Saturday, Bloody Saturday

It was one of those Saturdays when the library could have run itself. Maybe 40 patrons wandered in and out of the building throughout the day, but only five approached a staff member for help, while the rest were self-sufficient. Eight hours of sitting in an uncomfortable chair, looking up enthusiastically at each and every face that approached the desk, only to greeted with a smile as everyone rounded toward the public computers or found their own material. It was suitably a day when I worried about job security and the obsolescence of my position. On top of that, there were two of us sitting there for those eight hours, trying very hard to stay awake.

It’s days like this that I think the little things are going to make me lose my mind.

One of the first people through the door that morning was a young man of about 19 who frequently parks himself in front of a public computer for most of the day, and it was no different yesterday. However, either he had a cold or ragweed season has officially plunged him into runny-nose misery, because the silence of a Saturday morning library was interrupted every five seconds by his thick, mucus-y sniffling. He was using the back of his own hand to wipe snot from his nose at regular intervals, after a handful of viscous sniffles, and the chorus of nasal activity was starting to develop a pattern. This went on for an hour and a half before I had to excuse myself from the desk to escape the maddening desire to bean him with a box of Kleenex.

I strolled out to the circulation desk and told my tale of sniffly woes to the clerks, who trumped me straight away, as usual.

A woman had just walked up to one of the clerks with her library card in her mouth, and then plucked the contaminated device from her dark, wet, germ-hole to hand to the clerk.

This is so common an occurrence that each clerk has his/her their own way of dealing with it. Some try hard to touch the card only where it wasn’t touched by the mouth, and others will just suggest the patron set the card down on the desk, whereupon any library card number can be read and typed into the computer by hand. The clerk who received the mouth card yesterday morning was so sick of people doing this to her that she reached around behind her and grabbed a tissue, which she used to hold the card.

The patron was not embarrassed by the position she put the clerk in -- she was actually offended that the clerk would refuse to touch her wet card.

“What are you doing that for?” she demanded.

The clerk replied, “Well, you had it in your mouth, and I didn’t really want to touch it.”

The indignant patron then shocked everyone by saying, “So what? I’m just going to put it into my wallet and pull it back out next week, and you think it’s going to get clean between now and then? No. I’m going to hand it to you, and it will still have been in my mouth a few days earlier, and you think you’re going to be any safer if you didn’t see me put it in there?”

These are the patrons you wish to put some kind of flag on their accounts so that others will know to put on biohazard suits before dealing with them, but the rub is that you have to touch and scan their cards before you will reach the flag on the account.

No one knew quite what to say to this rude patron, who happened to be right, because we all know disgusting people are, with little or no regard for the rest of the world.

After lunch, two of our regulars paid us a visit. They are the quintessential embodiment of what you would picture if siblings had sex and produced offspring. 21-year-old twin girls, with some mental, physical and maturity handicaps, dirt poor, uncouth, uneducated, unwashed, and unaware that we call them The Beasts.

They asked for two computers, and because they owe the library so much in fines, I had to put them on the temporary computers five feet from the reference desk. With so few other patrons in the building, they were able to use these computers for about two hours before we finally booted them off. What caused us to boot them off had nothing to do with demand for the machines, either.

Somehow, they always have money for snacks, and they bring bags of candy and potato chips, along with their preferred soda brand out to the computers. The twin nearest our desk was grazing steadily from the moment she arrived, and each time she took a swig of her pop, she let out this manly, vulgar belch, and then promptly said, “Excuse me.” It was as if she’d given herself license to behave in any ill-mannered way in public, as long as she excused herself afterward. In a library where patrons were scarce and the loudest noise we could hear was the hum of the air conditioning, the frequent burping was starting to get on my nerves.

I have a relatively short fuse when it comes to the little things, but I can deal with a huge crisis in a state of calm and clear-headedness, and never worry I’m going to have a meltdown. The Beasts were by no means a crisis, but I could feel my tension building as I looked around for some office supplies I could maim them with.

My partner at the desk, who sat closer to them than I did, sent me a quick email stating that he’d had enough of them, that he found their behavior to be so fucking disgusting that he was kicking them off the computers. I wrote back and thanked him for acting, explaining that I was worried they were only driving me nuts and no one else. He jotted an email back that said he could smell the odor every time Beast #1 burped, and it was making him sick.

With that, he put reserves on their computers that would time-out their sessions in just a few minutes, and he announced he had to step away from the desk for a few minutes. I told him to take his time, and then proceeded to turn on the fan, because the most recent burp’s odor was wafting my way now.
The Beasts were oblivious to the offense they caused, and when their computers ran out of time, they simply left.

I swear, for the remainder of the day I still smelled the stench of their post-chewed food, mixed with gastric juice, belched up and shared with the world.

Saturdays like these are uncommon, and given that school starts on Monday, I’m assuming we won’t see another for about ten months.

Good riddance!