20 ways to be really annoying in the library

UK's Public libraries are expected to close or open for a total of 150,000 fewer hours this year

The library is a vital place for students. It is the sanctuary where our most innovative thinking is produced and our most significant work completed, and it is a haven from the distractions of the outside world. Well that may all be exaggerating slightly, but it is a place you go to when an important deadline is looming and you really need to concentrate.

We all know what it feels like when that really annoying person sits next to you in the library distracting you from your work. They rustle plastic bags, they talk exceedingly loudly on their phone - “OMG I was so drunk last night”, they smell bad; it’s not their fault but they do.

Often the problem with this person is they seem to be to be completely oblivious to what they are doing or they simply don’t care even when you do say something to them. So if you can't beat them, join them and have a ball being just as irksome. These tips will help you reach whole new levels of being irritating.

1. Type with fake nails on. The click-clack of these acrylics will drive your neighbours mad (I'm currently typing with some on now and am succeeding in even annoying myself).
2. Eat cheese and pickle sandwiches. They stink.
3. Skype your friends, on speaker of course. Mobile phones are so 2005.
4. Go to sleep. Preferably in a place that everybody needs, maybe on top of the printer on deadline day. Don't forget to snore.
5. Take out a book that is really vital for the biology course, when you don't do biology. If you do biology, consider taking out a geography book.
6. Discuss your love life real or invented in great detail. We have all been scarred for life by hearing this one done by other people. Let’s share this trauma.
7. Make paper aeroplanes with book pages (especially pages that are particularly important to the plot, you know in Pride and Prejudice the page where Mr Darcy tells Elizabeth how much he loves her for the first time? Use that one). Fire these planes at unsuspecting people.
8. Talk to the person next to you about how the Dewey Decimal Classification is an abomination. Explain that the books are free spirits and should not be constrained by the order the system provides. Replace them in the shelves at random.
9. Why walk around the library when you can bunny hop?
10. Go over and inform every person using Facebook that they really should spend less time on Facebook and more time writing essays. Then five minutes later add them as a Facebook friend.
11. Talk to the people who have just arrived about how long you've been in the library and how you have done so much work that you have finished all your essays three weeks early.
12. Swap the numbers of the shelves, this way nobody will ever be able to find any of the books they want.
13. Go to the library really late at night and demand security walk you home. Then protest you are an independent person and do not need an escort.
14. Bring an assortment of personal items such as photos, flowers, a model boat and a dream catcher so you can personalise your desk. Then let anyone who walks by you know they are invading your ‘space’, it is clearly yours as all your belongings are there.
15. Sigh loudly and often.
16. Go to the librarians and complain that somebody has touched your newspaper and you need your morning newspaper pristine and unread.
17. Then demand lemon in the water from the water cooler. And ice. You must have ice.
18. Look amazed every time you sit in a chair with wheels and then proceed to spend the next half an hour wheeling around shouting “Jolly good invention! Chair and wheels, who’d of thought it?”
19. Explain to people you are actually too cool to be in the library, going to the library is for weird people; you just got lost and ended up there. Next drop bits of food on the floor before explaining you are making a trail so you can find your way out.
20. Every time the clock strikes the hour shout “One less hour till your work is due, the deadline is approaching! We are doomed! We are doomed!”

Using these tips you can achieve perfection in being really annoying in the library (although you may not get any work done while you are there).

Disclaimer: It is the full responsibility of the reader if they choose to follow any of these tips and any results that occur are entirely down to the reader.

Katherine Burch is a Politics student yet, despite this, wildly amusing (she claims). Why wouldn’t you follow her on twitter @BurchEKatherine?