The "Workplace"

I was raised in a house of tiptoe-ing--my father is a grumpy man sensitive to noise, and my mother was accommodating.  Surprisingly, despite hating this sensitivity in my childhood, I’ve ended up with the same condition as an adult.  (Yep, it’s a psychological condition called misophonia.)

I first saw it emerging when I was in college--if someone had a cold or allergies on exam day, you could bet my jaw ached from grinding my teeth by the end of the class period.  Since then it’s become terrifically acute, sharpened by noises emitted from the homeless and cell phone owners of San Francisco.  Here in Carlsbad it feeds itself on my sis-in-love’s enjoyment of coffee or tea and our neighbor’s abuse of her sound system.

My iPod has always served as a refuge (save for the tea slurping, which I usually have to endure).  Since I work independently on writing and educational software consulting, there’s a certain measure of sanity to be gained from working in a noise-free/noise-controlled environment.  If you were to search for a business or organization that should grant you some form of quiet work environment, what location would you think of first?  A cafe?  A bar?

Or would you go with a time-tried tradition of the local library?

Anymore, the cafe or the bar might be quieter.

Mind you, I am surprisingly not talking about children in libraries.  Remarkably, in all three branches of the Carlsbad City Library, the children are the most often shushed and the quietest of the patrons, and, remarkably too, the ones I not only can handle but enjoy listening to.  (I have this habit of attending children’s movies in the theatre so I can hang out with kids.  The movie is just a bonus.)

The children walk into the libraries hushed, reverent.  They probably have been waiting a whole two days since the last visit on story hour to come back and check out something else, to peek at another world.  They are a joy to watch.  Being a regular myself, I love seeing regular visits from the kids.  Even the teenagers that start to stream in for study groups after three o’clock are mindful of being quiet.

Senior citizens are comfortably silent as well.  I have gotten a routine picture of the woman who shops the dollar books for sale on Mondays, the man who stacks his hold selections gently on the corner of my table, the books and media covered in typing paper bearing his name and bound in rubber bands, and another gentleman, who looks like an East Indian version of Spencer Tracy, who methodically works through all of the newspaper subscriptions.  When they all go the way of virtuality--the dollar books, the hold selections, the newspapers--I hope God takes these gentle souls to a place where paper is still dreamed.

The young, the old, the bookends, if you will, of a life.  They respect the holiness of the this place.

Sadly, there’s a wide span of the population left that couldn’t give a rat’s patoot about the quality of sound (or striving for absence of it).  They sit with each other as though at a cafe, sometimes not even using their “inside voices.”  They talk on their cell phones.  They eat three-course meals from noisy Taco Bell bags.  They strike up forty-five minute whine and cheese festivals with the librarians, who vent right back.  At one point, I overheard a patron approach a librarian and ask her to “shush” another noisier patron.  For twenty seconds, I was grateful to my fellow patron, until I heard the librarian’s response:  “Oh, libraries don’t work that way anymore.”

Apparently, the quiet library is going the way of dollar books, selections on hold, and paper newspapers.

*****

Carlsbad Library didn’t always have this atmosphere.  As recently as last August I found myself sitting in San Francisco Libraries wishing, homesick for the quieter and better-behaved Carlsbad counterpart.  The only way to escape noise at a San Francisco Library branch was to find one with study or conference rooms and sign up or schedule them.  Again, the big culprits of noise were adults between college age and retirement.  Not that anyone got shushed there, either.  San Francisco is supposed to be progressive.

But as recently as Thanksgiving I started seeing a change in Carlsbad as well.  Now I go to the last known refuge--the genealogy floor of Georgina Cole Branch.  There you get dirty looks for the sniffles.  There are a lot of senior citizens up there.  I often move up there after starting out somewhere else in the building--it’s not the world’s fault that I have this condition, and I try to keep it out of the conversation that pops up in the world.

I do miss the children, though, and their occasional whisperings of wonder between the cracks of intrusive racket the adults throw around.