Feeding Frenzy

Have you ever started your day and had the expectation that it would go swimmingly, only it ended up going drowningly?

Today was such a day for me.

Trip #1 to the washroom left me in the stall staring at a creature that was staring back at me. It was a smeared handprint of a small woman or a child, about 4½ feet off the floor on the back of the stall door. The smear was composed of a dried and hardened substance that was dark brown in color. It could be mud. It could be not mud.

The thing about this smear is that I’m quite familiar with it because I’ve been staring at it for almost four weeks now. I refuse to clean it off the door, being immuno-compromised as I am, but I’m monitoring the amount of time it will take the janitors or someone else on staff to take care of it. To me, it’s quite obvious, and perhaps there are a number of other members of staff who are using the washroom and staring at this hand smear just like I am, wondering when someone will take care of it.

This is slightly worse than the used tampon shoved back into a wrapper that sat in the tray of the tampon machine for over two weeks. The abandoned tampon was not so bad because it was inside the part of the machine where you would have to insert your hand to actually touch it. The shit-print is also worse than the mystery pill that sat on the floor in one of the grout lines for three weeks not too long ago. I find it disheartening that our janitors who allegedly clean the washrooms daily went three full weeks without sweeping or mopping the floors in the washroom. Even then I’m not sure if the janitors mopped or if someone who read my blog was motivated to remove the mystery pill. I’m betting on the latter. This time I’m keeping my trap shut at work about the shit-print. We’ll see how long it stays there. I fully expect to run into Golgothan whenever I enter that washroom each day.

On my way out of the washroom, I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror and discovered that my shirt had a tear in it, which was even more obvious than the shit-print on the back of the stall door. I was wearing a sheer, black blouse with a black tank beneath, and the tear was where the sleeve connects to the back of the blouse, exposing my pasty white skin for about an inch-and-a-half. I looked like a She-Hulk in mid-transformation. Someone at Circ was kind enough to locate a sewing kit for me, but it had only white thread. I found myself back in the shit-print bathroom stall, sewing my shirt back together, and then using a Sharpie to color the white thread black. It worked, but I spent the day with my thumb and index finger dead black from the Sharpie ink, appearing as if I’d been fingerprinted. Lovely.

Some days take only a half-hour of participation before you realize that you would have been better off never having gotten out of bed.

Something evil has attacked the computers at our library and they are running so slowly that often the tasks you ask them to do time-out and freeze up the system. Our website had been down, many staff computers were shut down with debilitating viruses, and the public computers are so painfully slow that many claim they are not even worth using. Yet, they were still full all day today, with many cranky patrons complaining about the lack of speed and abundance of unloadable web pages. Welcome to the reference desk!

My first patron almost gagged me. She reeked of cigarettes so intensely, I actually tried to get a look at her hands to see if she was smoking right there at my desk. As if she was motivated to cause me the most discomfort, she also made a point of leaning on my desk to speak as close to my face as was possible without making physical contact. I leaned back, and she leaned in closer. I pushed my chair back and she moved down the desk to an indentation where she could be even nearer to me. Finally I stood up and took two steps away from my side of the desk, which made me a full foot taller than her, too. That distance was the greatest distance between her stanky breath and my nose since she’d walked up to me. I was grateful for my height more than anything at that moment.

What she was asking for kind of amused me, though.

“I need a book on MANIAC depression.” That is not a spelling error. That is what she said.

Without chuckling, I explained that I was searching for bipolar disorder and located a few books to point her to.

“Does it have pictures?”

Pictures?

“Yes, pictures. Nothing specific. Just something that shows what it’s like to be maniac depressed.”

Now I was smiling. But I covered it up by asking whether she was interested in pictures like graphs and tables of statistics or information, or photos of people who have BIPOLAR DISORDER.

“Just whatever. Pictures. Like, a happy face and a sad face. You know?”

I sent her to the Youth Department to find a children’s book on maniac depression. I wondered if it was too advanced for her.

Later I asked Leelu what she thought MANIAC depression was and she responded, “Is that what happens when you run out of people to kill?”

Must be.

My next patron was an older woman who was completely computer illiterate, but wanted to find and print out the operator manual for her lawnmower, which was made in 1950. When I say she was computer illiterate, I mean that she had confidence in using a mouse and seemed to know what she was doing until I asked her to click on something, and then she was lost. Aren’t websites just like books on a screen? You can CLICK on parts of the words and go to OTHER websites?

It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I only had to repeat my instructions to her about three times, the third time sternly, before she followed my instructions.

“Click on the green box that says ‘Manuals’.”

She’d put her cursor on a red box that said “Sitemap”.

“No, the green box that says ‘MANUALS’.”

She’d put her cursor on the yellow box that was an ad.

“No! The GREEN box that says ‘MANUALS’.”

Just as I’d start leaning over her shoulder to point it out, she’d finally do what I said. This is what happened for a full 20 minutes, guiding her through page after page, website after website, until we found the PDF where her manual was available, each time having to repeat very clear directions to her three times. The girl sitting at the computer next to her was giggling each time I repeated something. When the people nearby were starting to glare at the woman, I offered to do the search and print the manual for her myself, but she was determined to have me instruct her thrice, until she got it herself. By the time she printed it out, my throat was sore from the intense repetition, and I’d sprained my eyes by rolling them so much.

It takes a lot to sprain my eyes. They roll all day long.

There was another man sitting at a computer far in the back of the library – not his choosing, but could have been fixed if he’d been in the least bit courteous – who was taking his business calls on his cell phone every five minutes. He was polite enough to leave each time he received a phone call, but the time it took him to secure his computer and walk the length of the building to the lobby sometimes allowed him to seal a deal and hang up before he even got out of our earshot. Perhaps it might not have been so irritating if he wasn’t such a loud talker.

My senses were bleeding by then.

I’m not one to usually complain about larger women wearing skimpy clothes because trampy dress doesn’t hinge on body type to me. However, I had a young woman who was about 5 feet tall, roughly 200 pounds, wearing a skin-tight, black tube top with some wannabe gangsta propaganda all over it, written in gaudy, gold lettering. However, her boobage was too significant to be wandering around in a tube top, so this girl chose to wear a pastel pink bra under it, with the straps and tops of the bra cups protruding from the elastic rim of her tube top. It was downright disturbing. And she kept adjusting her bra, pulling her girls up to an unnatural height on her chest. It was like a train wreck. I couldn’t turn away, but I couldn’t hide my horror.

Not long after this, a man sitting at the computer nearest me started blasting music into his headphones, and for a second I wondered if I was having some kind of flashback to my younger years, when I was riding a sugar high of Pixie Stix and Smarties, because I swear I could hear the song “Centerfold” blasting from nearby. Surely the J. Giles Band has not been inflicted upon us! Who the hell would blast that stupid song 27 years after it was released?! There he was. The pathetic man who spends his days at our library, playing Tetris and listening to bad 80s music. Next on the docket was “Rock and Roll Band” by Boston. For the first time in my life, I trying to think of a place to call where I could be put on hold and listen to tragic hold music. Then I realized the worst hold music I know belongs to my very own library, and given that I can’t call myself and put myself on hold, I had to suffer through some more dreadful flashbacks via the headphones of a man with nothing better to do than torture me.

A man then approached my desk wanting to use our public fax machine. He’d prepaid at Circ as was required, and handed me a receipt showing he had two pages to send through, yet he handed me three pages.

I asked, “Do you have two pages to send, or three?”

He answered, “Well, two, but this one is a cover sheet.”

“Yes, but that’s three pages.”

“Cover pages don’t count.”

“Well, they do to us. It’s a full-page document with writing on the entire length of it. It counts as a page. You’ll have to go back to Circ and pay for the third page, or we can leave the cover sheet off, if it doesn’t matter to you.”

“That’s stupid! It’s just a cover sheet. It shouldn’t count.”

“It's three pages. One. Two. Three. We don’t discriminate based on what the pages have on them.”

“Fine. Send them through. I’ll go pay in a minute.”

I stood there looking at him. I didn’t budge. He didn’t budge either. He wasn’t going to pay and I knew it, so I continued standing there. When it was clear that we were going to have a standoff, I set his three pages on the desk, took a deep breath, and began flipping through a magazine. This caused him to throw his hands in the air in defeat and stomp off to Circ to pay for the third page. When he handed me the receipt, I sent his fax through, but not a moment sooner.

By then I was starting to feel like the patrons had it in for me. I was grinding my teeth more and counting the minutes until my shift ended.

Also, I was spasmodically paranoid that the emergency stitchery I’d done on my shirt was not going to hold, so I would feel compelled to whip my head around and check my back about every five minutes or so.

It was a stressful shift.

When I answered the phone to a man who identified himself as a Hospice nurse for one of our patrons, I expected the interaction to be a smooth one. Hospice nurse, right? That requires patience, tolerance, sympathy, intellect, and people skills.

There I go again assuming and jumping to illogical conclusions.

This man was furious with Circ, who would not allow him to pick up his patient’s interlibrary loan items. They suggested that he place all future holds on his own card so as not to breach any privacy laws protecting the patrons, but he refused. They suggested he put his patient in the homebound delivery program and just have all the items delivered right to the doorstep, but this was undignified and condescending to him because as a Hospice nurse, he was perfectly capable of picking up his patient’s library material. They could make no headway, and in desperation, Circ transferred the angry man to me. Great.

I tried to explain that my hands were even more tied, since all I could do was place holds or transfer him to the person in charge of homebound delivery. I have no power over Circ rules. He yelled his frustration at me and then hung up on me.

Why on earth he would be so insulted about the home delivery program, I don’t know. Who the hell would turn down home delivery? Clearly he was just angry about the Circ rules and wasn’t thinking about his patient’s needs, or he would’ve been grateful for the door-to-door services we offer.

Great nurse there. Pick a principle and fight it, even if it’s to the detriment of your patient.

The rest of my shift was a struggle with a single patron who felt compelled to interrupt and give bad computer instructions to people I was standing next to, giving correct instructions to.

I’d say, “If you right click on the link and choose to open it in a new window, this will allow you to—“

And suddenly Mr. Interrupter would whirl around in his chair and loudly tell my patron, “It has nothing to do with opening new windows. It’s the computers. They’re going too slow. Nobody is doing anything about it. That’s why your link isn’t working.”

After a deep breath I explained, “It’s true, the computers are going very slow today, but your problem doesn’t have to do with speed. The link isn’t loading, and we’re trying to figure out if it’s a pop-up that’s getting killed by the pop-up blocker, or if it’s a dead link. If you right click the link and tell it to open in a new window, we can see.”

She followed my instructions. The new window opened and the error screen announced that it was a dead link.

The next patron I helped wanted to print a PDF, but it wasn’t showing up at the printer.

I started to instruct her, “With PDFs, we have to use the PDF toolbar to print, rather than the IE toolbar. If you click this icon here—“

And the interrupter shouted from three computers away, “The printer here is messed up! It doesn’t matter what toolbar you use, it’s not going to work. You should just print things from home, like I do.”

This kept happening, and finally I got angry and I told him that he was wrong and to please refrain from giving bad computer advice to the patrons. I was trying to help them and he was actually making matters worse. He started to protest, saying our computers were messed up, but I interrupted him and said that the problems people were having were none of his business and he should stop disrupting the library with his outbursts. I think that by reducing his comments and advice to nothing but disruptions and outbursts he was clear that his interruptions weren’t welcome. He was quiet after that, but as he left the library, he stopped at my desk to loudly proclaim our computers to be functioning at their very worst ever.

This almost made me laugh. The worst ever? That’s pretty bad considering I can recall days on end when they were flatly dead. Slow is worse than dead?

However, I explained that we were aware of the slowness and that there was someone working on them behind the scenes as we spoke, but he turned toward the patrons at the computers and said that we CLAIM someone is working on it, but he’d been here all day and it was not improving one bit.

I snottily said, “That’s because it’s not FIXED yet! Hence me saying they’re STILL WORKING ON IT!”

He continued mumbling his complaints as he left.

When my reference shift was over, I chose to leave work early. My jaw hurt from my molars clear up to my earlobes and I could feel my face pulsating. Out of concern for the welfare of all those who crossed my path, I removed myself from the building.

Drowningly: that’s how my day went. And the patrons seemed to sense this and had a feeding frenzy.

I hate days like this.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

I can sit at the desk for a half-hour flipping through new books, smiling at patrons walking in the door, and nodding when folks comment about the Indian summer, secretly wondering why they’re celebrating the weather by spending the afternoon inside the library, checking their pathetic email and MySpace pages. I surf the news for stories about the most recent psycho in my neighborhood to kill someone so I can see if they have a library card at our library. But most of all, I just reserve out computers that noisy patrons are using so that they cannot get extensions, and also so that I don’t have to confront them about what an asshole they’re being. It’s Sunday, after all. This is my day of giving people breaks. And I choose to passive-aggressively break them from their computer.

Just when I got complacent about the lazy afternoon I was spending at work, two kids walked up to me. The first was looking for information on the Banaue Rice Terraces, which is obscure enough not to have entries in any encyclopedia we own or databases we subscribe to, so I resorted to the evil and distrusted internet for this boy’s research. If his teacher has something against Wikipedia or a few dot-coms, then this boy is going to get a big, fat F on his assignment.

Yet, on the plus side, I learned about the Banaue Rice Terraces, which are fucking fascinating, and I’d love to see them before they are destroyed.

Put the Phillippines on my list, Jeeves. And stop by a gas station so I can pick up some lottery tickets, too, please.

The other boy, who waited semi-patiently, was looking for a recommendation for a good movie. That’s all he gave me to go on. I thought about telling him to watch the DVD I recently watched and loved, Earth: the Biography, but I didn’t figure he’d appreciate that. Finally I got him to share that he was looking for old, scary movies, you know, like Halloween.

Ah, yes. All those old movies are kept in a special vault in the back, where we control the temperature and pH of the environment so that they don’t turn to instant dust in the sunlight. I gave him a list of recommendations and sent him on his way.

In the meantime, the phone had been ringing and I let it go to voice mail. Once the boys were served, I checked the message and wished for some more wild goose chases by pre-teen boys to keep me busy rather than the request from this patron.

“Hi. Um, I need some information about how to get electricity to a building outside my home. Like, how do I run the wiring? Do I have to use plastic or [mumble, mumble]… so if you could just call me back and let me know how to do this, I’d appreciate it. My number is [whatever].”

No name. Just do all my electrical research for me and give me a call back when you have it.

So I called the number.

“Hi, I’m calling from the library, returning…someone’s phone call from a few minutes ago.”

The woman who answered said, “Oh, hello. Let me just put you on hold for a minute and get the person who called you.”

Oooooh, big identity secret! I get it. No names please. I don’t want to be subpoenaed when you blow up your shed!

He finally got on the phone and said, “Hi, I’m the one who called.”

What the hell is with the anonymity? Don’t they know I’m a librarian? Don’t they know I can just look them up by phone number and find out who they are? Don’t they know I have already researched their public records and know how much their house is worth, what their criminal record shows, and I’m currently trying to hack into their medical records? Don’t they know I have LexisNexis connections and I know their life story? Don’t they know that I have already stolen their identity and am currently booking a flight to Indonesia so I can see these Rice Terraces close up?????

Ahem. Anyway.

I started explaining to the caller that we have some older books on electrical codes, some do-it-yourself manuals, and a few other things that will likely cover most his questions, but for local ordinances I have no current information.

I could hear the disappointment in his voice. He was expecting a phone call with step-by-step instructions on how to electrify his backyard porn studio without him having to get up off his recliner. For something this important, particularly when there are wires, codes, laws, and electrical currents involved, you probably shouldn’t rely on a book-y librarian to give you all the information you need on this subject. It always amazes me when a man wants to do things himself, but he wants someone else to do all the digging, prepping and legwork for the projects. Glory whore.

Which is much different from a glory hole, but not by too much, so suddenly I was envisioning him constructing his porn studio with multiple rooms to accommodate all the pervy minions he serves as their Big Daddy.

Without missing a beat, I encouraged him to come into the library and do some of the research in the books I was recommending, and also to call the local village to find out about local ordinances for building porn studios outside structures.

He sighed and said, “I was hoping to avoid having to make a trip over there.”

I apologized and told him I simply couldn’t research his building project for him, but the books were on the shelf if he wanted me to set them aside for him.

He signed deeply again and said not to bother.

I guess building a den of sin takes more work than he anticipated. Involving the local library in this construction was an interesting thought, though. Namelessly, I should add. Perhaps if I’d been extended an invite to the grand opening, I might have been more generous. Alas, it’s in his hands now. Unless it’s somewhere else… nevermind.

About twenty minutes later, I was helping someone with a printing problem and in walks a regular patron of ours, looking quite intense.

He’s one of those holy-rolling, preachy men, who only will watch movies rated G, because PG-ratings these days let downright obscene content and language pass. Once he asked me if there was anything disgusting in the movie Big, with Tom Hanks, and I remembered enjoying that movie immensely (despite the fact that Tom Hanks was the star) and I said it was a sweet, funny movie. Later he came in and scolded me for recommending it, saying it was so offensive and sexual in content that he could not finish the entire movie. This is the man who called about the electrical wiring, who I had, without knowing it was him (because no, I hadn’t researched him and stolen his identity, which I’m starting to think I should have) assumed he was building a smokehouse for a neighborhood sausage-fest. Somehow, it all made sense.

Sunday.

To some this day means something.

To me, it’s just a day when I have to deal with the lunatics all by myself.