"Lemme in! I gotta use the innanet!"

Wow. Today was craptastic, bordering on shitacular!

Lots of irritating and bad things happened to me today and most of the worst of it centered around computers. Sometimes it was our new circulation software, which crashed our circ computer twice for no reason then abandoned all its saved settings in the interim. Mostly, though, it was the patron computers--specifically the patrons using them--that gave me the most headaches.

We were lousy with computer patrons--a full 42 of them by the end of the day, which I think may be a new internet crowd record. At no time between the hours of 1 and 4 were there fewer than three computers in full use with at least one person, usually two, waiting to take a turn. It was amazing and incredibly frustrating.

And yet people kept coming in--often in groups. Yes, sir, they'd arrive, three deep already, with hopeful happy "I'm going to use the internet" expressions on their innocent little faces only to have their expectations crushed by the grumpy "liberry" ass. at the desk.

My oft-repeated mantra became: "Sorry, it may be a while. They're all full right now and there are two people waiting ahead of you. The soonest I could put you on will be 29 minutes from now unless one of them dies or gives up."

One of the computer patrons was an utter newbie to the world of the internet. She signed on as instructed and asked, "Could one of you come put me on the internet. It's been a while since I've used it." I think by "a while" she really meant, "I once saw someone else use a computer.  On TV.  From across a very smoky room."

I logged her on and showed her the Internet Explorer icon, which I activated, bringing up the program. I assumed she knew what to do from there and left her for her half hour. She departed a while later, but came back after a couple of hours to sign on again. This time, I just logged the computer on, figuring she'd been taught about how to load IE already. Well, she did load it, but just barely. After she eventually called me back to help her again, I saw that she had made it as far as our home page and had managed to open up some kind of funky Windows program screen that I'd never seen before. I had to close it all out and double click the IE icon for her, a feat which seemed to delight and amaze her.

As she shortly explained, she was trying to apply for a job somewhere but needed an e-mail address. Someone had suggested she come to the library and sign up for a Hotmail address. They'd even written www.hotmail.com on a piece of paper for her, but she had no clue as to where to type in the address. Only then did I finally realize just what an internet neophyte she truly was.  Still, I'm happy to help educate newbies where I can, so I showed her the address field and instructed her on the minor points of typing in hotmail.com there. Once that came up, I showed her where to click for a new account, showed her around the application screen.  I pointed out the important bits, such as the fact that there was no way in hell she could use her own very common name as the username and not have a five digit number affixed to it. I should have known something was amiss, though, when she seemed to have trouble with the whole concept of passwords. She kept asking me if the password was supposed to be the same as her username.

"Well, I guess it could be, but I don't recommend it," I told her. "Hotmail might not even let you do that."

No, Hotmail most certainly DID NOT want her to do that. In fact, this is exactly what Hotmail was telling her to stop doing when I went back to check on her 15 minutes later. It also didn't want her to use spaces or punctuation in her password.

"I don't understand," she kept saying. "I'm not typing in any spaces or punctuation but it says I can't use that password."

"Is your password your name then?"

"Uh, yes," the woman said, looking at me with an expression that suggested she thought I was some sort of psychic to have guessed her impossible password.

"Don't use your name," I said. "Hotmail won't accept it."

"Oh," she said. She immediately typed in variations on her name twice more and twice more Hotmail refused to accept them.

Over the course of the next ten minutes I struggled to persuade her to stop doing this and to choose something different. I also told her she needed to write down whatever she chose. Did she? Oh, no. Instead, she moved on to the next screen where her chosen user ID of her name was rejected on account it didn't have the aforementioned 5 digit number affixed to it. She didn't like that option, though, so she decided to use her dog's name. This also didn't work, cause there are thousands of other Hotmail users who use her dog's name too.

While sorting this out, she wound up having to go back through the password business again as apparently something had gone amiss somewhere in the process, then back through the username section where she finally settled on her dog's name plus 278. I then made her take my pen and write this down.

Eventually, we got into her new Hotmail account. Knowing how confusing the whole process was for her, I wanted to log her out, then hold her hand and lead her through the login process and show here how to use the damned thing. And, of course, when she tried to log in, Hotmail refused to accept her password.

Another ten minutes crawled by as she tried variations on her name, her dog's name and then capitalized versions of the previous. And because she hadn't written the password down at the same time she wrote her username down, both of which I'd told her to do, she now had no idea what password she'd chosen.

Finally, I convinced her to just use the I'm a damned moron and can't remember my password for five whole minutes link, answer her secret question, (answer: her dog's name), and finally get to choose a new password. Naturally, she tried to use her frickin' dog's name again and screwed it all up!

"Ma'am, you CAN. NOT. use your dog's name, nor YOUR name as a password," I said, practically hissing. "Your username is already your dog's name so Hotmail will NOT accept it as a password. You will HAVE to use a completely different and unrelated word."

"Well, I don't know. You pick one for me," she said, when we'd brought up the new password screen again.

I pointed to our new orange internet sign, flipped back over the top of the monitor.

"Orange," I said.

She shrugged and typed it in.

With that Herculean task finally accomplished, I prepared to leave her to her own devices.

"So now I can just go to the job site?" she asked. I looked and saw her pointing to her piece of paper, where the job site's address was written as well.

"Sure thing," I said. "Just type it in the address line there."

I then left the computer hallway, hauled ass for the circ desk, and told Mrs. C I was going on break.

When I returned, half an hour later, the lady was gone. Mrs. C said she'd had to go back and help the woman twice before finally realizing that the woman firmly believed her new Hotmail username and password would serve as her username and password for the job site. They might have, if she'd had an account with the job site to begin with. Both of them quickly realized that this was not something that needed to be tackled today and the woman left.