I need a new look

Not that I'm trying to look fashionable--I gave up on trying to look fashionable a long time ago. I use the Easter Island Monolith look to put off potential chatterboxes who might wish to take an hour or two of this my only life which I shall never see again to tell me about something fascinating. But, as alert readers may remember, there is this one guy who mistakes my scrupulous lack of interest for rapt interest.

Today he told me all about his passion for water color painting. I sent him DON'T CARE DON'T CARE REALLYREALLY DON'T CARE thought waves which should have melted his cerebral cortex, bu they were, sadly, singularly ineffective.

So instead, I listened for a few minutes about his great love of water color, about which he is passionate. Really passionate. But, it turns out, he hasn't actually done any yet. But he is going to. Soon. He just knows that he'll be great at it. Which is why he will be checking out and studying these three books, all of which I needed to leaf through with him. After a few pages that were accompanied by exclamations of the kind of pictures he would soon be painting, I gave him a hearty, "Good luck with your painting!" and turned back to my computer. Undaunted, he forged on. I further learned about where and when he intended to buy his painting supplies and how much he speculated that they would cost (I'm guessing that there may be some sticker shock in his future.) All this while, I typed furiously at the keyboard, giving him no encouragement. Happily, the phone rang. I gratefully answered a question about the availability of season whatever of that show, even going to the shelves to make sure that it was actually there and, incidentally, the guy was not there when I returned.

New Scientific Study Released

Dateline: deskslave Central.
A new scientific study conducted at a small suburban library was released today amid fanfare and not a little controversy. In this study, to be published later this year in the journal Proceedings of the International Academy of Smelly Things, researchers have determined that smoking a lot of cigarettes and consuming a great deal of greasy fast food does not, as many scientists had previously believed, mask the odor of marijuana smoke.
"It came as a complete surprise to me, frankly," said lead researcher Dr. D. Slave of the University of Puttin Up With People. He went on to relate this study to earlier work his team had done on masking vodka odors.
This new study is not without controversy. It contradicts to some degree earlier work published in the Annals of Dodging High School, where studies indicated fast food and Binaca could, under certain circumstances, block both cigarette and marijuana odors.

Batting Average

A woman came to the desk with a list of books that we did not seem to have. Kid's books, she'd looked on the shelf and we were found wanting. The first problem was that they were nonfiction and she had been searching in fiction. Honest mistake, so I was favorably disposed toward her, even though she had a slightly imperious air about her. However, as we went through her list and found that we owned about half of her list and only had one of those on the shelf, she started making comments as we failed her on each. I can understand frustration, but, even if I decided not to order the ones that we didn't own, it's not my fault that somebody beat her to the punch on the books that were checked out. I kept my humble deskslave personality to the fore and did not react to comments like, "I can't believe you don't have that one either."
But eventually we got through her list. She peremptorily refused my offer to help her find similar books, since her titles seemed fairly generic, like Volcanoes and such like.
In lieu of offering thanks, she said, "So what's that? One out of ten?" with a smirk before turning and leaving.
"You're welcome," I said with my sunniest smile, as though she had just sincerely thanked me.

"I have a Mac" as an excuse to not learn something

I realize that Macintoshes are very nice computers. I actually own one and have had them for a long time, but since most of the world runs on Windows, I have one of those, too, and use Windows each day at work. I don't think a week goes by where somebody doesn't have a problem with a public Intarwebs computer or with the catalog and, when I try to walk them through the process, they interrupt me and say, "I have a Macintosh."
I'm never entirely sure what this is supposed to mean. On the surface, it sounds and looks like, "Silly peasant, I shan't soil my delicate fingers on this task. You, my minion, shall do it for me." Or maybe it's slightly apologetic? I remember trying to use Windoze when I was a Mac-only guy and hated being, functionally and temporarily speaking anyway, an idiot. But I don't remember hiding behind a claim of operating system superiority as reason not to know something.
So I end up saying something like "That's cool. Here's how you do it on this computer." I try to not sound mean about it, too.

Robert Behn? Robber Baron?

I'm getting old, and the teen is inarticulate which makes communication difficult. After trying to find out if the author's name is perhaps Robert Ben or maybe the book is about the infamous Robber Barons of the 19th century, I finally figured out that he wanted a rubber band. This is good, because we have nothing by a Robert Ben, or Ben. And our biography of Jay Gould was probably above his reading level.

Just so you don't think I just pick on the young and the old, I will pick on somebody my own age.
"Lee Iacocca's latest book," she intoned in response to my hearty good morning.
That one really gets me: don't even acknowledge me, just hurl a title at me. There is a fairly entertaining book called The Customer is Always Wrong, a collection of semi-amusing rants about customer service jobs. In one, a former video clerk talked about how sick he was of people walking up to the desk there and calling out a title. He mused about how many jobs there are where that happens. His estimate? None. But he did have funny line or two about it: "This is the video business equivalent of Are You My Mother?...Do you go to the post office and yell out 'Stamps!' to no one in particular?"
"Title?" I barked. Two can play at this game.
That stopped her for a moment. But only a moment. She regained her nasty composure, narrowed her eyes. "I don't know," she overarticulated to me, the not-so-smart child, "whatever his latest book is."
A few keystrokes later, I determined that it was the interrogatively rhetorical Where Have All the Leaders Gone? which appears to be some sort of call to arms. Since she hadn't been all that nice to me, I guess I could have been a meanie and not let her place a hold when she revealed that she had no card or other ID on her. Especially since she told me this in a sort of of-course-I-don't-have-a-library-card-or-other-ID way. But really, who leaves the back yard without something like that? I overcame my dislike and tried to focus on the irony of wanting a book on leadership and a book heavy with "let's work together" platitudes, but leaving the house without your ID and being a dink to the guy trying to help you. So maybe the guy responsible for both the Mustang and the K-Car can help her. He certainly can mix a fine metaphor. This is from page 1:
"We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff."
I think driving a shop off a cliff is an accomplishment, myself.

A New Word to Hate

The subtitle, which may be pretty darn hard to read is

An Ecopreneur's Toolkit for Starting a Green Business from Business Plan to Profits

Ecopreneur? Sheesh.