Rogue Sighting

The wife and I slept late and got an even later start preparing to leave for breakfast. Before we could depart, Mrs. C phoned me and asked if I would stop at the Town-C branch to check on their computers. We had a huge electrical storm last night and none of the computers were working there, including circulation. Complicating matters further, Town-C's librarian, Mrs. S, was out of town at a meeting with Mrs. A accompanying. A volunteer had been left to man the desk and nothing her instruction sheet was telling her to do was working.

Town-C's library branch isn't nearly as busy as my own in Town-A. It's not nearly as nice either, but is also 150 years younger and is of the prefab octagonal cookie cutter library design that was popular in the state some decades back, when getting cheap libraries into smaller communities was all the rage.

Sure enough, none of the computers seemed to be doing much. The patron computers wouldn't connect to the internet and the circulation computer wouldn't even let me into Win XP. The volunteer who was working thought for sure it was somehow her fault. It wasn't.

While I was trying to convince the circulation computer to load, who should walk in the door but Mr. B-Natural and his dog Bubba. We've not actually seen Mr. B at our branch since we banned Bubba from coming in due to the flea infestation that he allegedly caused. I thought, mistakenly it seems, that we were the only area library that would tolerate dogs, so I didn't see why Mr. B was so upset by it that he would refuse to come back to our branch at all. But we've certainly not seen any of him for over an entire month. There was a time when we would have paid good money to achieve that effect, but as it's being achieved at Bubba's expense, I'm not so happy about it. Neither is my wife. She thinks its a crime that we won't let Bubba in. She immediately began petting Bubba and telling Mr. B-Natural what a charmer his dog was. He beamed.

When Mr. B-Natural saw me at the desk, he smiled and said, "What are you doing down here?"

"Just trying to whip this computer into shape."

I finally did get that computer whipped into shape, but couldn't convince it to connect to the internet. Even after 10 minutes on the phone with one of our techs and some time spent turning the router, server computer, and battery backup on and off, we couldn't get it to come up. We finally chalked it up to being Verizon's problem and I was able to leave for lunch with my woman.