The Sound of Music. And Pee Cups.

Lots of mishearing at the Ref Desk. A colleague was asked if our computers sounded like music. That made no sense, of course, so she asked the patron to repeat. Several times. Did our computers sound like music? Not really. They sound like asthmatic hamsters. It took a few more ever-more enunciated repeats until she understood the patron as asking “do the computers download music?”

Not to be outdone, I was shocked to be asked a while later by a different patron where the pee cups were. “I’m sorry?” I asked the young man from, I’m guessing, the Indian subcontinent.

“Pee cups. Where can I find the pee cups?”

I almost told him that the place giving him the drug test would probably have them and that we would not collect or circulate such things when it occurred to me that maybe he wanted to pick up a hold.