Pick Your Battles

A woman came into the library this week to get a library card for herself and her daughter. At the time, the clerk did not notice that the birth year the patron input as her own was 1986, and the birth year she input for her daughter’s was 1992, which would’ve made her six years old when she gave birth. This discrepancy was realized later on by a clerk, who quickly put a block on the cards to get the correct birth dates for each.

The next day the daughter showed up and wanted to check some items out, but with the block on her card she was unable to do so unless her mother came in and corrected the information in the accounts. The girl immediately got on her cell phone and called her mother, who was infuriated and stormed over to the library right away.

When the mother arrived, the situation was explained, and she should have laughed it off like a sane person, admitting that she was not actually six years old when she had her child.

Instead she began rummaging through her wallet for correct ID, and when she whipped out multiple forms of ID, including credit cards, she stopped herself and said, “Oh, wait, these are the ones I use to get Disability. Hold on.”

Continuing to rummage, she produced all new ID with a completely different name and birth date. Different, in fact, from the original application she filled out. This, she claimed, was her real identity. The clerks (including the circulation manager) shrugged and made her a card with the new information, as long as it was feasible that she could be the girl’s parent.

No report of fraudulent identification to the police. No investigation into identity theft. No concern about someone defrauding the government for free money. No one cared that this woman is running around with someone else’s identification, including credit cards, which she’s using for most of her business.

Another problem occurred when she neglected to sign her library card application and another block was put on the card, so yesterday she was confronted yet again by one of the clerks who had to have her signature.

When all was said and done, the woman laughed as she was leaving and loudly said to the person she was with, “I signed a different name on the application, too! Hahaha!”

In a strange twist of fate, this woman then whirled around at the clerk who had been dealing with her, and accused this clerk of calling her the N-word.

Witnesses all state vehemently that the N-word was never spoken, and that the accused clerk hadn’t even said a word after the woman walked away. We do believe this story, given that the accuser is likely one of the biggest liars and thieves to ever walk in our door, but the way it’s being handled is another mystery.

The clerk, who was upset that she would be accused of saying this to someone, has repeated the story to anyone who will listen, only when she tells the story, she actually says the N-word over and over, quoting the woman who accused her of using it.

Maybe I’m a paranoid white girl, though I like to think it’s just a question of respect, but I don’t think I’ve uttered the N-word, even when quoting someone, since I was a little kid and my parents explained the meaning to me. I’m sorry, but that’s a word we just cannot use, even when we’re denying that we said it. It’s offensive, even to me, and I’m one of the rare people who finds most language acceptable and most insults amusing. Call me a cunt, call me a bitch, call me a whore, call me anything you want. They’re just words and unless I care about you personally, I don’t care what names you call me. But the N-word is not even part of my vocabulary, and hearing it, even by African Americans who are taking it back, is offensive to me. I don’t believe for one second that if someone is trying to depict herself as someone who would not call another this name, she probably shouldn’t be repeating the story and the word so much to prove that she would never do that.

So, what we have here is a group of clerks who are apathetic about someone freely flaunting her identity theft, which she successfully uses to swindle free money and attempts to finance and establish herself with. They also don’t care that she tauntingly laughs about signing a false name on a binding document, and let her get away with that as well. But it’s a bit of an ethical free-for-all when the patron accuses one of them of using the N-word.

While hearing this story, excuses ran through my head. It was a full moon this week. These are under-appreciated and abused staff members. Sometimes there isn’t enough money in the world to make their job worth it. Things often get exaggerated in the retelling.

Or maybe this was all true and nothing good or right is left in the world.