Bless me father, for I have sinned

I was about 2 minute EARLY walking out to my shift at the desk. As I strode purposefully across the floor, I noticed one of my less favorite patrons also striding purposefully toward the desk. I had to make a split-second decision: do I continue striding in my purposeful, and, if I may add, confidently masculine, manner and intercept the unloved patron, thereby sparing my colleague from the interaction, or do I slow down ever so slightly and wait for my poor colleague to become ensnared with the aforesaid unloved patron? I think you know me well enough by now, dear reader (all none of you). I suddenly became passionately interested in straigtening the New Books shelves. "My goodness, these are a fright!" I thought as I busily tidied just long enough to ensure that it wouldn't be my ref interaction. Bad, bad me.

Almost fooled me

I was just asked if we had any upstairs bathrooms. Since we only have one floor, did he mean do we have a secret upstairs annex with a sumptuously appointed biffy, or does he know about a secret basement with God knows what? I just let him know where he could find the restroom I knew about.

Remember: I'm the idiot here

It probably should have been a simple transaction. "Has your computer system changed?" the patron asked me. I'm sure she knew exactly what she meant, but I sure didn't. I gave it a stab.
"You mean the computers you look up books with?"
Fail.
"No, your system."
"The public Internet computers?"
"Yes." Success, yet still stupid. I could actually hear the italics in her voice.
"Not recently."
"So it's the same?"
"As when?"
"As always!"
Where to go with this? "Uhhh...we replaced the CPUs last summer and there are periodic updates to software, but...."
"Click." I heard. I think it was the phone.

Loribl Wins!!

Well done, Loribl, you were correct! It was indeed Yogi Bear. Not sure how the word drama ended up there. Maybe it was the tension we see between Yogi and Boo Boo about whether to play by the rules or throw caution to the wind. So maybe it should have been something like

Relationships, ursine, drama

In any event, I'm not used to people posting comments, so I wasn't thinking that this was an actual contest, with maybe a prize, but what the heck. I have before me a powells.com gift card with at least 80 cents on it. Shoot me an email, Loribl, at the name of this blog at gmail.com and I'll send you back all the data you will need to maybe trim the shipping price a little on your next order.

Always helpful, those librarians

Don't get me wrong. Good cataloging is good public service. I respect the profession a lot. But sometimes they get it wrong. Case in point: here are the subject headings for an item I saw in WorldCat. See if you can guess what these subjects describe...

Look You

I'm not throwing away old magazines. I'm a professional librarian, for heaven's sake. I'm deaccessioning superannuated serial publications.

Seen a kid? Sure.

He rode a scooter into the library, so I was not exactly favorably disposed towards him. The young man, after dismounting and being reminded about riding in the library, he asked if we had seen a kid. It was about 30 minutes after opening on a busy Sunday, we told him, we've seen lots of kids.
"About yea tall?" he clarified, holding his hand palm-down at eye level.
I shrugged. My colleage shrugged.
"Curly hair? More shrugs. "Well, kind of curly." Again with the shrugs.
Sensing that he wasn't going to give up soon, my colleage recommended that he look around for his friend since there were too many people here for us to take notice of everybody. Dejectedly, he scootered off. I chased him down to remind him of the conversation we'd had not three minutes previously about not riding scooters in the library.
"Oh, sorry," he said, dismounting. "Hey! You seen a kid, 'bout yea tall?"

Irony so thick and creamy it could be a dessert topping

I was just reshelving the book

Invest Like a Shark.

It may well be a great investment book, I have no idea. But somebody returned it with the bookmark still in it. Irony drumroll....it was a lottery ticket.

The cover is blue, I think

The young man wanted a particulr book about Norse mythology. The cover was blue, he was pretty sure. I took him to our section that has Norse mythology. Lots of borrowed, nothing blue. I was pretty polite when he asked if we could Interlibrary loan this item for him.

A theme was established later when he came back looking for a collection of Thor comic books.

Suddenly I'm the Jerk

A guy came up to the desk inquiring about free dental care. Actually, he said he needed a dentist. Quickly applying my RefSkillz, I ascertained that he lived in the immediate area and prepared a listing of local dentists using the excellent ReferenceUSA database. Printing it out, I noted which dentists were closest to DeskSlaveCentral.
"Are they free?" he asked, grabbing the proffered sheet of paper.
"Kinda doubt it."
He dropped the paper and fixed me with a "you dumbass" look. The look was practiced, like he spent a lot of time putting up with idiots like me who were unfamiliar with deep subtext and mind reading.
"It's gotta be free," he sneered, "I can't pay for no dentist."
I was inclined tell him that I couldn't either and you didn't see me whining about it. Instead, I told him that I'd see what I could do, but I held out little hope. I also asked him to check back in a while since the would-be reference customers were stacking up. At this point, he became like the paperboy in the John Cusack movie "Better Off Dead" where he keeps cropping up every few scenes wanting his two dollars. He kept circling back, giving me the hairy eyeball every few minutes.
Eventually I found several low-cost dental outfits that serve uninsured, low-income people. During the next stinkeye pass, I handed him the list, being careful to note that none of the listed places would be without charge.
I thought that would be the end of it. But he was back an hour later to give me hell because none of the numbers I gave him offered free dentistry.