Summer Reading Day 9

I woke up Monday thinking, Joy! It's Monday. It's Summer Reading Day. And I get to run the desk all by my lonesome!

That's right, Mrs. A was out of town at a meeting so I had to run the circ-desk by myself while the rest of the staff was outside conducting a water fight with the Summer Readers. So in addition to the usual Monday Madness, my day was punctuated by the occasional soggy dripping child padding through in search of books. I don't know how many friendly fire water casualties we had among our book population, but I'd imagine there were some.

One child even wanted to check out our gigantic Norman Rockwell retrospective, a book I pray was protected in the dry confines of our activities room before the water fight started. In addition to requiring a good sized wheelbarrow to move, this book is so huge that we don't have any plastic jacket cover big enough to fit its dustjacket. So it's one of the only books in the place not protected by plastic. A water fight goes down around it and we're talking serious collateral damage.

As busy as it was--what with fifty librarians and sundry relatives phoning up YET AGAIN to ask if the people they knew good and well were outside involved with Summer Reading could speak to them for a minute--my only real trouble came late in the day, after the Summer Reading crowd had left. A patron had been browsing the shelves for twenty minutes or so before bringing her finds up to the desk and giving me her name to check out.

"Um, do you have your library card, ma'am?" I asked.

"No. It's back home. Why?"

"Well, erm... we kind of need your card to check books out. It's part of the policy for our new system."

"What? You're kidding, right?" she said.

"No, ma'am. I'm afraid not. We really do need the card."

"But my card's at home. It's back in NEIGHBORHING county. You mean I'm going to have to drive all the way back to NEIGHBORING county just to check out a few books?"

"Well, ma'am, I'm not saying you have to do that, but we DO need the card to check books out to you."

Fire flashed through the woman's eyes. She was getting hot about this. She left her books on the desk and started moving toward the door, talking back at me over her shoulder and occasionally stopping to give me fiery glances as she went.

"So even though I could just show you my driver's license and prove that I am who I say I am, I can't check out any books?!"

"Oh, well, ma'am, if you..."

"This is just ridiculous! I already drove over here once today, then saw the sign saying you didn't open until 1 and had to turn around and go back home!" She was really screaming now and was quite angry.

"Ma'am... if you..." I tried to start again.

"Now I have to drive all the way back home and come back for a few books?!"

"Ma'am..." I said, a bit louder than I meant. "Ma'am, you do have your driver's license on you?"

"Yes!"

"Well, I'll take that, then," I said. Sure, it was against the policy by letter, but if I could match her drivers license number to the one in her patron record it was just as good as having her card there. That's part of the whole reason we require driver's license numbers in the first place.

This instantly took the wind out of her sails. Suddenly, she didn't have anything to argue about and was forced to realize just what a big deal she had been making about it all in the first place and became suitably apologetic.

She began fishing out her ID and I asked her name so I could go ahead and bring up her record. Only when I checked, there was no such record for her to be found. It was only then that I realized she didn't even have one of our new cards. I had to direct her to our applications, feeling terribly silly in the process for not having realized my error before. By now the woman was feeling so bad about screaming at me, though, that she completely didn't care that it had been my error and gladly filled out a form.