The Little Things

If someone were to gauge my strength at handling calamities, I’d probably be rated around an 8 or 9 on the Mohs Hardness Scale. Tell me I have a serious illness and I’m focused, clear, and concise when discussing options and prognoses; I might even make jokes. Tell me my father is on life support but my mother wants to pull the plug because he signed a DNR and it’s time to let him die, then I’m the only one in the room not crying, but holding my mother and brother as they do. However, paper-cuts send me into a fit of wailing, and having my ears pierced in January was one of the most painful, irritating things I have suffered, and continue to deal with on a daily basis.

The same principle applies to the trials at work. If the roof caved in, I would not be the one standing in the middle of the rubble, screaming like a banshee and crying for someone to save me. In my weakest moments I have never called out for my mommy, although, if you met my mom you would probably know why. My reactions are to pause, figure out what to do, and do it. I have trained myself well in the art of hiding my emotions and dealing with them privately. It’s the way of the warrior.

I am a warrior.

BUT…

A few things will derail me completely. By “derail” I mean come unhinged with anger.

Those few things that might derail me are often things that others would scoff at.

At work, we have a security alarm that protects our building while we aren’t around. Until recently, there weren’t many people on staff who knew what to do with it, even though it only involves having your own four-digit code and being able to read. Everyone has a personal code number. Almost everyone is petrified of the damn thing.

At one time, I had become so irritated with the sheer number of people who are far too intimidated to set the alarm at the end of the night, that I became the one who set it every single night. It became part of the routine. People got lazy and made me do it each night, which ultimately forced me to be the last person to leave the building and the only one who knew what to do if it went off. Two years ago, when I went on vacation, there were problems. It became evident that no one on staff had a clue what to do with the security alarm and I was forbidden to touch it at the end of the day with the hopes that this would force the rest of the staff to learn this part of their job. It worked for a while. If by “worked” it means that the alarm was set off with such frequency that the police started fining us for each incident, and sometimes we’d receive two to three fines per week. Administration put it high on the list of priorities for everyone to learn their fucking codes. It’s not hard! Four numbers! Put in your code and press the button that activates the alarm or deactivates the alarm. EASY! Five total key punches! Why these people resisted and screwed it up day in and day out, I’ll never know. If you can’t press five keys to enter and leave the building, you probably aren’t smart enough to be working at our library. That should be part of the proficiency for every position on staff. But it isn’t. If it was, we’d lose a huge chunk of our personnel.

Then we hired janitors who arrived each night as we closed, so people got comfortable not ever touching the security alarm again. They eagerly unlearned what they had been forced to learn, thinking they’d never need it again. The security alarm was something they evolved above, like a tailbone. Or so they thought.

About two months ago, a new team of janitors started cleaning our building, but the major difference with the new team is that they don’t arrive until midnight, which means that the staff has to close the building each night.

And turn the terrifying alarm on when they leave.

You should see these people!

The folks in circulation, with the exception of one person, race out the back door at the end of the night. They should have flames painted down their sides and parachutes that shoot out of their rectums when they reach the safety of the parking lot. Many times I have checked for skid marks in the shape of gym shoes on the staff side of the lot. I think that when the closing announcement is made, it is the equivalent of a starter pistol being shot. I don’t even see them move around behind the circulation desk, but five minutes after we close, they have Machu-Pichued the area. They leave all the lights on in the building, sometimes their own area fans, the fish tank, the bathroom lights, and I’ve heard that a few times they even left the cash register drawer in the register for anyone to have access to. These folks are in a hurry not to be the last ones out of the building. They don’t tell anyone else that they are leaving. They don’t offer to help others who still have closing procedures to complete. They bolt! They leave the building like they’re afraid they’ll lose their commercial sponsorship if they don’t cross some invisible finish line first. I don’t know if there really is a prize for the first closers out the door – I’m never out first – but there could very well be. That prize might just be that you make a clean getaway, which is a highly-coveted reward.

The youth department is much better and they, at least, check in with us to see if we need help or if we plan to stay later. That’s nice. We try to do the same for them if we finish first. However, it’s no less obvious that they want to leave in a group so that someone else will take responsibility for the alarm as well.

If you discount the UFO-like disappearance of the circ crew, and the well-intentioned cooperation of the youth crew, the problem really falls on the shoulders of one person.

We have one coworker who cannot keep track of her schedule, her obligations, her responsibilities, her overflowing email inbox, and, of course, won’t have anything to do with the security alarm. She claims she doesn’t have a code, but it’s as easy as just saying as much to receive one. Which she has received. And she has forgotten. It wouldn’t be a big deal if she wasn’t spending her desk shift preoccupied with her personal endeavors and she didn’t start cleaning up and shutting things down until well after the library has closed. With the janitors in the building, she could take her sweet time and leave whenever she wanted. However, now she has to hustle to get her closing procedures done so that she doesn’t have to be the last one in the building. This happens on nights when she’s being considerate. There are many, many nights when the group of us will be standing at the back door waiting for her, unable to leave because we can’t leave her alone in the building. If she can’t set the alarm, we have to wait for her. It’s getting really fucking old.

She is a manager.

Whose turn is it to baby-sit her tonight, we ask one another. Someone go check to see if you can speed her up.

Inevitably, she’s sitting somewhere sending out an email or printing a calendar and there is more waiting involved that no one can hasten. When she finally gets to the back door, you better have said a prayer that she didn’t forget anything, too, because it’s really hard to get blood out of drywall when you try to speed up time by slamming your head into the wall. I have actually been stuck at work until 8:30 because we waited for her for 20 minutes, got all the way out to our cars and were going to drive away before she remembered that her cell phone was still inside. This means someone has park, turn off their car, go back into the building, deactivate the alarm, let her go from the second floor NW corner of the building to the first floor SE corner of the building to retrieve her cell, return to you at the back door, then reactivate the alarm so you can leave. Again. And burn fucking rubber out of the lot before she changes her mind. Again.

This, I think, is why the circulation department breaks the sound barrier each night trying to leave. While it irritates the hell out of me that it’s like a reenactment of the Jamestown Colony disappearance on some nights within minutes of the library closing, with staff abandoning the building with frightening suddenness, I do prefer this to the member of our team who forces the rest of us to baby her. Not because she’s incapable of doing the alarm, but because she’s afraid of it and cannot for the life of her remember her code.

And if she had an ounce of wits about her, she’d request an easy code that consisted of her birth date or home phone number to make it easy.

Then again, that method might have been tried and failed as well.

I would rather deal with nightly knifings, gunfire and weather disasters than this.

Yes, I realize that it isn’t logical to prefer death and destruction to a bit of an irritant, but that’s how I am. It does not stress me out so much that I have $4 in my bank account, 9 pennies in my wallet and enormous medical bills that I owe, and will continue to owe because my health is only improving in tiny increments. It does not stress me out as much when I’m working at the desk alone and there are 8 people standing in line for help with the phone ringing and a policeman in need of some security camera footage of a bike being stolen. I can handle that. But the manager on our staff who forces us to stay late and wait for her, no matter what the hell she’s working on, just because she’s too flaky to remember her alarm code, makes me want to take a sledgehammer to the place.

If ever I go postal, let this be my manifesto that it wasn’t the Big Picture that broke me. Oh no. It was the miniscule bullshit. It was the fact that it’s routinely about 5-10º above comfortable in our office, despite having at least one fan going at all times; it was the innumerable pages made by one staff member seeking another staff member and roaring it into a microphone so often each day that I have developed a nervous tick and ringing in my ears; it was because of the repliers-to-all, who respond to an email and think the entire library should know that they agree with a primary (and arbitrary) email; it was due to the price of Coke in the vending machine going up to $1.25; and because I had to wait 10 extra minutes for the same person, night after night, who refused to learn how to use the security system that is easy enough for a child to use, not even as a courtesy to me, the only one who will always, always, always wait for her, no matter what.

By the way, what does get blood out of drywall when you beat your own head into the wall frequently?

Tenured, I'm Sure

She caused me to have to speak in short, succinct sentences because I was afraid her brain would explode otherwise, so when I talk about her or write about her, my words come out that way again.

She was a teacher. I know because she mentioned it in the conversation about eight times.

Her library card had expired. Ten years ago.

She wanted to know where our paperback section was. When I explained that we don’t separate books by hardcover and paperback, she was horrified. Why not? However do we organize things if not by the density of its cover?

She didn’t know the difference between fiction and nonfiction. Even after I described it twice.

She refused to use the computer to look up her books. She claimed to have never touched a computer in her life and wasn’t about to start now.

Fortunately, she did know how to write. Very badly, but I could make out her words. She wrote down two titles she wanted me to look up. She wrote them down because she didn’t think I could remember them if she just said them aloud. Perhaps I’d never heard of them.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

The Color Purple

I might have been insulted that she thought I’d never heard of them except for the fact that she seemed to be retarded. I’ve made a point of trying to be more gracious to people who are retarded and don’t know it.

The only thing that impressed me was that she spelled the words right. That surprised me. She had one skill. I wasn’t going to test it because I felt better about the local public school system thinking that she could at least spell.

She insisted I locate copies of these books in paperback and not hardcover. She said that they were for her niece, not herself, and her niece prefers paperbacks because they are more portable. We had copies on the shelf, thankfully.

I wrote the call numbers down and tried to explain that the fiction is arranged alphabetically by the author’s last name.

She stared blankly at me.

This book, The Color Purple, was written by Alice WALKER.

Walker is her last name.

The books are alphabetized by the author’s last name.

Walker is going to be in the W area.

That’s near the end of the alphabet.

You’ll have to look for the “WAL” on the call number.

The call number is on the spine of the book.

She nodded like she understood. She studied the scrap of paper I handed to her with the author’s names next to the titles she wrote down. If I hadn’t been alone at the desk with two patrons waiting, I’d have walked her to each book and plucked them from the shelf, but I had to trust that those keen spelling skills would kick in and she’d find the books herself.

She walked off looking disheartened.

I helped the next two patrons and when I finished, she was walking past my desk to leave.

I asked if she found the books. She said she had, after much searching, but decided not to get them.

She reminded me that she had never touched a computer before and would soon be retiring from teaching. She wondered if she should learn now or just finish out her life without ever having touched a computer.

I gave her that look of false contemplation I give to everyone who asks a question I haven’t the nerve to answer truthfully.

She asked if it’s always this crowded in the evenings. I explained that, yes, it’s always this crowded or more so.

She mused that she had no idea the young people were so studious.

Without wanting to completely pop the bubble she was living in, I said that they are mostly computer-users.

She said that she tells her students to NEVER EVER go to the library for personal needs. ONLY use the library for assignments and research. It’s not there for fun. She hoped that they were all working on projects while they were on the computer.

I looked around to see if she had antennae coming out of her head. If she did, they were well hidden. Perhaps the mother ship will be taking her back shortly.

I clarified that the library is not just for research, and it is widely used for recreation, which we encourage. Even if the children were using the computers for fun, they were still strengthening computer skills, which they will need for the rest of their lives if they want to function in the world.

(Unlike her.)

She said she understood that computers could be helpful and she was glad they were learning. She nodded her approval and left.

I’m guessing that her students learn more screwing around on our computers after school than they do in her classroom on any day of the week.

I’ve never been a proponent of home schooling, but I can understand it when I have conversations with people like this woman.

When Will It Snow?

It rained today. It was a much-needed reprieve from the stifling heat of late, but it hit with the kind of suddenness that you experience in a car accident (i.e., cruising along, scream, crash, scream some more, pee your pants a little, curse).

The thermometers were indicating we were around 90º with oppressive humidity and the sun was blazing down and giving me an instant headache just walking to my car. We needed rain.

The heat and humidity held out until it disappeared one second and thunder crashed the next.

Was that really thunder? Are kids firing off some early firecrackers?

Another rumble answered the question and within seconds the rain was pounding so hard on our metal roof, it seemed as if it might cave in.

People wandered into the library with that what-the-fuck look on their faces, as if they had been strolling happily from their car to our front door, and a large tub of water was dumped on them as they neared the sidewalk.

Sure, the weathermen warned of storms. Sure, the thunderstorm watches were in effect. Sure, it was something we all thought MIGHT happen today. But after our “Storm of the Century” a week ago, not too many people gave the rain a second thought.

RAIN-SCHMAIN! I’ll believe it when I see it.

Well, weren’t we surprised?

On cue, the Park District next door promptly sounded the get-the-fuck-out-of-the-pool-because-there’s-lightning-somewhere-in-the-county alarm and evicted a large public pool full of teens and preteens onto the streets. Gee, I wonder where they’re going to go.

With the rain came the teens.

We’re not just talking about a bunch of boisterous kids with excess energy to burn. We’re talking about boisterous kids with excess energy to bury, sopping wet, running around the library in their swimsuits.

There were two girls who couldn’t have been more than 15 years old who walked into the library wearing flip-flops and a bikini. Oh, and a wet towel flung carelessly over the shoulder. A bikini. They were old enough to have some curves to fill in the bikini, but not old enough to have any sense of time and place for the appropriate setting for this bikini.

There’s nothing like some underage girls in bikinis to make the seniors reading their newspaper grab hold of their pacemaker through their chest and hope it does its job.

Grandpa doesn’t need to see that, Ashley! That’s why they make those cute cover ups. SO YOU’LL COVER THE HELL UP!

This was a bit much. Everyone was oogling them; man, woman, adult, child.

I cautiously threw an email to my boss before I told these girls that we required clothes for admittance into the library.

I wrote the following:

For many days now, we've all observed many a patron coming into the library wearing only a wet bathing suit and wet towel, and we've longed for the days when there was signage saying that we did not allow you to come in with your wet pool clothes on. Is this still a policy minus a sign, or are we allowing sopping and chlorinated patrons to come in and sit on our furniture? Should I send them to the Quiet Room to dry off? :)

(The Quiet Room is our new service, which probably would float in communities where the patron majority was of legal age, but here, having a quiet room in the back of the library, with weak lighting and soft, comfy chairs, some of us think is the equivalent of inviting the teens to have world-record-breaking orgies. We are SOOOO going to get sued when someone’s parents find out their daughter banged three guys in the Quiet Room.)

My boss strolled out to have a look at the library’s swimsuit edition, and he skeptically scanned the horizon for offenders, whereupon the harmless summer clothing turned nightmareishly into pedophile paradise.

His eyes sprang out of his head with an audible boi-yoi-yoi-yoing, and he assessed the view with increasing concern.

“Oh… OH! OOOOHHHH!”

With typical efficiency I have come to expect, he went a-lookin’ for some administrative-ish folks.

No director. Assistant director missing in action.

My boss made the error of walking into the meeting room where a Red Cross blood drive was going on. Like ravenous vampires they descended upon him, wanting to start the preparatory interview work of making sure his blood was pure and sweet enough. He quickly fled. I like to imagine that the big, manly guy screamed like a little girl and ran out with his hands waving in the air wildly, calling for his mommy, but I’m sure it didn’t happen. It just makes me smile to imagine it.

Rattled from nearly losing his life, or worse, his soul, he decided the swimsuit question could wait.

Thus, all afternoon, I sat listening to the rain, the squeals of teenage delight upon seeing one another after the eternal waiting period of less than 24 hours, and gasps of adults who caught glimpses of the girls in bikinis.

It’s going to be a LONG summer.

When Does the Cesspool Close?

Phone rings.

Me: Adult Reference Desk. How may I help you?

Caller: I’m calling to say that Enid and Sophie won’t be coming today.

Me: Oh. Okay.

Do other libraries take attendance? How do you keep track of what patron is supposed to be present on what day? Seriously. How do you know? Because if I knew what days certain patrons were coming, I’d rearrange my schedule or (*cough*) come down with an ailment.

Me: Were they meeting someone here?

Caller: No, they were signed up for a program today!

Me: OH! But we don’t have any programs today that required registration.

Caller: I don’t know! I’m just the grandma and their mother told me to take them for a program today, but I’m not going to!

Me: Okay, that’s fine. Thanks for call--

The caller hung up on me.

Sometimes I wish we had Caller ID so that I could call back this grandma and finish my sentence.

It’s fair if they can call the library and say something stupid like, “Yeah, I got a phone call from the library, but I don’t have voice mail so they couldn’t leave a message and I was wondering who called and what it was about. Caller ID says it came from this number.” How am I supposed to know who in my building called you and why? Dude, get an answering machine before you get Caller ID! It’s much more helpful!

* * *

Phone rings.

Me: Adult Reference Desk. How may I help you?

Caller: What time does the pool close today?

The pool? You mean the library’s pool? Well, our pool is private and only for staff. You can’t play in our pool. Imagine the crud and filth that we’d have to clean up if we let the patrons use our pool. For that matter, I’m not quite sure why we let them borrow our books, computers, movies and CDs. Have you smelled a popular library book lately? Egad!

CLEARLY you’re asking for the hours of the pool at the PARK DISTRICT, which is NOT a part of the library. NOT A PART OF THE LIBRARY! Who ever heard of a library that had a pool? That’s like a library with an open bonfire in the middle of it! What stupid concept!

If you want me to look it up for you, ask me to look it up for you! DO NOT assume that I have the hours to every local business on a handy-dandy spreadsheet. I do not. And no, that is not a good idea.

Oh, wait! Maybe the pool you were asking about is the cesspool that is a majority of the community I serve! Oh, well, that, m’dear, is open 24 hours!

* * *

Patron: I have a book that someone gave me, but I have no use for it. I was wondering if you take donations.

Me: Sure. If we didn’t add it to the collection, we’d likely sell it in the annual book sale.

Patron: Why don’t you take software?

Me: Well, that’s a little fuzzier, what with registration and copyrights. Books are fine, though.

Patron: Yeah, I had a copy of Linux that I wanted to donate to the library and I talked to the guy who is your computer guy… I can’t remember his name…

Me: Yeah, he doesn’t accept equipment or software donations.

Patron: That’s really silly. You could’ve made money on it if you wanted to. I mean, it wasn’t an original CD or anything, so you couldn’t have charged a lot, but it was a genuine burned copy of an original. I can vouch for that! It’s worth money. But you guys just turned down the money. So sad.

Me, shrugging: Eh, whaddaya gonna do?

Personally, I think the loss was worth it. For instance, we might have made $1 on the sale, if that, but the jail time, attorney fees, court fees, penalties and blow to our reputation might be a little more than $1 worth. That’s just a guess, though. I don’t actually know anyone stupid enough to try to sell illegally copied software in an open forum like that. Although, sir, you might be the first. Go ahead and give it a try. I think eBay has a special eJail for offenders like you. And if you sell it quickly enough, it might cover your eBail.

On second thought, we really don’t want that donated book. It was probably stolen and we’d get in trouble for possession of stolen property. Just go. Go now. And don’t come back. Ever.

Rule #2: Quit Insisting You're Right -- Because You're Not!

A woman approached my desk and asked for a book called Two Patriot Generals.

I thought to myself that it was a lame title, and one I was not familiar with, so I went fishing around in my catalog and at Amazon. No hits.

She was positive it was called Two Patriot Generals, though she was not sure whether it was Two, Too, or To. There was no way she was wrong about the words Patriot and Generals, though. She wrote it down!

Still no help.

She couldn't remember what it was about or who wrote it, for she heard about it on a radio show and not much was shared about the book.

WHY, pray tell, did it inspire you to seek it out, then?!

No hits were made with "Patriot Generals" in my search terms either, but a curious title popped up on Amazon called Young Patriots, about Madison and Hamilton, and the US Constitution.

I can see how that would be so hard to remember, being the highly forgettable subject matter of the Constitution and all.

She said she must have blocked out the word "young" from the title because everyone was young back then.

They were? Even the old people were young? Because in the late 1700s, people only lived to be about 20, and then they died of young age, right? It's redundant to call them "young" patriots, because back then, everyone was young.

Right. Good excuse.

Where "generals" came from, I don't know. Alexander Hamilton never made general and James Madison had very little military experience. She just made that up.

Thankfully Amazon was able to decipher this woman's insistence on the wrong title of a book. I have never doubted that Amazon is smarter than me, but I just never knew it could make sense of nonsense.


Another woman paid a visit to our library tonight and asked me for the book Little Hurricanes. My search again rendered zip.

Long story made short is that she was in two weeks earlier and found the book, but didn't want it at the time. She did not write the title down, but was absolutely certain of two things: the cover had a picture of the ocean on it, and the word "little" was in the title. While she wasn't absolutely certain the title contained "hurricanes," she was in the 90 percentile range of certainty. However, she had no clue what it was about, who wrote it, or whether it was a newer book or an older book.

Uh-huh. I suspected it might be Little Earthquakes, but when I showed her this book, she insisted it was not right because the cover should have had an ocean on it.

No explanation about how books are routinely published with different covers would persuade her to let go of her insistence that the book had an ocean on the cover, or the fact that it almost certainly had "hurricanes" in the title along with the word she was 100% sure of, "little."

I showed her the search results in my catalog, the results I Googled, and the results in Amazon. Nothing! If Amazon can't figure it out, you're wrong, bitch!

Finally she admitted she might be wrong about the word "hurricanes." She was now only sure that the book had an ocean on the cover and the title contained the word "little."

Since we don't yet classify books based on their color or cover art, I had but one option.

Little.

For a word that means such a small amount, it's amazing to know just how many pieces of material our library alone owns which contain that word.

1,800 items.

I looked at her.

She looked at me.

Then she admitted that maybe she should do some of her own research on her own time.

I know damn well she was thinking of Little Earthquakes, but that's one thing she's going to have to figure out on her own, after hours and hours of sifting through our 1,800 items with the word "little" in the title.

Then again, since the cover of that book was not issued with a picture of the ocean on it, she might never admit she was wrong about all of it. Nor will she ever read the book she seeks.

My only consolation is that it will probably drive her completely nuts.

And that gives me a little earthquakes of pleasure.

Our Role In Society

Recently, a colleague of mine went to a daylong seminar on a variety of topics about our jobs in the library.

I chose not to attend because I’d really rather not get up at 5 am to meet my carpoolers at the library at 6:30, drive an hour and a half to an 8-hour gathering of strangers, where I’ll have to sit and listen to speakers I don’t know, talk about things I don’t care about. I can do that from the comfort of my own library, with a computer in front of me that doubles as a toy to play with while they’re blathering on and on. AND I can sleep in. Until 7:30, that is.

So, when my colleague returned the next day, I asked her how the seminar went.

Note to self: next time, don’t ask.

Not only did she love the seminar, but she said one of the speakers in particular rejuvenated her interest in her own career.

Wow. That’s a powerful speaker. I was wondering if it’s possible that she might have been sitting in the far back and misunderstood the actual spoken words. She assured me she did not.

What she did say was that this speaker likened our jobs to saving the world.

I kid you not.

The phrase used was “perpetuate society”, in that we provide answers and pathways to answers that improve the civilized world we live in. We assist doctors diagnosing patients, we assist scientists in finding discoveries, we assist students in learning and going on to do any number of immeasurable things, and on top of that, we provide endless opportunities for education and entertainment to the masses.

Lofty words. Too bad it’s a bunch of crap.

I’m all for pride in our jobs, but this is so blatantly condescending that I can hardly swallow it, and that’s not just because I’m bitter and jaded. It’s because this speaker obviously hadn’t worked a reference shift in a long, long time.

We perpetuate society? Okay, let’s examine this.

Last week I helped a woman find legal information about giving up custody of her teenage daughter, which she whispered to me with her teenage daughter standing five feet away, looking terrified. Specifically, she wanted to find out how to make her daughter a ward of the state temporarily, until she had more money, and then she’d take her daughter back. There were three younger kids bouncing around her feet, calling her “Mama”, but she made no mention of giving up the younger kids. Now, I’m sure that society is going to be much better off if this woman has fewer children, but the damage to the younger kids who would think their mother might one day get rid of them too is tragic, not to mention the destruction to the teen daughter who would somehow have to live her fragile life knowing that her mother gave her up, but not her younger siblings. That can only be good for society, yes? Oh, I was proud to take part in that debacle. What exactly do you hope for?

I spent two days assisting a lady I despise (because she had the balls to protest a poster we had up that contained Spanish words on it, even though it was mostly English) print off idiotic Internet jokes people had emailed to her, because she didn’t know how to highlight, cut and paste them into a document. These jokes were very funny to her and she wanted to print one of them and frame it. Yes, this too is an excellent example of perpetuating the mindless society we have become.

The humpback whales that swam into a whale-free zone in California and nearly died inspired another encounter. One of our regular pests came in with two pages of questions she wanted answered about the whales, such as “Why did they go there?”, “Was the mother protecting the baby from a predator?”, “Did they know they were lost?”, and my favorite, “Were they hoping for human help getting them back on course?” With as little sarcasm as I could muster, I said, “I’m not really sure the whales would answer if we asked them these questions.” She did not get it. She wanted me to contact the people in charge of the whales and ask them. The people in charge of the whales? I gave her a few phone numbers, printed about five articles about whale behavior and the known facts surrounding this particular event, and tried again to explain that there were probably no answers to her questions because there was no way to know. It took about a half-hour to make her understand that there weren’t going to be answers about what the whales were thinking or how they felt. She was greatly disappointed. I’m quite certain that if I had made a gigantic load of shit up about the whales, she would’ve been quite pleased. For instance, I might have said that I discovered an article that claimed a rogue band of seals were harassing and tormenting the whales, chasing them clear up the Baja Peninsula to the San Francisco Bay, where they finally found safety in the fresh water. The crowds of humans, which the whales were hoping for, scared off the marauding seals, and when it was safe to return to the ocean, the whales slipped back and eluded the gang of seals. Our crazy patron would’ve been quite happy with this story. Instead I told the truth and she went away upset. This, I’m sure, improved the very state of our world because crazy ladies who are curious about whales must be silenced.

A very malodorous old man visits often, notably last week, wanting access to a computer so that he can research his family tree, only what he does is search the online listed phone records of everyone in the country with his last name. I have no idea if he goes home and calls them all, wanting to know if he’s related to them, but why else would he compile this information? Each visit is to target another geographical area, and he’ll ask me to help him search for all of the people with the last name Bianchi in Washington. It takes him hours to print out the list of names, but he does it and takes them home. I’m guessing that there are hundreds of people with his last name (or variants of the spelling of his last name) who have been pissed off with a rambling and uninvited phone call from a strange guy on the other side of the country, wondering if they’re related just because their last names are the same. Yes, I’m sure that improves the quality of many lives and to have participated is a high point in my career.

And while I’m sure that crafts and cookbooks make people happy, it certainly doesn’t take a PhD to hand out knitting books, place a hold for Sylvia Browne’s latest farce, or finding how-to home repair books with lots of pictures for the guy who is illiterate. My only proud moments last week occurred when I helped a man in a wheelchair find movies on learning to play guitar, and a middle-aged woman who needed a few sex aid manuals. Those are the only two I can tenuously say were positive experiences and might have contributed to some enlightenment.

Do I believe I provide a service to the community? You bet.

Do I believe it requires skill or higher education? Absolutely not.

Do I do it because I need to feel like I’m somehow important, riding on the coattails of people who actually accomplish great things? Hell no.

I do it because it’s fun. People amuse me. Sometimes I get to be creative, and other times I get to spend lots of other people’s money on books I want to read and add to our collection. Perhaps if you are a librarian in a medical library or a university library, things might be a bit different. My library, which is a medium-sized suburban public library, has never owned the kind of collection that could one day lead someone to the cure for Parkinson’s Disease or cancer. Anyone who actually buys into the concept that we can somehow take credit for all the great that happens in the world today is delusional. Perhaps one librarian in a million might contribute to something great, but if we’re sitting around trying to validate our jobs using concepts so lofty as this, then we really do belong in another field.

This post isn’t to diminish the egos of librarians everywhere, or to shatter some illusion the world has about the place of librarians in society. Our patrons determine our place in their world, and in a way that does perpetuates society, but it’s not always for the better.

Sometimes it’s just to give MySpace a larger extended network of users, or to give an out-of-work simpleton a place to spend his time until his Unemployment benefits run out.

Sometimes it’s to provide recipes, driving directions, needlework patterns, popular fiction novels, and the entire first season of “Gray’s Anatomy” to average joes.

And that’s good enough for me.

Self Love

I walked from my office to pick something up from the shelf and found myself about 10 feet behind a man who was seemingly headed in the same direction as me. He was familiar, but I didn’t know if he was just a regular patron or possibly someone I might know outside of the library. Hopefully it was just the former.

About three steps into our synchronized stride, I heard a flubbery squeak that was fairly loud. It did rather sound like a fart, but many things make fart noises around our library, including the carts, my shoes, and the gerbils running on their wheels inside all the computers.

Note to self: we really must upgrade to mice, which are smaller and have more energy.

In front of me, the familiar man reached behind himself and, through his nylon shorts, firmly grasped his left buttock in his left hand. With the bun secured, he pulled the cheek away from the other and the same flubbery squeak emanated from the gap his hand had created.

My face contorted into some kind of mixture of horror and disgust. My feet stopped walking, but I didn’t remember telling them to stop.

Unfortunately, the familiar man also stopped, still 10 feet ahead of me, and this time, instead of clearing the way for another gaseous expulsion to exit without speed bumps, he dug his hand between his cheeks and seemed to be scratching or massaging the orifice through his shorts.

At first I gagged and made a turn to avoid hitting the odoriffic cloud that he’d let loose on the planet just a moment ago, and also to avoid touching anything that he might touch before me.

Then it dawned on me – this man, however socially challenged and intestinally free he was, had absolutely no qualms about his bodily functions. He welcomed his farts into this world with cheeks widespread, and he rewarded his anus with a nice rub afterward. That’s someone who loves his body. That’s someone who believes his body can do no wrong. That’s someone with more confidence than I will ever have.

And, dare I say, I was a little turned on.

They say you have to love yourself before you can love anyone else, and I believe it. If this guy loves his bowels this much, imagine how much he might love the more lovable parts on someone else. It was titillating just thinking of the possibilities. Those hands were accustomed to accommodating the needs of his own body. What might he do to someone else? And no one ever need be humiliated if some playful activity leads to their own escaping squeakers because this guy is likely to hold your cheeks apart and beckon them into the world, possibly give you a little rub of a reward after.

Yea, I say! I’m downright intrigued with this man! Perhaps we could all stand to be a little freer with our bodies!

As I rounded the corner and caught up with him, I realized where I knew him from the second I saw that same hand that had so recently been giving himself a nice post-fart stroke was shoving a finger so far up his nose, I thought it might come out his eye socket. Yes. Now I remember. This is the mentally handicapped man who visits the library with his mother. Years ago he used to follow me around in the stacks in the opposite aisle and peek at me through the holes in the books, which inevitably would scare the mother-fucking-shit out of me and I’d almost crack a tooth from clenching my jaw in an attempt not to scream bloody murder.

It was suddenly all so clear.

And now that I’ve amused myself and repulsed all of you, let’s all take a break and have a group vomit! Wheeee!

Rule #1: Do Not Touch the Librarian

He completely creeps me out with all his religious tattoos up and down his arms, the pop-bottle glasses, the straw hat, and sly way he seems to emphasize his southern drawl. Once you cross the Mason-Dixon line, chewing on toothpicks and wearing a fringy, suede vest makes you a bit laughable here in these parts.

He is not charming. He is not sexy. I wish he’d leave me alone.

Yet, he frequents the library often and always makes a point of visiting with me.

Often there is nowhere to run.

It becomes increasingly difficult to hide my horror when I see him walk in the door, though I try to be civilized and professional.

He always asks me out for coffee. I tell him I don’t drink coffee. He then asks me out for whatever I drink.

I have come very close to giving up all beverages because of him.

Instead I explain that my boyfriend wouldn’t appreciate such a meeting.

He smiles sinisterly and says that his wife would not either, but as long as we behave, there is no harm.

Vomit. Bile. Last week’s digested meals. Bits of my own broken down digestive tract. Chunks of my reproductive system self destructing and rising in the eruption of insides wanting to become outsides.

The misbehavior I am inspired with when he is around is not the kind he’s thinking of, unless he’s imagining himself rolled up in an area rug and run over with a bulldozer before being buried semi-alive in a shallow grave somewhere near a fire ant hill.

I withdraw when he’s near. I pull my hands off the desk and push my chair back, keeping my distance because whenever he comes in, he tries to touch me. Not in a molesting way, but in an overtly desperate need to make contact way. It bothers me. The contact doesn’t bother me, but I follow his eyes, and I watch his behavior because he baits me to expose a part of myself that he can touch, and that bothers me. It’s the manipulation and it’s the fact that he thinks he has some kind of right to touch me.

He asks for books on blackjack tournaments, which is a creature unknown to me. Poker, yes. Blackjack -- never thought it could turn into a tournament.

This requires me to take my hands out of my lap, move forward a bit, and use the mouse and keyboard. He watches my hands move up to the desk and he stares openly at the movements.

We have no material on blackjack tournaments and strategy guides to help you win them. I tell him I cannot find any in existence, but the truth is I’m not looking all that hard because each time I move my hand to mouse something, his eyes follow and it creeps me out more.

He’s going to touch my hand, I can just tell.

My arm twitches at the thought. I look around for another patron, another staff member, anyone I can make eye contact with and somehow indicate that I need to be rescued, but no one is nearby.

He says, “Now that’s just the purtiest ring you got there,” and before I can yank my hand away, he’s holding it in both of his, turning my ring so that the ruby faces him.

I thank him coldly and pull my hand away.

He seems a little bit shocked at my shortness and dislike of his handling. He then thanks me for my help, accepts that there are no books on the topic he is asking about (as if he never really cared anyway), and bids me farewell.

If he wasn’t a foot shorter than me and in his late 50s or early 60s, I’d be concerned that he might be a serial killer or other dangerous deviant.

Clearly he has a hand fetish.

Then again, if he catches me wandering around the library without my protective desk between us, he will touch my shoulder, my back or any part of me that is within reach.

It really creeps me out.

Sometimes he sings to me. This is easy enough to curtail since it is a library.

He’s invited me to his many performances at nursing homes around the area, where he plays gospel songs for the residents. I think that if he and I were in a place where death is a fairly common occurrence, it would inspire me.

How many ways can one murder another with an acoustic guitar?

On that pleasant though, I shall venture off into dreamland.

...strangulation with guitar strings...impaled with fretboard...beat about the head with entire instrument...zzzzzzz...

The Mouth-Breather

We call her that for obvious reasons. When your mommy and daddy have relatives in common, something happens in the embryonic stage that prevents the offspring from developing proper nasal breathing passages. You can hear an inbred coming if you listen for the mouth-breathing.

She asked one of the youth librarians for "another book catalog."

A what? Like, an online public access computer? A card catalog? And "another" one? Where did the first one come from?

After much snotty explaining on her part, she managed to inform the librarian that she sought a second list on which to document the books she's read to her kids for the reading club. (Our supposition is that someone else is doing the reading, unless picture books count.)

The poor youth librarian didn't have her Mouth-Breather to English dictionary handy. There was no hope for understanding without translation.

Then the woman somehow found her way to the adult area, where she and her son stood in an aisle I needed to get into. In fact, it was the aisle that leads to my office, and her son was pounding his little fists hard against the glass of my office door.

She did nothing.

I said, "Excuse me, I have to get in there." I was hoping she'd move herself, her kid and the stroller with her baby away from the entrance to my door, but all she did instead was instruct the boy to get out of the way. She didn't budge an inch.

This forced me to squeeze between her and the wall while stretching my arm sideways to unlock the door, but I still wasn't able to get into the office because of the stroller.

She still did nothing.

She left me with no other recourse. I had to move her baby in the stroller myself.

She still did nothing.

After I managed to squirm into my office, I began closing the door as I stared with loathing at the back of Mouth-Breather's head. She turned around and I paused for a fraction of a second and thought to erase the look on my face as our eyes met, just before the door touched the frame, but I decided against it. She deserved to know just how much of an ass I thought she was.

She still did nothing.

Fast forward three days and she returned with her two children.

The boy is about four years old and I learned his name today, not because he told me, but because Mouth-Breather shouted it so often that it sounded like a broken record echoing in my skull.

Jonah! Jonah! Jonah! Jonah! Jonah! Jonah!

JONAH!

Jonah! Jonah!

Jonah-Jonah-Jonah-Jonah-Jonah!

Jonah, another mouth-breather, clearly suffers from ADHD, and possibly a little bit of a hearing impairment because nothing anyone said to him seemed to penetrate his childish ears.

He was on his way up to the third tier of an empty bookshelf as he ascended what must have been the kiddie version of a rock-climbing wall, before one of my coworkers stopped him.

It went something like this.

Coworker runs to save Jonah's life.

Mouth-Breather does nothing.

Coworker puts her hands on Jonah so that he doesn't let go of the shelves and plummet to the ground.

Mouth-Breather shouts, "Jonah!"

Coworker says to the boy, "Jonah, you cannot climb the shelves in the library. Feet are better off on the ground, where you cannot hurt yourself as much."

Mouth-Breather, who can see the entire event unfold, shouts, "Jonah! If you don't get over here, I'm leaving without you."

Coworker eases Jonah off the shelves.

Mouth-Breather, now looking at me, shouts, "Jonah!"

Coworker watches as Jonah runs off to join his mother 10 feet away.

Mouth-Breather shouts, "Jonah! That's it. We're leaving!"

No apology. No discipline. Nothing.

From the looks of it, she's pregnant again, too.

Who knew her own brother would be available to procreate three separate times with her?

Then again, I imagine mouth-breathers don't get to do much kissing. They'd pass out.

Introduction

Surely this makes the 2,945,371st library blog in the mix.

At least I'm in good company.

On with the bitching!