General Etiquette > All In A Day's Work

Changing How You Interact With Reality Challenged Patrons Post Script #29

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Yarnspinner:
That was the best title I could come up with.  "I don't care about your stinkin' zombie apocalypse" didn't really explain the issue.

How do you shut down a "friendly" (as in: too nice to the point of exhaustion) relationship with the reality challenged to make it more professional/friendly.  We have always been very kind to our reality challenged patrons.  Some of them we have probably been way too nice to before we discovered just how completely cut off they are from reality.  There are several who come in on a daily basis and because we have been kind in the past, they are really taking advantage.  I could write a treatise on all of them, but I will use Ninja as an example because of I have blogged about her before.

She is a sweet, well meaning, self styled tough girl  (approximately 28 years old) who comes with a load of emotional and mental baggage that causes her to "become" the hero(ine) of whatever manga she is obsessed with at the moment.  When I met her four years ago, I really belileved her tale of being a street pickpocket who saw her mother killed...until I started reading her favorite manga myself and realized where she got the story.  Of late, she has become a paranormal expert (who is trying to convince us to hire her to do programming on demons and spirits) with a special fascination for zombies.

Combined with her usual way of greeting everyone (shouting out "HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!!!!  I'm CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!") this zombie obsession is beginning to grate.  Apparently Ninja believes, 150 percent, a series of viral videos that are almost certainly hype for upcoming film projects.  She quotes a clever CDC site in which the CDC teaches disaster preparedness using a zombie attack as an example.  She talks long and hard about how in the upcoming months the "evil satanic government" is going to release a virus to turn us all into zombies.  (Based on my experience, I think that has already happened.)  She warns us to stockpile water and guns.  And she ends every blasted lecture with the reminder "If I get bitten, I want you to shoot me right between the eyes to make sure I don't turn into a zombie."  (One of my coworkers muttered something to the effect that she could make sure it wouldn't happen by killing Ninja NOW.)

It probably sounds very mean on our part, but we are absolutely shredded by the time she leaves...and she doesn't leave and stay away...she keeps coming back....and coming back....sort of like, you know, a zombie.

We don't know how to get rid of her.  We smile and wave and go back to whatever we were doing.  We smile and nod when she rattles on and on.  (At least when other patrons come to the desk, she stops talking and steps back so they can ask their questions.  This is more than Mr. Titanic does.  Mr. Titanic will stand at the desk for HOURS shouting about the boat, the errors in the movie and--oh yes--how maybe some of the survivors were turned into zombies.  He won't go away even when asked to.) 

We are aware that we helped to create this monster by listening to her earlier tales and just being nice.  We have been nice to the point that Ninja is up front surprised that none of us have visited her website to contribute to her paypal account so that--and I quote--"I can keep writing my novel and doing my art and still make money to add to the check I get from social services."  I'm not ranting here, I am just trying to demonstrate how familiar she--and others like her--have become because we were never able to establish boundaries.  Or discovered too late that we SHOULD have established boundaries.

So I guess the etiquette question here is "Can you step back gracefully from a relationship started with a person who is mentally ill and with whom you were professionally friendly before it became clear just how sick they were?  Is there a way to reestablish boundaries after you've allowed the fences to be breached?"  We have tried, gently, to explain that we have work to do.  She offers to help.  We tried to point out that the CDC site was not really a zombie disaster planning site and that the videos are hype...and were told "That's what you've been brainwashed into thinking."

If anyone has successful tips, my colleagues and I promise to try them out on Ninja...and Mr. Titanic and Project Runway Guy and The Queen of Djibouti (although we haven't seen her in a while) and our various conspiracy theorists.  My immediate supervisor just looks away when she appears and doesn't even respond when she talks to him...which strikes me as somewhat rude as well, but, hey, HE doesn't get his soul sucked dry by her emotional vampirism.

Any ideas.  Seriously. 

On the other hand, if there IS a zombie apocalypse in the near future, I promise to eat crow and feel silly for not having bought a cross bow and bolts. 

Thank you...and if you got all the way through this, have some virtual chocolate chip cookies on me.

EMuir:
Mmmm, cookies.

At this point I think that if you say "I have work to do, I don't have time to talk," and they continue, you can follow up with "Please leave the desk, I need to work." If they continue, say "If you do not leave the desk I will call security." Then do.  If the person is ranting at the air, call security and have them removed.  As a library patron I don't want to see that behavior either!

I don't know if there's a way to keep the relationship friendly.  Their goal is to have an audience. You could try totally ignoring them, but it sounds like that doesn't work either.  Honestly, it's a library and they are disturbing others, that's what security is for.

Iris:
What do you MEAN you haven't bought your crossbow yet??!!?? Are you NUTS?? Obviously I can't count on YOU to shoot me through the head when I'm bitten!!

Kidding! (Sorry, couldn't resist) The only advice I can offer - if you are not happy to just ignore her and walk away - is to be very, very distant and cool. As in, dial back the nods and smiles to grunts. Limit eye contact. Continue working as though she isn't there, occasionally throwing out the odd "Oh" or "Mmm-hmm" without really breaking the flow. Just don't be fun anymore. Hopefully she'll find someone else to obsess at. I know that sounds really callous, but it seems as though you've tried everything else.

Oh, and thanks for the cookies  :)

LadyL:
I sympathize. I ran a research study and while we excluded people with schizophrenia, bipolar, etc. we didn't exclude for personality disorders so we still got some people who were paranoid or had major boundary issues. I had one woman who had major delusions about her poetry career and kept offering to read me her poetry when I needed to be collecting saliva samples from the person there for the next appointment. I had other people borderline stalking me. These things came up all. the. time.

First, you need an official policy about what you can and can't help patrons with, i.e. looking up books on viruses? Within the bounds of your job. Making polite chit-chat for 2 minutes? Same. But indulging someone for longer than that, donating to someone's paypal, etc. - "I'm sorry, that's against policy and I could lose my job. I need to get back to work."

You need to start setting firm, professional boundaries. Start with what we call "redirects" - "maybe later, I need to get back to this" and that sort of thing but then quickly and firmly escalate to "I can't do that. I will get fired. I'm going to get back to work now."

People who are disconnected from reality often need firmer (and at the same time gentler) redirection than "normal" people. Your ninja friend may sulk or lash out - this isn't your problem. You may want to see if you can get her caseworker's number if you can, in case she starts flipping out or something. In my case we had a very clearly outlined referral system (one of the licensed clinicians would do outreach).

Essentially you want to defer to "official policy" rather than making it about you as a person drawing a personal boundary, if that makes sense. Blame it on some nameless entity who created a policy that you have no control over - this appeals to the "us vs. them" way of thinking paranoid people tend to have, actually.

Winterlight:
As a government librarian who gets lots of calls from reality challenged people (tinfoil hat people really do exist) we have an office policy whereby we rescue each other from callers and visitors who do not get the point. Can you have a staff member in back come and pull you out after X number of minutes? (We IM each other so someone knows you're in trouble and starts the clock.)

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