Patron Practices

What is that leads people to feel they haven't presented their library cards until they lay flat on the counter? It doesn't matter if you are reaching out to meet them, they will actually rush to get it slapped down before your hand gets in their way. It's like handing the card off is against the rules or something. And these aren't necessarily the upset patrons or those with a gruff presence--most of them aren't even aware of what they are doing. There's just some subconscious command to do it that way.

While we're on the subject of patron annoyances, one of my special pet peeves is those who want to read every book by a given author, but have no idea which ones they've already read. You show them the list of titles and they all sound familiar, but nothing for sure. So you find a description of each book one at a time--with Amazon or something since the catalog doesn't have blurbs for adult fiction. They sit and read each one thoroughly and still aren't sure. So you click and wait and click and wait, and for some reason they seem to blame you for not knowing which one they want next. If they're not going to get enough out of reading the book to even recognize it later, why bother in the first place?