The first time was when I was concerned a patron had urinated onto some furniture and a chair, no puddle just smell. I was told to never complain about smells, that we are to only respond if a patron complains to us, and so forth. I took some if the hand cleaning solution we used, put it under my nose to burn my nostrils, and went back to shelving. Oh. And this was the teen area with no teens present due to smell.
The second time happened over 2 weeks. The same teen area had a patron with many of their belongings. This patron took up the entire 6 person desk, and enjoyed watching porn. Also, smell again. The teens? In the children's area or outside. They didn't even go by to pick up a book. So, for two weeks I observed this. To top it off the teen librarian also observed this, as they looked directly at the table the patron had taken over. Every day I got more mad. One patron shouldn't mean an entire section is off limits. Who the hell expects a 14 year old teen to know what words to say and complain to us when adults don't? Remember, librarians couldn't make a complaint about a patron. Only fellow patrons could.
The third thing that led to me quitting occurred during those two weeks. The highest ranking person, so everyone's boss, raised her voice and kicked out a teen using the computers to play with his friends. He was banned from the library for a few days. Why was the teen there? First, his school was across the street, and, second, our teen area with computers was taken over by the adult patron who came in early to camp out. Why was he loud? Cause the teen librarian couldn't do any programming to work with this group of teens as the teen area was unwelcoming.
Fourth was an email about how we can't prosecute someone for public masturbation unless we see the sex organ. NOPE I was not hired for that!
So, I quit. I told myself if I couldn't handle this, I couldn't handle public librarianship. I would need to see if academic or special is better cause I'm not a social worker. I've now been in academic for years, and also talked and visited other public libraries. I realized it was that branch I hated, those rules I hated, and not actually doing the work. My friends always had bosses who backed them up and made sure the teens area was for teens. They could complain about a patron causing a disruption and be heard. I felt my branch would only do something when assaults occurred, which they did, or if we saw a patron mastubating plus their sex organ in use.