Hi, these are just a little overdue

The librarian from the Community College, Mr. Rob, stopped by to drop off a few of our books that a patron had entrusted to his care. They weren't interlibrary loans, as you might expect, but were just books this patron had checked out directly from us that were so embarrassingly overdue that the patron was too scared to check return them to us herself. Mr. Rob said she had even pleaded with him to return them to us on Friday when she knew we didn't charge fines. Mr. Rob must not have liked her much, though, cause he turned them in on a Wednesday.

And just how embarrassingly overdue were these books? Something to the tune of 16 months.

The ironic thing is, even as overdue as they were, we still wouldn't have charged her any fines on any day because they were all checked out on our old VTLS circulation system, the records from which we no longer have access to, so we wouldn't have even known what to charge her unless we wanted to do the math based on the date due slip. Even then we have a fine ceiling cutoff of $4 per book, so she still wouldn't have been out more than $16 total.

She may have been afraid we'd charge her for the one book among her four that she had evidently gotten wet, for the cover was all ink-blurred and wrinkly from a soaking, no doubt over a year ago. This being the case, we used our new handy-dandy Millennium circulation system, on which she had managed to secure a new card at some point in the past month, to block her from checking out anything at any library in our network until she pays us $9 for the damaged book. Frankly, she's getting off easy.