Not that I Expect Gratitude or Anything...

One of my duties here at deskslave central is buying the Large Print books. It's an interesting challenge, especially since my budget is about eleven cents a year (cut from last year's two bits, I'm afraid). A patron was just in, complaining that she had ordered the two books that she dropped on the desk before me in Large Print, but we had sent her the "little print" versions. Fair enough, I thought, that's the sort of mistake we make, so let's get you the LP. Upon looking them up, I saw that we did not own them in LP, just LP. (For those of you not following this carefully, the first two "LPs" were for "Large Print," and the final one for "Little Print.") I told her this, wondering to myself who had placed the holds: us or her? I checked WorldCat and saw that, though some libraries owned them, they were both published within the last year, and thus would not be Interlibrary Loan-able. I had been ordering books right before she came to the desk and had my Evil Bookselling Empire page up in a different window, so I looked up the books she wanted. They were still in stock, even though they were not new books, which is almost a miracle since my car trunk probably has more stuff in it than the Evil Bookselling Empire's warehouse. Always--OK, occasionally--wanting to be helpful, I told her that I would order the two books (out of my scant budget) and put her name on the order so that when the books came in, the nice people in Technical Services would place a hold on them for her as soon as they created the records in the catalog. Like I said, I don't expect a lot of gratitude, but was unprepared for her angry outburst. She practically shouted, "Well how long is THAT going to take!?" Seriously, she was loud enough that the woman who plays Farmville all damn day on the same Intarwebz computer 15 feet away actually looked up.