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.

Where would we be without traditions?

There are some important--nay sacred--traditions at deskslave central. Last month, we observed an important Halloween tradition whereby people show up on Halloween expecting there to be scary movies on the shelf. Some get upset, some seem to harbor suspicions that we are hiding them for ourselves, but all are disappointed. 

Today we had the traditional Thanksgiving Eve pageant. Well, it's actually less of a pageant and more of a collision of two things:

1. People come to the library on Thanksgiving Eve looking for an armload of movies for the upcoming long weekend or to spend some quality time on the Intarweb before their one day computer fast;
2. The library closes two hours earlier than usual.

It really doesn't matter that the early closure is on the library's calendar. It doesn't matter that signs at eye level have been on the doors since Halloween. The early close always comes as a shock. When the announcement that we are indeed closed came over the intercom, it lead to agitated turbo typing by die hard Internet habitués and some particularly frantic power selecting among the motion picture enthusiasts. 

Tonight, I managed to herd the last of the movie-seekers toward the self check machines and turned to try to shoo the remaining netizen. 

"OK! Just a second!" she carped after I told her that we had closed five minutes before. 

I told her I was heading to the management station to terminate her session. 

"I'll be done in a second!"  

Her time estimation skills were not good. After about a minute, I clicked the button and her computer shut down. 

She wished me a Happy Thanksgiving on her way out, but her tone suggested that she didn't really mean it. 

I Almost Made it Through 2012

without somebody asking me if I was a volunteer. My luck ran out and I had the usual conversation about being at an actual job with actual responsibilities.

One of these days, when somebody expresses incredulity that someone could possibly get paid to do something as easy as being a librarian, I may just say, "OK, you have $250 this month to buy items for the 900s collection. That's biographies and history to you, champ. What are you going to buy and where are you planning to get it? Defend your decision. While you try to figure this out, some dipshit walks up to you and asks if you're a volunteer. What do you say?"

Irony Meter Broken Again! And I just got it recalibrated!

I helped a patron get a bunch of audio books. Thrillers, mysteries, etc. Some of them were even those $#&! Recorded Books which cost a fortune. He seemed pretty happy with our selection and found four or five titles he wanted to check out. I went back to the desk, metaphorically patting myself on the back for a job well done. 

As a coda, he later came up and, completely out of the blue, told me that he hated taxes and government and that if people got to keep their money instead of having Obama take it all (that’s how he put it) people would build things and the country would be a greater place. I think I showed admirable restraint in not pulling the big stack of audio books from his hands and suggesting that he find a free market solution to his lack of audio books. 

I Really am Sorry

I’m sorry you’re frustrated. Really. I believe you when you tell me that you don’t know how to use a computer and that you need help. And I will try to help you to the best of my ability. I’m a geezer myself and didn’t even touch a computer until I was in my 20s (a PDP 10 terminal: look it up) so I know how intimidating technology can be to those of us who grew up in a pre-digital age. Really.

(Believe it or not, this was super cool back in the day and you
had to sign up days in advance to use it for an hour or two. You think the patrons at the public access Internet computers are
jealous of their computer time? You have no idea.)

It is certainly cruel of your health insurance company to require you to fill out forms on line and I'm sorry that you are in a hurry. Forgive me for asking you if the document was a pdf file. I should have known that you would not know what a pdf was or even understand the concept of a file type. I wish our printing system were more intuitive and I will indeed refund the ten cents that our equipment maliciously "ate." I will not be offended with your response of "you better" when I inform you of this. Really. So now that we have gotten this out of the way and you have all your forms printed off--mostly for free--and I have used up 25 precious minutes of this, my only life (which I will never see again), could you please go the fuck away as soon as humanly possible? Thanks. Really.

From the "I Thought I'd Seen Everything" File

For whatever reason, people like to flush strange things down the toilets in libraries. Even the urinals. So many urinals have these little plastic grates in them to prevent people from flushing weird things that might cause big problems.

Today I was informed by an alert patron that the little red plastic grate thing had been taken. That's right: somebody stole the thing that all the guys literally piss on.

I think I came out even

To my credit, I did not order:

But to my eternal discredit, I did order:

Guess the Topic Game

OK, an older woman came in looking for books on a particular subject. It took me a while, but I finally got it. So, what do you think?

The original questions:

Do you have any books on microbionics?

I asked her to spell it.