Case in Point

Not an hour after posting this morning, I got fresh material from someone who did exactly what I predicted, verbally lynching me for two sentences on a personal blog. They put so much effort into their sermon hoping that people would read it that I'm going to be nice and put it front and center, with the key points in bold:

"I am appalled at your insensitive comments regarding the Lauren Spierer case. While I understand the points you were making concerning the media, your choice of wording displays some sort of hostility towards this girl and those that miss her (90 pound blond....wasted....tiresome....make her corpse surface faster...) As a parent and a library professional I would suggest you seriously consider some of your career plans that you noted in an earlier posting - you mention becoming a manager someday. Good managers never forget that they are managing people and good library managers never forget they are serving the public who use the institution and not the IT or book collections within the building. Your tone is cynical and your criticism of how people treat you as they interact with you as customers tells me that you should stay away from contact with the public, as you will only give the institution you work for a bad reputation. Humanity as well as technical expertise is needed in the IT/Library world if we are to hope that Libraries will continue on in this century. Otherwise we may find our customers preferring to get their IT fixes at the local Apple/Microsoft/or whatever else there is rather than have to interact with someone like you. I appreciate that you have created this blog and are in no obligation to provide it at all - hey, it's your blog after all - but today it showed up in a simple google search in the first page of results for news on Lauren Spierer and it is probably safe to say that someone who cares about her and her family read it and now wonders about why libraries would employ a person with an attitude like yours. Lose the cruel tone please, it doesn't come over as witty or clever, just plain nasty."

Now, if you know anything about the Lauren Spierer "case," these are the facts: she was approximately 90 pounds. She was a blonde. She was underage and wasted. And after more than a month, I am 99.999% certain that all that is left of her is a corpse. If you read my post, my main point was that the local mobs have careened out of control, and are posting virulent messages against anyone who dares say anything to that effect. As soon as you do, you have your entire character generalized and speared by self-righteous white knights. Funny enough, if I happened to say the exact same thing about 90 pound blondes getting wasted and running around at 4:30 in the morning while she was alive, everyone would applaud my upstanding character. But it got her killed, so, now it's "nasty."

So thank you, Anonymous-person-who-claims-to-be-a-library-professional-but-doesn't-have-the-spine-to-identify-yourself, for proving my point exactly. If you read my post from Tuesday with any attention, which you claim you did, I didn't complain about customers at all--I complained about the lazy people I have to work with. People who, for example, would rather be commenting on blogs at 11:15 in the morning than doing their actual work. If I were a baser person, I would point out how blatantly unprofessional it is to attack random students on websites for their personal opinions. It makes me wonder exactly what kind of "professionals" the libraries are hiring these days, who believe that "the public" only includes select people they agree with.