At my library, when someone asks you if you noticed “that skanky girl”, you have to wait, because there must be more information to accompany that, otherwise the possibilities are endless.
It could’ve been the African American girl who used to be pretty until she hit puberty, and now she wears shorts that go straight up her rectum. It must take a while to wedge the denim in there, but she is devoted. She also has a relatively small chest compared with her larger hips, but this does not stop her from walking with her back so arched that she does a better job of pushing her ribs out where her boobies are lacking. I bet her back aches by the end of the day. Today she had on a purple T-shirt that was so small, both vertically and horizontally, that I suspected she stole the shirt from a baby sister. (Emphasis on the baby.) I’m not even going to talk about all the lavender, glitter makeup.
Or it could’ve been the young woman in the pink, rhinestone-studded T-shirt, which, thankfully, was longer than the purple T-shirt of the other girl. “Thankfully” because her jeans were so tight and hung so low, that her muffin-top turned into a muffin-landslide. She had muffin overflowing in places I didn’t know muffins grew. I’m telling you, these pants were tight. I noticed her because she had about 30 keychains on the spiked belt that seemed to facilitate the valiant attempt to keep these pants on her body. They were not built for her. They were not built for someone 30 pounds lighter than her (and she wasn’t overweight). They were built for someone probably 8 years younger than her. She was a prime example of why stretch denim should be outlawed. This fabric does not make it okay to buy clothes six sizes too small.
Or it could have been the motherly woman with a tank top that was far too large, over a bra that was far too small. Or maybe the pre-teen girl with the summer dress that just barely clears her butt cheeks. How young is too young to wear thong underwear, by the way?
So, when my coworker approached me and asked, “Did you see that skanky girl earlier? The one with the pink T-shirt and the spiked belt?” I knew which skanky girl she was talking about.
Unfortunately, the good news ended there.
My coworker continued, “Did you see the ringworm sores all over her arms?”
I made a noise that started off as a scream, which I tried to mute into a gasp, then the air got caught in my intake valve caused me to choke, and the sound resembled that which a squeaky screen door makes when it’s flung open and allowed to slam. Not pretty. That alone could’ve killed me.
My incredulity ruled and I began grilling her about what the sores looked like and if she was familiar enough with ringworm to confidently identify the markings. She described them perfectly.
DAMMIT! We’ve been fungied!
When I was a young lass, my mom contracted ringworm while visiting a friend, who had just bought a new Doberman from a puppy breeder. Clearly this was not a good breeder because the dog was diagnosed with ringworm the very next day, and my mother developed a case so bad that the fungus is still in her, rendering her feet unsuitable for public display, and her big toenail had to be permanently removed. Ringworm is something that has long caused suffering for my mom, and I spent months having to check my body for the sores and avoid contact with my mom.
I do not like ringworm. Ringworm is bad. It is creepy. It is disgusting. It gave me the heebie-jeebies so bad that I could hardly sit still.
My coworker elaborated that there were many sores on this woman’s arms, and she was scratching them like mad when she was speaking with her.
Quickly we did a mental regression to try to remember where we’d seen her, what we thought she might have touched, and then set about to disinfect the area. With gloves, wet wipes and Lysol in hand (not knowing if any of that would work on ringworm), we attacked the OPACs, the doors, the counters and anything else she might have casually touched while she browsed in our library for about an hour. Thankfully, she wasn’t able to get online because she owed too much in fines (which she attributed to her “bad twin”, I kid you not), so we didn’t have to evacuate the computer area. What she was doing in the library for so long, we don’t know. She couldn’t check anything out, either. Clearly, she was just infecting things. Lots of things. Things I don’t even want to know about.
At the end of the night, I had to pee so bad that it actually hurt, and I announced to my desk partner that I’d be right back.
She shouted to me, “You might want to wipe the bathroom down before you go in there.”
OH SHIT! Ringworm Girl might have used the bathroom on her way out! I considered holding it until I got home or running all the way to the staff lounge, but my bladder would not wait or tolerate bounding down stairs. I grabbed a handful of wet wipes and wiped down every surface before I touched it, including the toilet seat and bowl, just in case my clothes brushed them. I was so thoroughly grossed out about cleaning the bathroom, which is notorious for being the recipient of biological graffiti, that I actually held my breath, figuring the rest of my body was thoroughly cootified when I stirred up the germs, that I would not inhale any of the newly launched airborne particles.
When I got out, I said to my partner, “I don’t know if Ringworm Girl used the bathroom, but I think I just came into contact with about 1,000 more germs by cleaning the bathroom, that are probably 1,000 times more dangerous. I should have just peed my pants.”
Sometimes it’s better when you don’t know and don’t take measures to avoid things. Swerving to avoid an accident can lead to bigger accidents.
Ringworm: it’s not the worst thing lurking in the library.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
It's My Library & I'll Cry If I Want To
A young couple and their baby have become new and frequent users of our library, which ordinarily would not necessitate a blog post, but they are no ordinary family.
The young couple initially came into the library with the baby in a carrier, and they sat in a remote corner while they each read their books. This made the couple happy. This did not make the baby happy. The tiny baby cried pretty much nonstop for three hours. I don’t know babies – they are creatures I avoid – but this one could not have been a full year old. Each time I walked past the couple, I eyed them disapprovingly, hoping they’d take the hint and try to do something with the baby. It seemed that by the time my patience and tolerance ran out, they inevitably were packing up to leave. This happened a couple times when, on their exit, the mother approached me with all smiles and quietly asked me if it was possible to use one of the tutor rooms the next time they came in, so that the crying baby wouldn’t disturb as many people.
There was a huge part of me that wanted to ask, “Why don’t you actually DO SOMETHING about the crying baby, like take care of it, rather than hide in a closed room?” Alas, I did not. I simply pointed her to the proper authorities who could give her information about the tutor room.
This week they returned. They returned and were locked away in the tutor room, which may seem to be a soundproof room, but it is made of glass and drywall, so it merely muffles the sound slightly.
Slightly.
I walked past the room, looking in glaringly, and the parents sat there in the dark, reading their books, ignoring the crying baby.
A while later, after I decided the crying had to stop or they had to leave, I was going to go back and say something to them, but a coworker approached my desk with a question. As I answered her question, the couple and their now quiet baby passed my desk, and when they were out of eyeshot, I rolled my eyes at my coworker. She looked at the couple and then looked back at me knowingly.
“What? Were there books on the kid’s head?” she asked.
“WHAT?!” I wasn’t even quiet, I just yelled it right at the reference desk. What the heck did she mean?
“Well, they came to the check-out desk the other day with the baby in the carrier and they set books and movies all over the baby in the carrier, so they wouldn’t have to hold the books separate from the baby. I didn’t even know there was a baby in there until they loaded all the books and DVDs. She had like three DVDs on her head!”
I demanded, “Are you serious?”
She concurred. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Why we offer computer classes, when these patrons have lived this long without computers and will continue to live without them, yet we get ignorant, young parents who come into the library and have NO CLUE how to be parents, and clearly the most important lessons we could offer our community have more to do with life lessons than cyber lessons. While we’re at it, some classes in common courtesy and how to drive would be useful to our community as well. Perhaps a seminar on gratitude and how to wipe your ass after you use the toilet might be fortuitous.
Yet, I can’t get so high and mighty without mentioning that I helped one of our circ clerks the other day, who needed to scan a few pictures and email them to her daughter. This is a woman who has a computer at home, uses a computer all day at work, communicates with our Outlook email as much as the rest of us, but has no clue what the Internet is all about. Once she had scanned her photos, I told her to go to her email account and I’d show her how to send an attachment. She opened an Explorer window and then started typing the address in the address bar, only instead of typing “yahoo.com”, she typed her entire email address in the address bar. Error. I suggested she first go to Yahoo.com and then sign into her account. She had no idea what I was telling her to do. I showed her and typed it in myself, bringing me to Yahoo’s homepage, and she still had no idea what to do from there. Then she had no idea what her password was. I asked how often she uses her home email and she admitted it was only once in a while, and she just saved all her passwords on her computer so that she didn’t have to remember anything.
So, I suppose if we’re going to start teaching people and playing holier-than-thou, we should probably make sure we have equipped ourselves first with all the skills we hope to offer the public. If everyone on staff passes the Wipe Your Ass class, we’ll move on to the How To Send Email class. I’m wondering if we have more than two people on staff qualified to contribute to a How To Behave With Your Baby In Public class.
The young couple initially came into the library with the baby in a carrier, and they sat in a remote corner while they each read their books. This made the couple happy. This did not make the baby happy. The tiny baby cried pretty much nonstop for three hours. I don’t know babies – they are creatures I avoid – but this one could not have been a full year old. Each time I walked past the couple, I eyed them disapprovingly, hoping they’d take the hint and try to do something with the baby. It seemed that by the time my patience and tolerance ran out, they inevitably were packing up to leave. This happened a couple times when, on their exit, the mother approached me with all smiles and quietly asked me if it was possible to use one of the tutor rooms the next time they came in, so that the crying baby wouldn’t disturb as many people.
There was a huge part of me that wanted to ask, “Why don’t you actually DO SOMETHING about the crying baby, like take care of it, rather than hide in a closed room?” Alas, I did not. I simply pointed her to the proper authorities who could give her information about the tutor room.
This week they returned. They returned and were locked away in the tutor room, which may seem to be a soundproof room, but it is made of glass and drywall, so it merely muffles the sound slightly.
Slightly.
I walked past the room, looking in glaringly, and the parents sat there in the dark, reading their books, ignoring the crying baby.
A while later, after I decided the crying had to stop or they had to leave, I was going to go back and say something to them, but a coworker approached my desk with a question. As I answered her question, the couple and their now quiet baby passed my desk, and when they were out of eyeshot, I rolled my eyes at my coworker. She looked at the couple and then looked back at me knowingly.
“What? Were there books on the kid’s head?” she asked.
“WHAT?!” I wasn’t even quiet, I just yelled it right at the reference desk. What the heck did she mean?
“Well, they came to the check-out desk the other day with the baby in the carrier and they set books and movies all over the baby in the carrier, so they wouldn’t have to hold the books separate from the baby. I didn’t even know there was a baby in there until they loaded all the books and DVDs. She had like three DVDs on her head!”
I demanded, “Are you serious?”
She concurred. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Why we offer computer classes, when these patrons have lived this long without computers and will continue to live without them, yet we get ignorant, young parents who come into the library and have NO CLUE how to be parents, and clearly the most important lessons we could offer our community have more to do with life lessons than cyber lessons. While we’re at it, some classes in common courtesy and how to drive would be useful to our community as well. Perhaps a seminar on gratitude and how to wipe your ass after you use the toilet might be fortuitous.
Yet, I can’t get so high and mighty without mentioning that I helped one of our circ clerks the other day, who needed to scan a few pictures and email them to her daughter. This is a woman who has a computer at home, uses a computer all day at work, communicates with our Outlook email as much as the rest of us, but has no clue what the Internet is all about. Once she had scanned her photos, I told her to go to her email account and I’d show her how to send an attachment. She opened an Explorer window and then started typing the address in the address bar, only instead of typing “yahoo.com”, she typed her entire email address in the address bar. Error. I suggested she first go to Yahoo.com and then sign into her account. She had no idea what I was telling her to do. I showed her and typed it in myself, bringing me to Yahoo’s homepage, and she still had no idea what to do from there. Then she had no idea what her password was. I asked how often she uses her home email and she admitted it was only once in a while, and she just saved all her passwords on her computer so that she didn’t have to remember anything.
So, I suppose if we’re going to start teaching people and playing holier-than-thou, we should probably make sure we have equipped ourselves first with all the skills we hope to offer the public. If everyone on staff passes the Wipe Your Ass class, we’ll move on to the How To Send Email class. I’m wondering if we have more than two people on staff qualified to contribute to a How To Behave With Your Baby In Public class.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
What a Day!
It was one of those days.
I took a phone call from a man who was looking for travel videos, specifically DVDs, on obscure National Parks. Not just a DVD about national parks that include some of these lesser-known parks, but he wanted a movie that was devoted to each park, and it had to be on DVD. Not surprisingly, there are none available on the parks he was requesting. One had a VHS movie in some far-away library that I could have requested, but he refused the obsolete media. Finally, he expanded his interests to include some areas that are actually a little more popular, and there were libraries in the area, which could readily loan the videos to us.
“All I need is your library card number and I’ll process the hold for you,” I stated.
He stammered, “OK, let me find it. Um, it’s in my wallet, I think. Uh, hang on.”
After much ruckus, he got frustrated and blurted out, “You know, I’m not sure where my card is, but my wife is on the library board. She’s actually the president!”
Aaaaaaaaaaand I’m supposed to care about that, why? Perhaps congratulate you? Oh, wait a minute! The president’s husband? Isn’t the president of our library board the woman who donated a free facial wax for anyone who signed up for a new library card during National Library Card Month? Uh-huh. She’s a winner. I have a friend who is also on the library board, and I do believe she has described your wife, sir, as self-important, and one of the many members of the board who routinely does not read any of the board packet material ahead of time, which is part of her damn job as a trustee, and she regularly shows up to meetings completely unprepared and ignorant of the topics on the agenda. Oh yes, I’m familiar with her. The woman who volunteers two mere hours a month to use her lack of knowledge about how to run a library to make decisions that run our library. Yes, I do know of her, sir, and if you’re going to name-drop with me, you really should pick someone who might positively reflect upon you.
If only you were married to Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears. THEN I might look up your card number for you. HOWEVER, I would probably *accidentally* not place the travel videos on hold, but maybe some self-help books. That would make me feel better about the entire situation, sir, but as it stands, you telling me you’re married to the board president isn’t doing a damn thing for you.
“Sorry, but I really do need that card NUMBER to process the hold,” I said.
Eventually he found it, and much to my extreme pleasure, it was blocked with a nasty message that he had to see Circulation about a problem with his account. Oh yeah!
You see, the only thing worse than a self-important board member who expects special service because she is part of the team who doesn’t want to give us COLA raises each year, is some idiot spouse of a self-important board member, who has NOTHING to do with our library, yet expects some sort of in-law special services because he married a woman who passes policies for our library, that actually contradict the ALA’s philosophies of providing access to information without censorship.
So, about 30 minutes later, there was a tiny, scruffy-faced man with a buzz cut standing before me, and all I could think about was that his entire head was covered in stubble. Strange.
He identified himself as the caller from before, needing the travel videos.
OH! Yeah, the board-president-in-law! Right!
As irritated as I was to now have his disheveled little self standing before me, I found myself in a compromising situation. In the middle of speaking with him about what video to order now that his account had been cleared, a one-eyed man wandered over to my desk and interrupted us.
He wasn’t really one-eyed, but he had one eye that couldn’t possibly have any vision because the entire iris and pupil were covered in a cloudy film. I looked into his “good” eye, sympathizing with his ailment but not welcoming his rude interruption.
He said, “Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me! I need help with my computer!”
I froze, apologized with irritation to the board-president-in-law, and asked the one-eyed man what he needed.
“I need a new computer! Mine is going too slow. The page won’t load and I need to fill something out online today!” He was a little over 6 feet tall, thin, totally unkempt, and a little intoxicated.
“Well, if the website is going slow, I can’t speed anything up. Every computer runs off the same network, so if it’s slow at one computer, it’s going to be slow at the others. Maybe it’s the website that’s slow or overloaded with visitors,” I suggested.
“No, it can’t be! I need another computer!” he demanded.
I took a deep breath and told him that I would help him with his computer problem when I was finished with the patron who was ahead of him. The one-eyed man sighed and started pacing clumsily nearby, while the board-president-in-law seemed pleased that I made this man wait his turn, as if I somehow defended him and his imperative travel movie needs.
It’s a very strange feeling to hate a man who is name-dropping to get the rules bent to his needs, and then find myself longing to be back helping him because another patron comes along who irritates me more. And in the process of doing the right thing and triaging the situation, I somehow make the self-important bastard I don’t like very much feel even more self-important, while making the disruptive guy wait, which makes his disruptive behavior continue.
Some days my job pains me.
When my shift ended, I took a jog to the washroom for a quick bladder dump. I went into the first stall and found dark yellow poo staining the toilet seat. It looked dry and hard, not fresh, and I wondered how many people had touched this seat covered with poo and not known they were wiping someone else’s intestinal bacteria on their bum. Backing out of the stall, I opted to use the second one. There I found more copious amounts of dark yellow poo on this toilet seat. Someone shat upon both toilet seats in the washroom! What the hell kind of maniac would do something like that?
While I know that we are expected to clean up such messes when we find them, I was only there to pee quickly before going to lunch, and I feared that if I had to chisel dried poo off of two toilet seats, I’d also be cleaning up my own vomit, and additionally have absolutely no appetite, thereby wasting the 30 minutes I was going to get docked for lunch regardless of what I did or didn’t eat. It seemed unfair and a physical request that exceeds reasonable expectations of this employee.
The responsible thing would have been to report it to another staff member, who might find someone with a stronger constitution to do the clean-up. Being the irresponsible twit that I am, I decided to wash my hands and go to lunch. When I returned, I’d warn the people on staff who I like about the poo-encrusted toilet seats so that they too may avoid the liability issue of She Who Finds It, Cleans It. If you never found it, you can’t be expected to clean it.
The remainder of the evening I spent sitting cross-legged and trying not to stand up for any length of time. Holding your pee for an entire day is not easy. Thankfully, our patrons aren’t remotely funny or there might have been an accident I couldn’t avoid taking responsibility for.
It was reported later, by another librarian, that a man was sitting at a public computer, looking at softcore porn and fondling himself. Although he wasn’t exposing his naughty bits, he was definitely getting quite friendly with them through his jeans. A patron saw him and reported it. As it turns out, this fondler is a patron who is a frequent visitor at our library, and he is clearly suffering from some degree of retardation, which is easily ascertained in the briefest of conversations with him, so it’s a bit difficult to make him feel like a humiliated pervert and drive him out with our moral whip and steed, decrying him as a social leper we have no need of serving. Not that I’ve ever done such a thing, but others have. My point is that when you have someone with such severe disabilities, it is difficult to figure out what kind of talk you should have with him about the inappropriate behavior. Precisely how it was handled, I don’t know. Yet, I thank my lucky stars that I only had to deal with the board-president-in-law, the one-eyed computer-user, and the poo-encrusted toilet seats.
I’m never sure whether to feel overwhelmed by the relief that my freaks didn’t equal the freakitude others had to deal with, or more disappointed for the fate of mankind, given the sampling of members of the general public I crossed paths with. My glass is neither half-full or half-empty. It’s just a glass with a gaping hole in it, and the liquid is draining constantly.
I took a phone call from a man who was looking for travel videos, specifically DVDs, on obscure National Parks. Not just a DVD about national parks that include some of these lesser-known parks, but he wanted a movie that was devoted to each park, and it had to be on DVD. Not surprisingly, there are none available on the parks he was requesting. One had a VHS movie in some far-away library that I could have requested, but he refused the obsolete media. Finally, he expanded his interests to include some areas that are actually a little more popular, and there were libraries in the area, which could readily loan the videos to us.
“All I need is your library card number and I’ll process the hold for you,” I stated.
He stammered, “OK, let me find it. Um, it’s in my wallet, I think. Uh, hang on.”
After much ruckus, he got frustrated and blurted out, “You know, I’m not sure where my card is, but my wife is on the library board. She’s actually the president!”
Aaaaaaaaaaand I’m supposed to care about that, why? Perhaps congratulate you? Oh, wait a minute! The president’s husband? Isn’t the president of our library board the woman who donated a free facial wax for anyone who signed up for a new library card during National Library Card Month? Uh-huh. She’s a winner. I have a friend who is also on the library board, and I do believe she has described your wife, sir, as self-important, and one of the many members of the board who routinely does not read any of the board packet material ahead of time, which is part of her damn job as a trustee, and she regularly shows up to meetings completely unprepared and ignorant of the topics on the agenda. Oh yes, I’m familiar with her. The woman who volunteers two mere hours a month to use her lack of knowledge about how to run a library to make decisions that run our library. Yes, I do know of her, sir, and if you’re going to name-drop with me, you really should pick someone who might positively reflect upon you.
If only you were married to Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears. THEN I might look up your card number for you. HOWEVER, I would probably *accidentally* not place the travel videos on hold, but maybe some self-help books. That would make me feel better about the entire situation, sir, but as it stands, you telling me you’re married to the board president isn’t doing a damn thing for you.
“Sorry, but I really do need that card NUMBER to process the hold,” I said.
Eventually he found it, and much to my extreme pleasure, it was blocked with a nasty message that he had to see Circulation about a problem with his account. Oh yeah!
You see, the only thing worse than a self-important board member who expects special service because she is part of the team who doesn’t want to give us COLA raises each year, is some idiot spouse of a self-important board member, who has NOTHING to do with our library, yet expects some sort of in-law special services because he married a woman who passes policies for our library, that actually contradict the ALA’s philosophies of providing access to information without censorship.
So, about 30 minutes later, there was a tiny, scruffy-faced man with a buzz cut standing before me, and all I could think about was that his entire head was covered in stubble. Strange.
He identified himself as the caller from before, needing the travel videos.
OH! Yeah, the board-president-in-law! Right!
As irritated as I was to now have his disheveled little self standing before me, I found myself in a compromising situation. In the middle of speaking with him about what video to order now that his account had been cleared, a one-eyed man wandered over to my desk and interrupted us.
He wasn’t really one-eyed, but he had one eye that couldn’t possibly have any vision because the entire iris and pupil were covered in a cloudy film. I looked into his “good” eye, sympathizing with his ailment but not welcoming his rude interruption.
He said, “Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me! I need help with my computer!”
I froze, apologized with irritation to the board-president-in-law, and asked the one-eyed man what he needed.
“I need a new computer! Mine is going too slow. The page won’t load and I need to fill something out online today!” He was a little over 6 feet tall, thin, totally unkempt, and a little intoxicated.
“Well, if the website is going slow, I can’t speed anything up. Every computer runs off the same network, so if it’s slow at one computer, it’s going to be slow at the others. Maybe it’s the website that’s slow or overloaded with visitors,” I suggested.
“No, it can’t be! I need another computer!” he demanded.
I took a deep breath and told him that I would help him with his computer problem when I was finished with the patron who was ahead of him. The one-eyed man sighed and started pacing clumsily nearby, while the board-president-in-law seemed pleased that I made this man wait his turn, as if I somehow defended him and his imperative travel movie needs.
It’s a very strange feeling to hate a man who is name-dropping to get the rules bent to his needs, and then find myself longing to be back helping him because another patron comes along who irritates me more. And in the process of doing the right thing and triaging the situation, I somehow make the self-important bastard I don’t like very much feel even more self-important, while making the disruptive guy wait, which makes his disruptive behavior continue.
Some days my job pains me.
When my shift ended, I took a jog to the washroom for a quick bladder dump. I went into the first stall and found dark yellow poo staining the toilet seat. It looked dry and hard, not fresh, and I wondered how many people had touched this seat covered with poo and not known they were wiping someone else’s intestinal bacteria on their bum. Backing out of the stall, I opted to use the second one. There I found more copious amounts of dark yellow poo on this toilet seat. Someone shat upon both toilet seats in the washroom! What the hell kind of maniac would do something like that?
While I know that we are expected to clean up such messes when we find them, I was only there to pee quickly before going to lunch, and I feared that if I had to chisel dried poo off of two toilet seats, I’d also be cleaning up my own vomit, and additionally have absolutely no appetite, thereby wasting the 30 minutes I was going to get docked for lunch regardless of what I did or didn’t eat. It seemed unfair and a physical request that exceeds reasonable expectations of this employee.
The responsible thing would have been to report it to another staff member, who might find someone with a stronger constitution to do the clean-up. Being the irresponsible twit that I am, I decided to wash my hands and go to lunch. When I returned, I’d warn the people on staff who I like about the poo-encrusted toilet seats so that they too may avoid the liability issue of She Who Finds It, Cleans It. If you never found it, you can’t be expected to clean it.
The remainder of the evening I spent sitting cross-legged and trying not to stand up for any length of time. Holding your pee for an entire day is not easy. Thankfully, our patrons aren’t remotely funny or there might have been an accident I couldn’t avoid taking responsibility for.
It was reported later, by another librarian, that a man was sitting at a public computer, looking at softcore porn and fondling himself. Although he wasn’t exposing his naughty bits, he was definitely getting quite friendly with them through his jeans. A patron saw him and reported it. As it turns out, this fondler is a patron who is a frequent visitor at our library, and he is clearly suffering from some degree of retardation, which is easily ascertained in the briefest of conversations with him, so it’s a bit difficult to make him feel like a humiliated pervert and drive him out with our moral whip and steed, decrying him as a social leper we have no need of serving. Not that I’ve ever done such a thing, but others have. My point is that when you have someone with such severe disabilities, it is difficult to figure out what kind of talk you should have with him about the inappropriate behavior. Precisely how it was handled, I don’t know. Yet, I thank my lucky stars that I only had to deal with the board-president-in-law, the one-eyed computer-user, and the poo-encrusted toilet seats.
I’m never sure whether to feel overwhelmed by the relief that my freaks didn’t equal the freakitude others had to deal with, or more disappointed for the fate of mankind, given the sampling of members of the general public I crossed paths with. My glass is neither half-full or half-empty. It’s just a glass with a gaping hole in it, and the liquid is draining constantly.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Run. As Fast As You Can.
Today there was some sort of cosmic conspiracy that resulted in huge amounts of interference from forces greater than me, coming together to create a shift at the reference desk that will go down in history as Freak Fest, 2008.
Aside from the fax machine having repeated strokes and refusing to do its job, computers were freezing into a white screen more frequently than I could get to them for a reboot. Eventually I just announced to our patrons that if their computer froze, they could hard boot them down on their own. Files weren’t accessible one second, and then they were. Some documents successfully made it to the network printers while others were lost in oblivion. Fortunately, the patrons did not rise up and decide to lynch me; they felt sorry for me and did their best to try to fix their own problems.
Like I said, this was not a normal day.
One man tried to use the scanner on his library card’s barcode, but he thought he had to run the scanner up the length of the barcode. When this didn’t work, he tried it slower and faster, assuming that it was the speed he was moving the scanner up the card and not that he was somehow misusing the scanner. I was never aware that a red, horizontal laser line that appears under a scanner would present a situation too complicated to figure out where the barcode should go. You have no idea how many people try to feed their card into the floppy drive of the computer. If they can’t figure this out, I don’t think they should be using our computers.
Another man approached me with an open bag of potato chips, and as I asked him how I could help him, he shoveled a handful of potato chips into his mouth. I fully expected him to chew his mouthful before asking me his question, but this was not to be the case. Through shards of potato chips, he mumbled his question, which was computer related, so I followed him to his computer, with the hopes that he’d swallow the food in his mouth and then be able to communicate with me properly. When we arrived at his computer, he sat down in the seat. He put his finger up to indicate that he needed a moment, then proceeded to scoop another fistful of chips into his mouth. With his mouth full again, he began mumbling about wanting to know how to control the volume. I was so irritated that I didn’t want to stand there and wait for him to finish chewing before I issued instructions to him. I told him to use the mouse to click here to find the slider that controls the volume, and that’s when I realized his hand was full of crumbs. He made no attempt to wipe his hand off and immediately began mousing. There was nothing I could say. I turned around and walked away, disgusted.
A woman approached my desk, and I tried not to stare at her, but it was nearly impossible. She’d pulled all her hair from the back, sides and top of her head into a ponytail where her bangs are. Her hair was actually short and thick, so you could see how most of the back of her hair had fallen throughout the day, but the top and sides remained as a bushy fountain spewing like a unicorn horn out of the center of the top of her head. How do you not stare at that?
She had her husband’s resume that needed to be faxed to a business. The resume was wrinkled, dirty and had a grease stain on it, which might or might not translate through the fax. I said nothing about the condition of the paper, but I silently wondered if all this debris and chemicals feeding through the fax would somehow damage it.
As the fax was progressing, I turned to the patron and said it was going through just fine.
She responded, “I hope I get my period.”
Is this a reference question? How am I supposed to respond to this?
I kind of looked around, then back at her, and drawled out an “okaaaaaaaaaay” that ran me out of breath before I blinked again.
She continued, “I’m late. And I’m really bloated.”
I blinked a few times and then I offered up the only thing I could think to say, something to the effect that the fax would take a few minutes to transmit, and she could come back to see me in about five minutes to receive her confirmation.
She said, “I need to pee. Again. I pee a lot.”
Again I blinked. Quite a bit. Suddenly the ponytail coming out the top of her head wasn’t the weirdest thing about her.
What’s really bizarre is that there didn’t seem to be retardation or anything cognitively wrong with her, but as someone I know likes to describe a person who gives out way too much information to complete strangers, this woman was socially promiscuous.
That’s right: she was a verbal whore.
With a bad hair-do.
Perhaps that was her freak flag flying high.
Maybe I’m the idiot because I didn’t recognize all the warning signs and run.
Whatever is going on in the universe that’s making the freakiest of people flock to me, I hope it subsides very soon. If this is a month-long, some-planet is in my house of some-zodiac-sign, or whatever phase of the moon we’re in that will last until the next one, I’m going to have to drive to the middle of nowhere so that I can avoid the freaky people for the rest of this cycle.
Aside from the fax machine having repeated strokes and refusing to do its job, computers were freezing into a white screen more frequently than I could get to them for a reboot. Eventually I just announced to our patrons that if their computer froze, they could hard boot them down on their own. Files weren’t accessible one second, and then they were. Some documents successfully made it to the network printers while others were lost in oblivion. Fortunately, the patrons did not rise up and decide to lynch me; they felt sorry for me and did their best to try to fix their own problems.
Like I said, this was not a normal day.
One man tried to use the scanner on his library card’s barcode, but he thought he had to run the scanner up the length of the barcode. When this didn’t work, he tried it slower and faster, assuming that it was the speed he was moving the scanner up the card and not that he was somehow misusing the scanner. I was never aware that a red, horizontal laser line that appears under a scanner would present a situation too complicated to figure out where the barcode should go. You have no idea how many people try to feed their card into the floppy drive of the computer. If they can’t figure this out, I don’t think they should be using our computers.
Another man approached me with an open bag of potato chips, and as I asked him how I could help him, he shoveled a handful of potato chips into his mouth. I fully expected him to chew his mouthful before asking me his question, but this was not to be the case. Through shards of potato chips, he mumbled his question, which was computer related, so I followed him to his computer, with the hopes that he’d swallow the food in his mouth and then be able to communicate with me properly. When we arrived at his computer, he sat down in the seat. He put his finger up to indicate that he needed a moment, then proceeded to scoop another fistful of chips into his mouth. With his mouth full again, he began mumbling about wanting to know how to control the volume. I was so irritated that I didn’t want to stand there and wait for him to finish chewing before I issued instructions to him. I told him to use the mouse to click here to find the slider that controls the volume, and that’s when I realized his hand was full of crumbs. He made no attempt to wipe his hand off and immediately began mousing. There was nothing I could say. I turned around and walked away, disgusted.
A woman approached my desk, and I tried not to stare at her, but it was nearly impossible. She’d pulled all her hair from the back, sides and top of her head into a ponytail where her bangs are. Her hair was actually short and thick, so you could see how most of the back of her hair had fallen throughout the day, but the top and sides remained as a bushy fountain spewing like a unicorn horn out of the center of the top of her head. How do you not stare at that?
She had her husband’s resume that needed to be faxed to a business. The resume was wrinkled, dirty and had a grease stain on it, which might or might not translate through the fax. I said nothing about the condition of the paper, but I silently wondered if all this debris and chemicals feeding through the fax would somehow damage it.
As the fax was progressing, I turned to the patron and said it was going through just fine.
She responded, “I hope I get my period.”
Is this a reference question? How am I supposed to respond to this?
I kind of looked around, then back at her, and drawled out an “okaaaaaaaaaay” that ran me out of breath before I blinked again.
She continued, “I’m late. And I’m really bloated.”
I blinked a few times and then I offered up the only thing I could think to say, something to the effect that the fax would take a few minutes to transmit, and she could come back to see me in about five minutes to receive her confirmation.
She said, “I need to pee. Again. I pee a lot.”
Again I blinked. Quite a bit. Suddenly the ponytail coming out the top of her head wasn’t the weirdest thing about her.
What’s really bizarre is that there didn’t seem to be retardation or anything cognitively wrong with her, but as someone I know likes to describe a person who gives out way too much information to complete strangers, this woman was socially promiscuous.
That’s right: she was a verbal whore.
With a bad hair-do.
Perhaps that was her freak flag flying high.
Maybe I’m the idiot because I didn’t recognize all the warning signs and run.
Whatever is going on in the universe that’s making the freakiest of people flock to me, I hope it subsides very soon. If this is a month-long, some-planet is in my house of some-zodiac-sign, or whatever phase of the moon we’re in that will last until the next one, I’m going to have to drive to the middle of nowhere so that I can avoid the freaky people for the rest of this cycle.
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