I'm Afraid They Do Know It's Christmas, And That's the Problem

I worked today, even though it was that most ill-named day--"Christmas Eve Day."* It's an utter waste of time to be at the Ref Desk on such a day. It's all the usual suspects at the Internet computers who would be there no matter what day it was. And there were people looking, amazingly, for Christmas movies and CDs. (And nobody else.) The movie seekers were probably the same people who were looking for the movie Halloween on Halloween.

When someone came up and asked if the movie Elf was in, I actually looked it up out of a strange sense of professional duty. Whatever holiday film or CD they wanted was invariably out, naturally. There were heaps of holds on all of them to boot. If they added themselves to the list they'd be lucky to see the movie over Memorial Day weekend. I might as well have just typed random keystrokes into my computer and just said, "oh, sorry, all checked out."

deskslave patron tip #14: Place your holds for next year now
Most systems will let you make your hold inactive. You move up the list all year until you sit at number two, right behind me. Then you activate your holds on December 15th and you have the movies of your choice over the holiday. So you can see that, even adjusted for the time of year, Scrooged hasn't aged very well, Love Actually is pretty vacuous and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is creepy as hell.

In a new twist, our long-suffering Interlibrary Loan specialist told me that someone put an ILL request in today for a Christmas CD. One that we own, naturally.


* This means that the night before that is Christmas Eve Day Eve, and the night before that Christmas Eve Day Eve Day Eve. And so on. So the night of December 20th is something like Christmas Eve Day Eve Day Eve Day Eve Day Eve. August 30th? Don't get me started.

Let's Play "What on Earth are You Talking About, Madam?"

A woman in her sixties came up to the desk and asked, "Where are your storylines?"

I've been working in libraries a while, but this was a new one. I used my usual question to elicit more information about whatever it was she wanted. "Could you tell me a little more about storylines?"

She gave me the "you moron" look that I am, to my distress, all to familiar with.

"You know...they're....STORYLINES!"

It took a little time, but I got it. Any guesses about what storylines might be?

Just Another Saturday

I was at the desk fulfilling my Saturday destiny--looking up movies for people. A young guy in his early twenties and another guy in his forties (maybe his father?) had quite a few requests. They wanted the usual action/horror sorts of things. They were very nice to eachother and I would have thought it was all very nice except the young guy had face tattoos. It's so distracting.

The younger guy thought of a film and asked the older guy if he had seen it.

"Oh, yeah. I think I went to that one right before I went to prison," he said.