Are you sure that that place is a library?

Just a slight update, my com is still crashed, my data is still stuck on that (goddamn) drive and yea, nothing is really good about my computer situation currently...
The good news is that I have more than one computer at home, and the second good news is that the promotional exams are finally over...
Excellent...

Anyway...
In a fit of after promos exam fever, I decided to go out and go around all over the place. In the end, it landed me between the arcade and the library. Things that happen in the arcade are pretty much always the same for me. There's the cursing towards the monitor, the cheering after the completion of a freaking hard level, the jeering at a really lousy player of a game, the raised eyebrow of shocking revelations of some people's method of playing and racking up that high score and the astonishment associated with totally owning everyone else in the game...

I decided that I should pick up JSP and try to learn it, so I went to the library to borrow books on it and at the same time source out methods in which I can attempt to retrieve the date on my hard disk. And that's when I realised that there are no libraries in Singapore that resembles a library...

Let us all imagine a library, the library of our dreams. It is a sanctuary of peace, quietness and the sound of paper being ruffled as the pages of a book is being turned. It is "supposed" to be a quiet place, highly conducive for the student's to study, for the fiction hungry people to gobble up fiction, for the people-who-have-nothing-else-better-to-do but to sit in the library but read newspaper...Library is a place for all of us to be able to seat back, relax and read some nice books and even do our homework...

So why is it that libraries here are near total opposite of this?
I think we had heard enough of the familiar criticism of parents bringing children to the library. They bring the children to the library in the hopes that they can borrow some books and become "smart" (how they become smart is a mystery to me). The parents sit down on some benches and start talking with their neighbours, immediately turning part of the library into a mock coffee shop. At the same time, the restless kids decided to convert the library into the catching arena. Happily running all over the library and exclaiming "you're it" at the top of their voices...
That's SO normal...

I'll add to the list.
Recently, a bunch of young kids decided to turn the library into a place for a perfect picnic. They entered the library and found a spot near the vending machine located inside the library. They then proceeded to empty out the vending machine using their money and very soon, they had a rather noisy party picnic going on. The noise generated was loud enough to irritate everybody that was on the same floor of the library. Just when you thought things were not going to get worse, they brought on 5 decks of TCG (duelmasters in this case) and proceeded to deck it out in the library very noisily, attracting the attention of everyone.
What a useful way to make use of the library eh?

And it doesn't end there...
People come to the library to study right? Hmm... Well, they do, as long as they don't bring their boyfriends/girlfriends along. Not all of them are like that, some do encourage each other to be better, but these are the not so ideal ones...
Instead of revising and doing their work, they spend more of their time pretending that the rest of the world don't exist and that they are still wearing their uniform. They soon drift off into their own mini world, oblivious to the rest of us. You know, you could just go somewhere else if you want to "mess around". Doing it in the library is as good as asking for the public to write in a letter (and then everything goes on and on)

Lets continue on shall we...
Upon entering the 4th floor of the library, I got this impression that the 4th floor of the library has recently been sold to another company. The 4th floor was amazingly noisy (it was about 4 times the noise level there on normal Saturdays and Sundays). It seems that more and more student decides to have more class outing and picnics there... and I wouldn't even be writing this had I not seen that some people had decided to blast their mp3 players at the maximum volume so that people all around can hear it...

I don't know if this is unique to Singapore, but apparently, the library in Singapore is more of a haven for the exact kind of behaviour that we do not want to see occurring in the library. People being inconsiderate, people not knowing that it is a library, people coming to the library without the correct purpose in mind. It shows how little books mean to us. The books sit on the shelf looking down as the people in the library ignores their presence completely. Is that supposed to be what a library is supposed to be like?

A lot of the things I described has happened on the 4th floor of the library, and yes, its supposed to be a bit noisier there, but at least spare a thought for those who are there really to study. You could do just that little by talking softly instead of screaming, not blasting your mp3 player, not holding picnics there and even just be there for a proper reason...

Recently, the things that are happening on the 4th floor are gradually being spread throughout the rest of the library...
The books are on the shelves, and they are not touched by the people...

Then why do you want to go the library in the first place?

Discmon