Going to one's local public library should be a pleasant experience. Unfortunately, as is the case with any public setting, one's experience can be profoundly affected by the actions and behavior of random strangers. You could be in a movie theater, a coffee shop, or the post office and find similar entitled behavior from Karens, parents, and kids that has the potential to ruin your day. Let's take a moment to assess the myriad of ways in which the same phenomenon can occur in public libraries.…

Who will be the next Harry Potter? Such a question was unthinkable to anyone who grew up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Harry Potter books, movies, merch, theme parks, and Halloween costumes, just to name a few, are among the highest-grossing media franchises of all time. Anyone from that era would’ve told you: “Harry Potter is Daniel Radcliffe.” Image via @gayrauder In the original film series, the young wizard Harry Potter is played by Daniel Radcliffe. His school friends were Emma Wa…

via BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash In the span of just a few years, we've gone from barely understanding what AI does to seeing it used everywhere. Your inbox is likely chock-full of companies bragging about their latest AI updates. On photo editing sites, AI generation is touted on the home page. X, formerly known as Twitter, has an AI named "Grok," while Google has the cutesy "Gemini." They want you to talk to these artificial beings, ask them questions, and even let them be your personal ass…

What would your boss do if they found out you read books in your spare time? It's a pretty harmless item to have around the workplace, right? Many bosses would assume you brought that book to read during your commute or your lunch break. I'm sure many would prefer that to employees being on their phones anyway! But this person's boss found some books laying around the office, and she took that personally. This person's supervisor sounds like both a snoop and a micromanager. She went and searche…

This boss is quite literally not the brightest bulb. He seems like the kind of person who cuts costs at every possible moment, which as you can imagine, is not making the employees very happy. A lot of workplaces operate on a tight budget, but some managers take this way too seriously. They'll either say there's no money to fix workplace issues , or they'll wait until the issue can no longer be ignored before they finally decide it's worth looking into. This person, u/MillyHughes, shared that t…

In Gandolf we trust.

This voice-over artist is clearly a professional. When they noticed typos in a book they were going to read aloud for a client, they fixed the typos for him. Sounds simple, right? That was a kind thing for u/pumaFGT to do, actually. They were taking on more work than they needed to for no extra charge. Too bad their client was annoyed at the way the book turned out… Up next, these people revealed the baffling reasons they got in trouble, like one person who shared that, “In driver's education I…

Playground logic persists in adulthood in many ways. There's always a king of the hill, some kid with glasses getting annihilated on the dodgeball court, and a snarky class clown running around screaming ‘nana-nana-boo-boo’! When you're at odds with another ‘kid’ on the blacktop, the mature thing to do is walk away and let it go. But in a world that's not so different from Lord of the Flies, sometimes the only way to get proper payback is to stoop down to your bully's level

Good deeds are a dime a dozen, but this school really gave it its all so that kids would get great Christmas gifts from their parents who did not have a lot of money. Unfortunately, along comes a Grinch, today known as a Karen, and has to ruin it for everyone. In this case, many Karens. Let's start at the beginning… One school used to organize a toy store for families in need, and this store would be stocked to the brim with all kinds of donations. The parents could shop there and get new toys…

High school memories arise from time to time, evoking mixed feelings, and causing me to wonder, why does anyone ever say that they are the best years of your life? The teachers never liked me all that much, being the hyper kid I was, who despised homework and could not focus for one minute in class, and the other students kind of bored me. Maybe it was the school itself, who knows? Perhaps others have had better luck. In any case, I can remember that when students broke the rules, the rest of t…

Bookish kids will always remember the day they got their library card. Perhaps it's because this is the first card you ever authenticate with a signature at the bottom, or perhaps it's because you had unlimited access to all the books in the world and finally had a friendly old lady who was willing to point you towards your next adventure. And everyone knows that friendly librarians are the ultimate pseudo-granny.

Talk about a birthday party gone wrong!

The days of office spaces decked out with personal photos, tchotchkes, books, and scattered papers are gone. In today's modern officeplace , lots of people just use their laptops. There's no need to have stacks of papers to go through when you do all your work digitally. And most office workers communicate through instant messaging or email, so you can ditch that cup of pens and paper clips. For this employee, however, their boss actually had an issue with the books they brought to read while o…

How are these people wired to think that yelling at an underpaid teenager is going to change anything?

If you're a reader, you know there's nothing worse than being interrupted.

After this indie bookseller posted about an unthinking mystery customer, the internet read this rude customer to filth. On her Twitter account, bookseller Rebecca George shared the real-life background of what goes on behind the scenes at a small business. It's not like the mega-stores and online giants — every penny counts in small business, and people's livelihoods are on the line. George tweeted about a customer who unthinkingly returned a large order, and wrote about the cost it was having…