I was just sitting down at my computer to pen an entry about an encounter I had with an Oprah Winfrey fan, lo' about two years back. I was gonna tie it loosely to the mention of Oprah from yesterday's blog entry. Before I fired up Blogger, though, I figured I'd read some of my favorite "liberry" blogs and see what was up. Imagine my shock and amazement when Daisy reported a disturbingly similar experience with an Oprah-fan down at her blog I Have A Snake.
Go and read her version of it now. (Don't worry, it's not near as long-winded as I usually am.)
(EDITORIAL NOTE FROM THE FUTURE, 1/20/05: Because I Have A Snake is no more and has been transformed into I Have A Phoenix, I will just reprint Daisy's original story here, with her permission.)
FROM: I HAVE A SNAKE, SEPTEMBER 23, 04
TITLE: A guy walks into a bar....
A woman of rather large proportions enters the library and approaches me.
Woman: (unintelligible)
Me: I'm sorry, what?
Woman: (unintelligible) Oprah Winfrey (unintelligible)
Me: I'm sorry, ma'am, but I can't hear you. Can you speak up and slow down a little bit for me?
Woman: I need to get the address for the Oprah Winfrey show.
Me: Okay, well, I would go to switchboard.com if I were you, and just type in...
Woman: (unintelligible)
Me: I'm sorry; what?
Woman: I don't have my library card with me. Can you just find it for me?
Me: ....Sure, why not? (I go to Oprah's Web site and browse around for a couple of minutes.) Well, ma'am, it says here that the show no longer accepts letters or packages from fans, probably because they're afraid of terrorism or something. There's an email address here, though, if you want it.
Woman: No, no. I need to mail her something.
Me: I'm sorry, but the Web site doesn't have that information and they don't accept mail at the studio.
Woman: What I'm gonna do?
Me: I can give you her email address.
Woman: What about her 800 number?
Me: It doesn't look like that's on the site, either. They pretty much only want you to contact them via email.
Woman: What I'm gonna do?
Me: I'm sorry. I don't know what to tell you.
Woman: Now I'm in trouble. I'm really in trouble.
Me: I'm sorry.
Woman: How am I going to find a therapist?
Me: .......Um, you could, um, ask her about that via email.
Woman: No, just in general, how do you find a therapist?
Me: Okay, see over there where the phone books are? Look in the Yellow Pages under therapists or psychologists.
Woman: No, no. I'm not going to do that. What I'm gonna do?
Me: Well, at this point I officially do not know how to help you.
Okay, ya back now?
All right, my Oprah-fan experience was EXACTLY like that except for a couple of variables.
About two years ago, a middle-aged lady came into the library seeking a book with Oprah's address in it. We had no such book, but I offered to look it up on Oprah's website. Just like Daisy, I too discovered that Oprah's snail-mail box is unlisted, but she's all about the e-mail. I tried to explain this to my patron.
"Are you sure?" she asked.
"Yes, ma'am. I know it seems weird that there wouldn't be a mailing address, but if there is one it's not listed here." I'd spent damn near 10 minutes searching Oprah's site and was pretty clear on that conviction.
The patron gave me a sad look that tugged at my heart. She stood there clutching a stack of eight notebook pages, with the ragged-edges still attached, on which she'd penned a near illegible missive to Oprah. It wasn't a letter asking for a free session with Dr. Phil, or anything. Instead, as she explained, it was a letter to Oprah requesting money for her sister's cancer treatments.
"Oprah gives money to people all the time," the patron said.
"Well, you could send it to her in an e-mail if you like. You would have to retype it."
Unfortunately, Oprah doesn't have an e-mail address listed either. Instead, her site has a little Plea to the Crown form-field which turns into an e-mail when you finish and hit send. This lady was going to have to type in her whole 8 page letter. I could smell tragedy before it even began.
At the patron's request, I logged her onto one of our systems, loaded up the e-mail form page on Oprah's site and showed her what to do. After about half an hour's worth of work, I went back to see how things were coming. The lady had typed in nearly all of her letter and seemed fairly proud of herself. She wasn't the fastest typist in the world, but she had made admirable progress. I told her to let me know when she finished and I would come back and give it a proofread if she liked. I went back up to the circ-desk.
After a minute or two, it occurred to me that I should really have had the lady compose her note in Microsoft Word, then cut and pasted it over for her. She could have saved it to the desktop, so if anything went wrong (like, say, Oprah's form having a damned time limit or something) her letter would still be there to recover. And I should have listened to that inner voice and gone back to paste the lady's letter into a Word file, for not one minute after I thought this, I heard a loud "AHHH!" from the computer hall followed by a very quiet and pitiful, "oh.... help..."
I rushed back to the computers. Her screen showed the desktop and no IE windows. Upon seeing me, she stood up and began ushering me into her chair saying, "Here, here... you can fix this." I sat but I knew it was useless. There were no program shutdown warning windows or anything to indicate what had happened. It looked like she had just X'ed out of IE.
"I don't know what happened," she said. "I was just typing and then it all disappeared."
"What were you typing... um, exactly?"
"This right here. I was starting this sentence." She pointed to it on her notebook pages. The first word of the sentence began with a W. I knew instantly what had happened. She had tried to capitalize it by hitting SHIFT W, but had mistakenly hit CTRL W, the command for closing out the window. I then had to delicately break the news to her that all her work had vanished into the ether never to be seen by us or Oprah again. I was afraid she'd start weeping, but the lady didn't. Instead, she decided she'd had enough of computers for the day and would attempt this at some future date.
I suggested she bring or buy a floppy diskette from us in order to save her work and prevent this in the future. She numbly agreed that would be a good idea and left.
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