Me and My Allergies, She and Her Manners

Summer is here and with it comes showers of pollen that make me want to claw my eyes out. Even with drugs like Claritin, I look like, according to one coworker, "a long-term cokehead who really needs more product." She even did an impression: vacuous look, vacant eyes being rubbed, sniffing. How she knew what a long-term cokehead looked like I didn't think to ask because I was busy sniffling and rubbing my reddened, puffy eyes. But she was probably right.

But I soldier on at the desk. One patron had been looking for some non-fiction title and could not find it. I went down the mental checklist of things to do when somebody says they can't find something that's supposed to be in. First, I check the catalog. Fairly often, the book is checked in, just not at deskslave central, but at some other, lesser library. Then I make sure that the catalog thinks it's actually in. People can, in their excitement, see that we own the book and not look at the circulation status. Then I find out the check-in time. I can't tell you how often people want something that was checked in 31 minutes ago (usually it's a movie) and would still be on a shelving cart in back. For this one, everything looked good for it actually being on the shelf. I don't want people to feel bad if I want to look on the shelf where it's supposed to be, so I tell them that I want to look near where it's supposed to be in case it was just shelved wrong. But this one wasn't where it was supposed to be. I scanned the nearby shelves after all. The poor pages can make mistakes after shelving nonfiction for a few hours. 973 can look an awful lot like 937 if you're 19 and operating on 3 hours of sleep after partying all night. But I couldn't find it. I was feeling stumped and, with the allergies, stupid to boot. The title was something like Dictionary of Some Damn Thing, so it occurred to me that maybe the page just assumed that it was a reference item. I mentioned this to the patron and took her over to the Reference shelves.

And lo, it was there. I felt all jubilant and leaned down to pull it off the shelf.

"Don't touch that!" the patron--literally--shrieked.

I straightened up.

She moved in and snatched it off the shelf. Walking away with it, she snapped over her shoulder, "I don't want to get what YOU have."

Now Here's a Thought (Whose Time Probably Hasn't Come)

Every day, I get to hear the default ringtones of a variety of mobile phone providers go off loudly at the library. I'm thinking that we should make up words to a song about the library to each of them, then the staff can sing them out with the tones. It could be informative, too (Don't forget to SIGN up for summer READing to-DAY-AY-AY!) The goofy esprit de corps might even help us from getting upset/depressed/annoyed by the constant ringing.

This Story Ends Predictably

The lissome woman, easily 15 years my junior, strode up to the desk, fixed me with a winning smile and said, "can I grab you for a minute?"

She needed help with her Microsoft Word document. Line spacing or some such nonsense.

Kids These Days, a Transcript

While waiting at the desk for a colleague to check in back for something, I got to listen to a pair of 10-year-olds chat. My advanced age renders me invisible to them, it turns out, so I got to hear all sorts of stuff. I tuned most of it out but did hear one of them explain the troubles she has communicating effectively with a younger sibling. I heard her say

Every time I jinx my sister, she's like, "Huh? Wha?" and I'nm like "It means you can't talks," and she's like "Isn't that, like, confusing?" and I'm like "Ummm...nooooo."

Inadvertent Dork Checking

Some years back, I used to work with a guy who liked to do something he called Dork Checking. He would purposely get something wrong that only a true dork would care about so that the dork would correct him. And then he'd laugh at the dork. He got me once by saying, in the middle of a conversation about some work topic, "It's just like that guy on Star Trek who's half Klingon and half human. I think his name is Wolf or something."

"That's Worf," I corrected, and then got laughed at for not only knowing, but caring enough to say something.

Today, a patron asked my desk colleague if we had the book The Fall of Rome. Being the insufferable know-it-all that I am, I just had to jump in, asking him if he meant the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.

"If that's the one written a long time ago," he said, not unreasonably.

"Yep," I replied, my insufferability growing by the moment. "The first volume was published in 1776." Then, to add wiseassery to insufferability, I just had to add, "Nothing else of note happened that year."

The patron gave me a squinty, pinched, oh-you-moron sort of look and said, "America was BORN that year." He might as well have added "jerk" or "dumbass" to it for the level of contempt his statement held.

But I didn't laugh or call him a dork. I just felt a little bad.

Attention: Holiday Week Change

Because of the holiday, Entitlement Tuesday was held today at deskslave Central. Halitosis Wednesday ran concurrently. The normal schedule will resume next week. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

That is all.

Minute Miseries...I Mean Mysteries

Here's a little mystery for you to solve. I was walking away from the Ref Desk toward the tastefully and sumptuously appointed employee break room to enjoy a simple repast of the plain but nutritious peasant fare of my people.* A youngster of maybe 12 intercepted me. I was crestfallen: I could already smell the heady aroma of coffee that had been on the burner for 3 or 4 hours.** But I was stuck.

"Hey, where's the computer thingie?" he inquired.

I had no idea what he was talking about. Do you have any guesses? I'll post an answer to this in a future post, provided somebody actually makes a guess. Maybe there will be a prize.

*OK, I was staggering toward the skanky break room to get more horrid coffee and microwave some leftover pizza. Sheesh.

** Every now and again, I try to popularize a word that I make up or reassign. Some years ago I thought up a good one that totally did not catch on. What is the cognitive equivalent of a typo? A thinko. Yeah. Didn't fly. But here's another one that I have been championing for about 5 years and may yet achieve escape velocity in the culture at large: what do you call coffee that has been sitting on the coffee machine burner for hours and hours and is now thickening through evaporation and smells like it's had machine oil dumped in it? Smelted coffee. I like the industrial sound of smelting, which I imagine smells bad. C'mon--start using it.

Let's Play "Name that Book"

The patron told me that she was looking for a book. The title, she thought, was something like future shock and the author was something like Alvin. I'm pretty old, as I never tire of telling you, so I remember when the book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler was a big deal back in the 70's. I even vaguely remembered the futuristic cover, which looks pretty quaint now:



So I piped up cheerfully about the Toffler book and quickly figured out that we even had a copy, since people at my library are notorious for never weeding any book, no matter how outdated it may be.

She gave me funny look and informed me that it wasn't Future Shock, and the author wasn't Alvin Toffler, but the title was similar, as was the author. But it wasn't about that at all.

I pressed on, asking questions about when she thought the book came out (last year? when she was in high school?), where she heard about it, and the like.

She said that it had been a bestseller maybe a year ago. Maybe less, maybe last fall. She seemed pretty sure it was nonfiction. I asked her if she could remember where she heard about it, hoping that it was an Oprah sort of thing that would be fairly easy to track down, but she remembered nothing.

More questions revealed that it was an exposé of some sort.

So, to recap:
bestseller
maybe last year
probably non fiction
exposé
environment-related

Definitely not Michael Pollan
definitely not Malcolm Gladwell
No way it was Jonathan “Safran” Foer

It did not, in fact have food or eat in the title.

What do you think? Any ideas. The woman is long gone, having grown tired of my fruitless searching and endless questions, so no time pressure.

A Question for You About WiFi

Before I get started, just let me say that I’m glad we have wifi in the library. I wouldn’t get rid of it even if I could. However, every once in a while a patron will come up to the desk looking for the thing they just printed from their laptop. I don’t think I astonish very easily, at least not about how people use computers, but I cannot wrap my head around the thought that there are people out there who think that all they need to do is push a button on their laptops and some printer out there at an unknown location, whose properties can only be guessed at, will automatically perk up at their summons, determine that it is the correct and only printer for the job, and print the document. Like Lassie finding Timmy at the bottom of the well and digging him out. Wait, not even that clear—at least Lassie knew Timmy.

So I had a Timmy-down-the-well printing experience today. A woman wanted to know where the print jobs came out. I took her over to the pay-to-print station and began walking her through the process like I do a dozen times each day. But there were no jobs on the print server. I asked her what number computer she was on. She told me that her computer did not have a number. She really hit the word “number” kind of hard. I could actually hear italics in her voice. It was as though she had said, "My computer doesn't smell," or "My computer doesn't have cancer." I started to explain that all of our computers had numbers. You can see where this one went, so I'll skip the dialog about determining that she hadn't been using one of our powerhouse computers.

She steadfastly refused to believe that our printer wouldn't print from her laptop. He printer at home, which she did not set up, prints just fine, therefore.... She wanted to talk to somebody about getting her document printed. I tried to be gentle, explaining that the wait for IT help was breathtakingly long. I tried to get her to email her document to herself and then pick it up on one of our computers and print it from there. She looked at me like I'd just told her to get up on the Reference Desk and do a little dance for me. She stalked off. Another satisfied customer.

What With All That's Going On These Days

We were talking about the death of What's-His-Face before we opened today. Somebody mentioned, with eyes rolling, that because of his demise and the fear of retaliation, various government agencies are encouraging people to report suspicious activity.

"If we called the FBI every time we saw something suspicious here," one circ clerk pointed out, "they'd block our number because we'd be calling so much."