes I am one), though, it's not unlike wandering into a supermarket to discover all the tins and jars with red labels, say, and all those with green labels, and and all those with yellow labels had been clumped together rather than by contents.

Not all libraries use Dewey either, specialist libraries like medicine and law have specially designed classifications as Dewey isn't usually specialised enough. And if you're a new nursing assistant, say, popping in before your shift to have a look at information about, I don't know, maybe the underlying anatomy of the respiratory system, or the difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes, you're probably not going to know the author or have the time to search through thousands of books on the shelves alphabetically. Even with the help off the catalogue. Which, I've observed over the years, most people don't use anyway. And yes you could ask a staff member, if you can find one, although thousands of library jobs have been lost since 2010. When books are organised by subject you stand more chance of finding something relevant.

And anyone who thinks public libraries don't have e-book collections, online magazines, newspaper databases or other resources like geneaology databases these days might be surprised if they took a peek at their local library web pages to see what's on there. Our local service has audio books as well. And I'm normal times they do all kinds of education and community focused sessions. Coding, genealogy, gadget shops, toddler tales...

Oh and in case anyone's wondering, with the exception of 2 larger services I worked for, I always cleaned my own library shelves as the cleaners had enough to do. Though we never had to have a deep clean.

EmpressMcSchnozzle · 25/04/2020 10:54

Two unintentional ands there. Plus other typos I'm sure I've missed. Sorry, grammar and typo police. Phone keyboard only suitable for microscopic pixies.

ProfessorHasturLaVista · 25/04/2020 10:57

Ok Drowsy. It just wouldn’t take me long to sort those shelves out as they have been removed shelf by shelf and as long as they were in decent order to start with there’s not much rearranging to be done. For instance, I can see a clump of Peter May books together so they wouldn’t need moving individually.
My experience is in larger public libraries though, so perhaps it’s a skill that comes from that. Hundreds of customers a day in a popular section like Crime does see the shelves out of strict alphabetical order ime.

Gwenhwyfar · 25/04/2020 11:04

"Did they expect the cleaner to familiarise themselves with their indexing system after cleaning the shelves and books? "

No, but I find it odd that she didn't know there was any kind of system at all.
Would you go to an office and re-arrange the filing cabinet unless you'd been asked to?

HungryForSnacks · 25/04/2020 11:04

Totally agree. The tweet seemed very classist and patronizing to me. It pissed me off

YetAnotherSpartacus · 25/04/2020 11:06

My partner did this to my mini-library. He thought it was what everyone did. I shelve by category. He didn't get it.

Mummyoflittledragon · 25/04/2020 11:10

It was really cruel to tweet this. I saw twitter yesterday.

Notredamn · 25/04/2020 11:14

The tweet doesn't even make sense so it fails in having the superior tone it was aiming for. If you're trying to be cutting, get your spelling and tenses right.

Gwenhwyfar · 25/04/2020 11:15

"How many people here would be OK about their boss or someone in their workplace publishing their mistakes on Twitter?"

I've had it happen actually. Wasn't impressed when the person could have just complained to me.

x2boys · 25/04/2020 11:19

nothing to do with that @QueenWinterWinterfell it's the fact the Librarian has decided to tweet the cleaners mistake ,which makes it unprofessional ,it's a private matter and should be dealt with accordingly not on social media .

JudyCoolibar · 25/04/2020 11:24

Why they felt the need to run to the news is beyond me. Bit nasty actually.

Nobody "ran to the news". Someone did a tweet which they probably thought only a few people would see, and it got picked up.

LynetteScavo · 25/04/2020 11:24

If I'd been cleaning the library I would have put the books back on the shelf I took them off. I wouldn't have made things better or worse.

The cleaner has gone above and beyond what she could have done by placing the books in some sort of order. Placing the books back in the correct place was never, ever the cleaners job.

louderthan · 25/04/2020 11:29

Public libraries don't use Dewey for fiction anyway. That section is arranged alphabetically and usually by genre. Really no hardship to put them back in alphabetical order.

hapagirl · 25/04/2020 11:48

I agree. It’s has sneery undertones and I don’t find it heart warming either.

LilacTree1 · 25/04/2020 11:50

Yes, it’s nasty.

MitziK · 25/04/2020 12:09

That's a really shitty thing to do. Firstly on the part of the woman who tweeted it to make her mates laugh. And then on the part of the BBC for opening it up for people worldwide to criticise the cleaner for it/laugh.

Branleuse · 25/04/2020 12:30

Can someone link the actual tweet please

Or at least say who im supposed to be searching for

PleasantVille · 25/04/2020 12:31

Can someone link the actual tweet please

It's in the OP

LilacTree1 · 25/04/2020 12:37

I have this vision of all the snobs laughing at it.