I had an enquiry today "Do you have anything on the causes of terrorism?" "I'm sure we do, what kind of information are you looking for, is about a specific place or group?" "I've just told you it's about the causes of terrorism" "Yes I understand that, is it for a project, do you have a reading list?" "Just show me where the books are" So i take the person over to the appropriate shelf and show them several books that might be of interest, they spend 30 seconds glancing at them and then say "This is not what I want", and I say "you need to look at them a bit more, I'm sure that they will help you", and they say "I don't even like books I don't know what I am doing here, and you are not being very helpful"
By this time I had taken an educated guess that this person didn't know what they were looking for and didn't understand the subject. So I take a different tack and lead them over to Britannica and explained about searching newspaper articles online for relevant information but by this point the person had lost interest and was getting quite hostile. I left them standing in the middle of the room. The whole infuriating episode lasted about 20 minutes. Five minutes later they approached one of my colleagues and asked them for the very same information and said to them in a voice loud enough for me to hear "the other man wasn't very helpful"!!!!!
It took all my 20+ years experience not to throttle them.
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