D-CON: Kills Nerds Dead, Part II

I confess that I get a bit star struck when I visit the Walk of Fame hall at Dragon Con. I usually just walk around and see the famous folks there without actually bothering them about anything. When I do talk to the celebrities, it's mostly to tell those I admire and respect that I admire and respect them, then I get the hell away. Not that there should be a problem with chatting to such folks at the con, it's just not usually my bag. I did chat for a while with Brad "Wormtongue" Douriff, but only because I found out he's from West Virginia and wanted to know which part. Turns out he has relatives in the Tri-Metro area and spent a lot of time around here as a kid.

Another drooling fanboy moment is pictured at right. This was my nerd's dream come true photograph taken with actors Andreas "G'Kar" Katsulas and Peter "Londo" Jurrasik, of TV's Babylon 5 fame. Peter wasn't even scheduled to be at the con that year. Imagine my surprise to walk into he hall of fame and see the both of them, my two favorite characters from the B5 series, seated side by side. I nearly screamed like a girl. My friend Joe had to ask them if they'd consent to a group photo and they graciously did. I'm such a damned nerd.

So you can see that there are celebs that make me too starstruck to say anything at all. I'm not sure why this is, as I'm a former broadcasting professional who has interviewed and otherwise met quite a few semi and actual famous people through the course of my job without once losing the ability to speak to them. Perhaps, though, it's because I never gave a rat's ass about most of the famous folks I met in the course of my radio career. Not so at Dragon Con.

For instance, while standing in a nerd traffic jam in the dealer's room, I happened to glance over at a woman standing to my immediate left, who was equally stuck, and noted that she was actress Claudia "Ivonova" Christian, also from B5.

Wow, I thought. She looks exactly like Claudia Christian!

And that's pretty much the extent of what was running through my head. Not: "Oh, excuse me, I just wanted to tell you that I really enjoyed your work on B5. You played one of my favorite characters on the show." Or better yet: "Why the %&#! didn't you come back for Season 5? What the hell were you thinking, woman?!" Nope. Just: She looks exactly like Claudia Christian! And in my starstruck beffudlement, I failed to notice that Ms. Christian had a gerbil peeking out of her cleavage. That's right, a live gerbil. In her cleavage. It should also be noted that one of my nerd companions, who I won't name so as not to embarrass him, (Mark Chow), first locked eyes on the gerbil in the cleavage and then was too distracted to notice whose cleavage it was peeking out of until we told him later. I don't know which of us you should feel more sorry for on that one.

Chatting with the celebrities can also be a dangerous thing to do unless you're armed with beaucoup small-talk skills and common sense. Otherwise it can quickly degenerate into something uncomfortable for all involved. For instance, there was the time we accompanied our above cleavage-fixated friend to meet Biff from Back to the Future:

MARK CHOW: "Oh, hey. I, uh... I just wanted to tell you that I liked you in Back to the Future."

ACTOR THAT PLAYED BIFF: "Oh, thank you very much. It was fun."

MARK CHOW: "Yeah. That movie was... that was great."

ACTOR THAT PLAYED BIFF: "Mm."

(Time passes)

MARK CHOW: "Oh, and you were good in the sequels too... playing all those other Biffs."

ACTOR THAT PLAYED BIFF: "Sure. Thanks."

(More seconds of awkward silence pass as we all stand there looking at Biff and his expensive autographed Biff merchandise we're not about to shell out good money for. None of the rest of us have any idea what else to say to Biff either since the only thing he's ever done that we've seen is play Biff, so we just leave Mark hanging out there like a moron.)

MARK CHOW: "Well... um. It was, uh... good to meet you."

ACTOR THAT PLAYED BIFF: "Sure."

(We slink away)

That's how these things go sometimes, though.

Another far more personal failure at smalltalk came when I met comic book artist Adam Hughes. When I first heard he was going to be at the con, I was bound and determined to get him to sign one of his issues of Justice League America for me and tell him how much I've enjoyed his art. He draws very clean and very well composed comic pages with a great deal of skill and I wanted to tell him I appreciated it. What I did NOT want to do was be the slack-jawed stereotypical nerd fanboy who just likes Hughes art cause he draws fantastically well-stacked women. So here I go, marching up to Hughes's table with my JLA issue in my hand and all that came out of my mouth was something akin to "Yew draw womens purdeee!" That's not an exact quote, but I assure you the real quote was startlingly similar. I was mortified even as I said it, for it was precisely what I was trying to avoid saying. I'm an intelligent human capable of discussing the finer points of comic art, but enormous well-composed cans were all I could think of when it came down to the wire. Hughes sort of smiled/sort of looked sad for me and then signed my book, mentally putting another check mark under the Horny Mouth-Breathing Dipshit column in his fanboy tally tables.

Sometimes, though, meeting celebrities can present more actual danger, such as the time a couple of friends of mine inadvertantly picked a fight with author Harlan Ellison...

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

D-MINUS: 3

D-CON: Kills Nerds Dead, Part I

In case you haven't guessed by now, let me just spell it out: I'm an enormous nerd.

That's right. Gasp in shock and horror at the darn near 32 year old male who collects comic books, plays Magic: The Gathering, watches cartoons regularly and is an avid role playing gamer (or at least he used to be back when he had nerdy friends to play with).

Nerd, nerd, nerd. Huge nerd.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

With this established, it should come as no huge surprise that in a mere 4 days, I'll be off to Hotlanta, GA, where I will be meeting a goodly number of my college Nerd Herd pals for our semi-annual sojourn to Dragon Con.

For those unschooled in the ways of nerddom, Dragon Con is a science fiction/fantasy/comic book convention that's held annually in Atlanta around Labor Day. It's an excuse for lots of nerds, closet nerds, freaks, geeks, subsidiary Buffites, Pern-People (Oh, God, the Pern people!), Trekkers, Trekkies, Tolkien Scholars, Poser Tolkien Scholars and a few otherwise normal folk to congregate and meet some of their genre heroes (actors, writers, artists, sundry creators, washed up b-movie has-beens, former porn actresses, and, as always, Boomer from Battlestar Galactica) who are responsible for large chunks of their nerdy entertainment pleasure.

Many of the attendees even dress up for the event, sporting some of the best and the worst home-spun costumes ever conceived. (Check out Dragon Con's picture pages for the good the bad and the ugly from years past.) Now most cons have dressup as a factor, but Dragon Con is especially well-known for being something of a freak show. Sure, you've got a huge representation of Storm Troopers, Elves, G.I. Joe troops, miscellaneous Cobra soldiers, Klingons, Hobbits, Ghostbusters, residents of the Matrix and comic and sci-fi characters, but there are plenty of people dressed up for completely non-innocent reasons as well.

To put this in perspective, Dragon Con has more leather present than do most herds of cattle.

In fact, the dealer's room, while chock full of nerdy goodness, is also home to booths that sell a wide assortment of leather gear. Some of this is couched as Ren-Fest supplies, but others are openly geared toward the S&M crowd.

Need whips, chains, hand-cuffs (both padded and not), leather lingere, riding crops or harnesses of any sort? Hit the dealer's room. They'll have what you want.

Need a speculum? Ho boy, do they have speculums. And ladies, these are not those comfy warm plastic speculums most thoughtful gynecologists use these days; we're talking nice cold gunmetal speculums that'll ratchet you open to 11. Two words: Dealer's room.

Need a testicle vice? Well, I haven't seen one of those in the Dealer's room, but I wasn't exactly looking for one either. It's probably there.

So as you can see, Dragon Con is nearly as much fun to attend just to watch the strange, disturbing, sometimes titilating but more often than not just plain unsettling scenery as it is for all the nerd stuff. And as weird as some of it gets and as much as I'm glad some of the people there are not among my close personal friends, it's a very open and welcoming atmosphere. Where else are you going to find two entire metropolitan high-rise hotels chock full of people just being themselves and not feeling out of place because of it. From the tiniest goth chick to the most whale-like comic book nerd, all are welcome to the party. It is a sight to behold.

Plus there's always the chance you'll get to ride in an elevator with Chekov from Star Trek, see a former member of the Royal Shakespere Company dry hump a fat guy or get to buy an overpriced autographed 8x10 of Lou Ferigno in the Walk of Fame hall where the celebrities hang out.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

D-MINUS: 4

The Book Sale, Part II (a.k.a. Make the Bad Books Go Away, Mommy! Make them Go Away!)

Other than the minor trouble the early birders gave us, the rest of the book sale went pretty smoothly and was a rousing success.

I found that my book radar was pretty strong throughout the day. At my request Mrs. C recently ordered a favorite childhood series, the Tripods Trilogy, by John Christopher, for the library's juvenile collection. Trouble is, the book supplier didn't have a copy of The White Mountains, the first book in the series, so they sent books 2, 3 and the prequel book (of which I was previously unaware). Just as the sale started, I happened to walk by the children's section and got a ping on my book radar. There, nestled among some juvenile paperbacks was a pristine copy of The White Mountains. In fact, it was the only one of the series to be found there. Providence.

Another ping came when I was doing some shopping on my own. I'd gone into the sale wanting to pick up some of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow series and found the first book right away, pinging at me from the paperback fiction.

I used my ping to help find books for several customers. It's kind of like playing a big game of Memory, finding the books we've seen earlier like shape cards turned face down.

Other books I picked up included Stephen King's Dreamcatcher, which I wanted to read just to see if it is as bad in print as it was as a movie. I found a few of Brad Meltzers novels. He's been doing a damn fine job writing comics these days, so I wanted to see how his novels were. (Check out his run on Green Arrow from a couple years ago, available in trade paperback, as well as his current gig as the writer of the Identity Crisis limited series from DC. Good stuff.) And speaking of comics, I managed to find the trade paperback of Dean Motter's The Prisoner mini-series from the late 1980s as well as a Marvel Masterpiece collection of The Essential Dr. Strange. I don't even like Dr. Strange, but it was in great shape so I picked it up. The only other comic to be found was the Batman Forever movie adaptation, which I have no use for on several different levels, so I didn't buy it.

By 5 p.m., we'd sold eight tables worth of books out of probably 16 or 17 tables total and we sold another table's worth by closing time at 6 p.m. We let late stragglers come and have their pick of the leftovers as we packed them all back up in boxes to haul away. We didn't have nearly as many leftover books this year as we have in the past, but they still amounted to around 130 boxes worth in the end.

Now those of you who had near cardiac infarctions when I last spoke of us chucking all the leftover books into the garbage truck, take your nitro and calm down. This year we did things a little differently.

Sure, I've been trying to convince Mrs. A that we'd sell a lot more books if we'd just back a garbage truck up to the book sale around 4:30, with the usual accompanying BEEP BEEP BEEP sound. If customers really knew that the garbage was the actual fate of the books, I'm betting they'd buy quite a few more $3 bags worth and we'd have that many less to throw out. However, Mrs. A fears the uproar this would cause so she looked into other avenues.

Turns out, a lady who lives in the closest bigger city to us wanted to attend the book sale but was unable to make it on the day it was held. She wrote to Mrs. A and requested a private session to go through the books herself. Mrs. A refused this on the grounds that it was even more blatant an early bird move than most of the early birders attempt. The lady then said that she would like to be able to go through the leftover books. Again, Mrs. A refused as what the lady was requesting meant a tremendous amount of unnecessary work for us. In that scenario, we the staff would have to pack up all the books from the sale, haul them back to our storage location instead of to the garbage truck, unload them, wait a couple of days for the lady to drive over, then we'd have to go back, unpack them all, let her go through them, pack up what she didn't want and load all those boxes on the truck to haul to the garbage and unload again. Work work work. Mrs. A told the lady that if she wanted any books, she had to take them ALL off our hands as well as do all the loading work herself (or bring her own help to do it). We absolutely were not going to haul any more boxes of books until next year. Surprisingly, the lady went for it and offered to pay us $1 per box. At 130 boxes, that nets us another $130 bucks to add to the $3890 we made in the sale itself, pushing us over $4000 total. Plus, it's no more work for us and we don't have to throw any books away. Sweet.

May all future book sales go so smoothly.

D-MINUS: 5

The Book Sale, Part I (a.k.a. Make the Bad Books Go Away, Mommy! Make them Go Away!)

Today's book sale went much better than might be expected. In fact, it was very little trouble at all, apart from the whole matter of having to haul around all those boxes of books. I'd guess we had around 350 boxes worth of books to unload from the U-Haul onto the long portable tables we'd spread out on the community college lawn. They were arranged into rows of Fiction Hardback, Fiction Paperback, Children's and General Non-Fiction of both the paper and hard back varieties. We started doing this at 7 in the morning and were finished with the unpacking and setting up by 8:30 or so, just in time for the early bird crowd.

The early birds were the major headache we were anticipating, but they weren't nearly as annoying this year. We only had to tell them four times that we were not yet open and they therefore were not allowed to begin bum rushing the tables. Naturally, they weren't too happy about this.

"We can't even look at the books?" one lady asked.

"No, ma'am. We have to be fair to all the customers," I told her. It's no good letting them shop early, even if they aren't physically taking the books from the tables. They're still marking them in their minds for future removal, getting a head start on everyone else. Granted, this is nothing I wasn't doing as I unpacked the books, but I work there and am doing all the heavy lifting so I figure I can mentally earmark a few books.

After being warned off, most of the early birders slunk away to what they hoped we would consider a safe non-shopping distance (i.e. only four feet from the tables). There they continued to scan the books, studiously not shopping yet still moving along the table rows at a very methodic pace. Their defacto leader in all this was Mr. Smiley, second grumpiest old man in the world. He stepped in three feet from the tables as he very conspicuously scanned them, daring us to tell him otherwise. Whatever. We let him go, cause there's just no pleasing him with the book sale anyway. He firmly believes and has in the past loudly stated to all within earshot that Mrs. A hoards all the good books for herself. This isn't true, but even if it was true she would only be hoarding them for the library's collection itself, which is why the bloody things were donated to us in the first place so she would be well within her rights to do so. He's also complained in the past that Mrs. A's dog was making too much noise, presumably disturbing his illicit early bird shopping.

The reason we are watchful of the early bird crowd is because last year a group of them gave us lots of trouble. The group in question was a family of used book dealers from another state who flock to weekend book sales to help restock their storehouse. They had arrived well before 7 a.m. last year spent the two hours before we opened the sale trying every trick they knew to get a look at the books early. Now, I can understand their need to seek cheap stock, but they're going to have to abide by the rules if they're going to do it at our book sale. We had to tell them to stay away from the tables several times and practically needed a whip to enforce the policy. Then, as soon as we opened, they descended on our books like ravenous birds of prey. They would swoop in and scoop up whole sections of books, which they carted back to their little nest of operations where they could sort through them away from the prying eyes of other shoppers. They picked out what they wanted and returned only the detrius. When we caught on to their scheme, Mrs. A told them to cut it out immediately and do their shopping at the tables themselves. They continued to swoop in and take books, but not in mass quantities as before. They still managed to amass several teetering piles of books that they still had not paid for by 2:45 in the afternoon. That's when we realized what their real game was.

See at our sale we charge $3 for hardbacks and $2 for paperbacks until 3 p.m., at which time we shut things down for half an hour to arrange the tables and shift books before reopening and charging only $3 per bag of books. These early-bird dickweeds had been planning to hold all their piles of books until after 3:30 and then buy them at $3 per bag. After all, why pay $3 for a hardback book when you could get a bag of them for the same price? They could have escaped with their whole hoard for under $25.

So Mrs. A told them that they weren't allowed to do that and that they had to either purchase the books before 3 p.m. or put them all back on the tables and take their chances that they would still be there when we reopened at 3:30. They figured it was a safe enough bet, so just before we shut down at 3, they put all the books back on specific tables where they could find them again quickly at 3:30. This was a mistake on their part, but their REAL mistake was in leaving the area for the half hour we were in siesta. We'd been watching them as they put their books back and so we went right to their "secret" tables, took all their desired books and seeded them throughout all the other tables. And some of the more noticably valuable books we took and hid in the U-Haul, just for spite. They were not happy campers when they returned to their "secret" tables and found their chosen books missing. I'm sure they relocated quite a few of the others, but they sure did have to work for it and they certainly didn't get all of them. Then, as soon as they checked out, we put the hidden books back out for mass consumption at $3 a bag.

I know, we're bastards, but at least we're only bastards to bastards.

This very family of book dealers did come to the sale this year, but they behaved themselves. They sent their daughter in to case the joint before 3. She bought a few books at regular price. Then, after 3:30, the whole family came back and bought 8 bulging bags of books. They played fair, we played fair.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

D-MINUS: 6

Bladders Running on Empty

Learned some very encouraging news, yesterday.

Mrs. C was at home last weekend listening to the police band scanner her husband has as part of his job as a volunteer fire-fighter. Sometime Sunday afternoon, she heard an officer come on and say he was in pursuit of a green Jeep with its top down. The officer had run the plates on the Jeep and discovered that its owner had around 6 outstanding tickets and a suspended drivers license. Before the officer even said the man's name, Mrs. C knew who the owner of the vehicle was going to be... The Amazing Bladderboy!

That's right, the Amazing Bladderboy, the cohort/lover/hater of Jimmy the Anonymous Snitch and the prime suspect in the theft of our library's laptop computer last January. He's also the only one of the two who remains at large, being as how Jimmy got packed off to prison for embezzling from a former employer. Also, Bladderboy's Jeep license plate number was originally provided to the police by none other than the staff of our "liberry" back when we were trying to play clubhouse detectives in the latptop theft case.

[For those of you new to the semi-ongoing saga of the "liberry's" arch-nemeses, Jimmy the Anonymous Snitch and the Amazing Bladderboy, you can play catch up with the entries: Legion of Evil Doers (with Bashful Bladders), Tales of the Bladder Thief, Drama, Drama, Drama, More Tales of the Bladder Thieves, Fate (and the Law) finally catches up to Jimmy the "Anonymous" Snitch, Gonna Be A Nettin' War and Sunday Shift.]

As Mrs. C described it to me, she listened intently to the play by play of the chase over the scanner for several minutes until it petered out. Bladders was able to lose his pursuers fairly quickly. For a while the police coordinated efforts to find him again, but beyond one possible sighting of the Jeep near police headquarters itself (where there were no available officers to give chase) Bladderboy was not to be found.

Still, we are overjoyed at this turn of events for Bladderboy will now have warrants issued for his ass, possibly an APB and will most likely see the inside of a jail for his crimes. And, if he shows his face around the library itself, we now have carte blanche to call the cops on him.

Ain't life grand?

D-MINUS: 8

The Manglehoffen Bluff

One of our semi-frequent patrons, Mrs. Manglehoffen (not her real name) came in yesterday. She dropped her books on the circulation desk and went to browse some while I checked them in. One by one, the books checked in bringing up her name on my screen as they did.

Presently, Mrs. Manglehoffen wanted to search for some interlibrary loans and asked if I could look them up for her. Sure thing. I helped her out, found the books at other libraries and put ILL requests in for them. Meanwhile, Mrs. Manglehoffen had picked out a few new books and walked up to the desk to check them out.

"Do you have your card?" I asked.

"My card? Oh, no. I don't. But I'm in there," she said, pointing to my screen. "It's Stella Manglehoffen."

"I'm sorry, but we do require an actual card to check out books now."

Mrs. Manglehoffen stared at me for a second, making some careful calculations. "I don't have a card," she repeated.

"Yes, ma'am. I realize you don't have your card, but we do require that you have it to check out books."

"But I'm in there," she said.

"Yes, ma'am. But we do need a card. If you like, we can hold your books here at the desk and you can look for it."

"Oh, no. That won't do," she said. "I don't have time to come back to town tonight."

I was fully prepared for Mrs. Manglehoffen to do the typical Old White Lady Stands There Staring at You, Waiting for you to Accede to her Wishesbit, but she didn't even try it on for size. She just stacked her books neatly on top of one another and slid them to one side of the desk and left the building. She wasn't even angry about it, which I thought was mighty nice of her. I felt a little bit bad for her, but we've really been cracking down on actual physical card presence recently. A couple of weeks ago, Mrs. A allowed a patron to check out books without a card due to the fact that Mrs. A had forgotten to close out the patron's record and it was already on the screen. That patron rewarded our generosity by going to other area libraries and telling them that we'd let her check out without a card, so why were they getting so snotty about requiring one. They then, in turn, got snotty with us about it, so we've been card Nazis ever since.

A few minutes later Mrs. Manglehoffen reappeared at the desk. She had her purse out and had evidently been searching through it, as she was clutching several stray pieces of paper that she likely found during the search.

"I've looked. I don't have one," she said.

I started to explain to her once again that I understood that she didn't have it with her, but that she couldn't check out without it when she stopped me and threw a new wrinkle into the mix.

"No, I mean don't have one at all," Mrs. Manglehoffen said. "I was never given a card."

Did my ears deceive me? Was she really trying this? Was this really the hand she was attempting to bluff her way through with?

"Uh, yes, ma'am, you were," I said.

"No. No. I never got a card."

"Ma'am, when I checked your books in, your name came up on my screen. That means you DO have a card with us."

"No, I never got one," Mrs. Manglehoffen said again. "She wouldn't give me one that day because I didn't have my drivers license."

By "she" Mrs. Manglehoffen likely meant Mrs. A, who wasn't there to defend herself. Didn't matter, because I've witnessed Mrs. A issue plenty of cards to people who forgot their drivers licenses, telling them to phone the number in later. We're not in the business of entering patrons into the database and then not giving them their cards. Occasionally, we've had patrons walk off and forget their cards, at which point we save them in a little card box at the desk, but Mrs. Manglehoffen was not one of them. I checked.

I tried to explain all this to Mrs. Manglehoffen, but she didn't care. She just wanted a new card.

Fine! But I wasn't giving it away for free. We're already getting plenty of people who forget to bring their cards and suddenly claim that they've "lost" the card in order to get a new one and check out books. So we've decided to charge them $1 for the first replacement card and $5 for each additional. I explained this to Mrs. Manglehoffen and she forked out a dollar for her new card, no arguments at all.

After Mrs. Manglehoffen had left, Mrs. C stepped over from her desk, where she'd kept herself deeply involved in a telephone conversation while all this had gone on. She suggested a very real possibility for why Mrs. Manglehoffen didn't have her card. It seems earlier in the week, our very own Mrs. J was attempting to check out books and was lamenting that she had already managed to lose her card. She'd looked everywhere for it, searched her purse inside and out, trashed her house trying to find it and came up blank.

Mrs. B just smiled as Mrs. J told her story, then said, "Uh, MRS. J, it's on your keys."

Sure enough, Mrs. J had one of our key-card models instead of the full-size wallet card. I'm willing to bet Mrs. Manglehoffen does too.

D-MINUS: 9

Brent, Brice, Busted

Our print-stealing New Devil Twins, Brent & Brice, came back the other day intent on using the computer. The last time they tried this, Mrs. C busted them--not for stealing prints the last time they'd used the computer, but for not having a permission slip on file allowing them to use a computer at all. She gave them one to take home and have their mom fill out and it was this completed form that they were armed with upon their return.

"Thank you very much," I said, taking their permission form. Then I added, "You still can't use the computer."

"How come?"

"Because the last time you guys came in and used it, you walked off with a stack of prints that you didn't pay for." I held up my fingers, approximating a 5th of a ream of paper. "We've told you not to do that twice before, so before you can use a computer again you're going to have to talk to our librarian and see what she wants to do about this."

I wasn't angry with them and said all this very matter-of-factly. To their credit, the boys didn't seem scared or angry either. They waited at the desk while I went upstairs to tell Mrs. A who I'd just caught in my web. She came down and talked to them, explaining that the amount of prints they had made would be worth far more than $1, but that this is what she was going to charge them before they could use the computers again. They agreed, and left.

About an hour later, Brent returned on his own. I thought he was going to fork over a dollar and sign up for a computer, but he'd only returned to tell us that his mom had decided that he would need to pay for this out of his allowance and he wouldn't get that for another week, so that's when he could pay us.

Maybe they'll learn a lesson out of this after all.

D-MINUS: 10

Actual Semi-Paraphrased Second-Hand Information Conversations Heard in Actual Libraries #6

SETTING: Our "liberry". A new patron has come in and applied for a library card with our new circulation system. My fellow "liberry" ass. Mrs. B took the man's information typed it into our computer and issued him a new library card.

MRS. B: (TO NEW PATRON) ...and you'll need to bring your library card each time you want to check out a book.

NEW PATRON: Oh, okay.

UNRELATED EAVESDROPPING FEMALE PATRON WHO ALREADY HAS A NEW CARD: What? Did you just say we have to have our library card to check out books?

MRS. B: Um, yeah. You do.

UNRELATED EAVESDROPPING FEMALE PATRON WHO ALREADY HAS A NEW CARD: (ANGRILY) Homeland Security!!

(PATRON THEN STORMS OUT OF THE LIBRARY.)

Now, could someone please explain to me how having a library card to check out a book--a time honored practice at libraries world wide for at least the past, oh, century--has anything at all to do with Homeland Security? Even if we didn't require you to actually HAVE your card, your patron account is still being accessed by us and books put on it. How is that any different from if we scanned your frickin' card?

And even if Homeland Security somehow DID have something to do with knowing what you've checked out, doesn't it make sense that having a library card would have no effect whatsoever on their ability to crack into a given library database and find out what was being checked out?

I'm really tempted to start telling patrons who complain like this that if they don't bring their library card Tom Ridge will personally come to their house and kick them in the ass. Trouble is, this would just feed the flames of their paranoia and confirm their worst fears.

Son of a B!

D-MINUS: 11

Sayonara, Bear Piss San

Today's Sunday shift went pretty well over all, but it sure didn't seem like it when I started out.

I nearly broke my and my car's ass trying to get to work on time. After church I barely had time to dash home, snatch up a plate of cabbage and boudain and hit the road.

(By the way, for those not in the know, boudain--pronounced boodan--is an exquisite New Orleans delicacy involving spiced pork, beef, chicken, liver and rice ground into a dressing and stuffed in a sausage skin. Done right, it can be as heavenly in a savory way as cinnamon rolls are in a sweet way. Most of the country, and indeed the world, is ignorant of this stuffed wonder. You can't buy it anywhere within at least eight states of here, so we had to import ours from friends passing through New Orleans. It's been sitting in our freezer for just over a year now, so we decided that since Ash and I are taking a minor break from our usual low-carb habits--due to her being stressed out at having to take the second round of board exams this week--we'd cook those suckers up today.)

So here I go, racing from home to make my usual 15 minute journey in 10 minutes. Never mind that the Fair is still going strong and traffic is nutty. I realize as I'm driving, though, that even if I'm a couple minutes late to work, the only person who will be inconvenienced is Mr. B-Natural, who's almost always waiting for us to open. Sure enough, he was the only one there when I drove up, a full two minutes before 1. By the time I actually opened the doors, Mr. B-Natural had been joined by Mr. Smiley, concentrating the world's population of grumpiest old men on our front step.

Mrs. H, who worked Saturday, had quite a busy day according to the circulation stats. She didn't even have time to finish the ILL's, so that was on my agenda. Eating my lunch was also on my agenda... that is, until Bear Piss Man wafted in for a computer. I didn't have one for him, as they were all full, so he just stood around stinking up the front room until I did. Bear Piss Man still smelled like bear piss, but he had obviously tried to cover it by spraying himself down with some sort of air-freshener. It did not help whatsoever. He smelled exactly like a urinal cake.

"Been to the fair yet?" he asked, still trying to ply his free entrance to the freak-show favor. "Oh yeah, you went for the cinnamon rolls the other day," he said, remembering that I'd told him that. "Better go today, cause it's your last chance til next year."

I didn't reply. I finally put him on a computer and he proceeded to stink up the computer hall for the better part of two hours. When he left, he said, "Well, if I don't see you before next year, it's been a real pleasure." Then he reached out and shook my hand. His grip was every bit as clammy as you'd expect it to be. As soon as he'd left, I booked it to the sink to wash my hand, trying not to breathe too heavily least I smell something on it.

I was unable to eat my beloved boudain until the place had had quite a while to air out.

D-MINUS: 12

No, seriously, we don't want any more books.

Our annual book sale is just over a week away. We've been collecting book donations for it since last September. Throughout the year, the donations come in and are hauled to the basement where Mrs. B periodically sorts them into categories and boxes them up to be moved to our storage facility in a local city-owned building.

While we're very grateful for all the donations made throughout the year, toward the end of July we begin really talking up the book sale in an effort to let our patrons know that if they were planning to donate books they should put some ass into it and get it done cause there WILL be a cut off date. This year that date was last Sunday, August 15, after which we put up lots of signs saying we weren't accepting any more book donations until September 15. Not that this has stopped people from bringing them anyway.

Most insistent book donators are turned away with a kind "Thank you very much, but we're no longer accepting books until September 15." They may not like it, but they do go away. One in particular, however, was not so easily disuaded. She phoned us up on Tuesday to ask if she could bring in her books. Mrs. B told her, sorry, no, but we stopped taking books on the 15th.

"But that was Sunday!" the woman said.

"Yes, it was," Mrs. B replied.

Within an hour or two the lady from the phone drove up outside and began unloading boxes. Mrs. B told the woman we really weren't accepting any more books, but the lady insisted on continuing to unload her boxes, stacking them neatly by the front door. Throughout the stacking, Mrs. B continued to tell the woman that No, seriously, we're not accepting any more book donations. You have to take these boxes away. Didn't stop the lady. Didn't even slow her down. She just kept stacking, not saying a word. It seemed nothing short of physical violence was going to stop her, and Mrs. B, having recently had surgery, was in no condition to dish any out. Then, when she'd deposited the tenth box onto the pile, she looked Mrs. B in the eye and said, "You should be grateful for these books." She then got in her car and drove off.

It may seem strange that we would be at all ungrateful for books to benefit our library or that we would have a cut off date at all, but it is absolutely necessary to the process. For one thing, it's very difficult to organize the books you already have when more keep getting dumped on the pile. For another, we're never NEEEEEVER gonna sell all of them anyway. We'd be dancing in the streets if we could sell half of what we usually have. It just doesn't happen, though.

Our booksale is always well attended, but when the number of books we have on sale outnumbers the population of the entire county and only a fraction of that population shows up to the sale, there are going to be lots of books left unsold. At the end of the day, all those unsold books will have to be boxed up again and hauled back onto the rental truck. Then they take a ride to see their new friend Mr. City Garbage Truck where they are compacted into book mush and eventually deposited into a landfill.

(*FEELS THE OVERWHELMING CRIES OF ANGUISH FROM BOOKLOVING READERS ACROSS THE EARTH*)

That's right, we throw them away.

It sounds brutal and horrible and I completely understand if you think we're all a bunch of inhuman monsters at this point, but stay with me cause I'm going somewhere with all this.

I was spared having to see the fate of the leftover books during my first year working the sale. I could live in my little fantasy world in which all those books were taken back to the book-orphanage that is our storage shed to await another chance at happiness in a new home come next year. (Picture scenes from Cider House Rules, only starring books instead of Dewey from Malcolm In The Middle.) Last year, however, they made me go help load the boxes into the garbage truck and I had to do some real soul searching.

I'm still pretty conflicted about seeing books destroyed in this manner. There's just something about a book, no matter how useless it may be to me personally or to the rest of humanity (*COUGH* *COUGH*ROBINCOOK*COUGH*), that grants it inherent value and twists at my soul to see destroyed. However, after much thought, I came to the conclusion (rationalization) that throwing away all those books was not the high crime it might seem on the surface. In fact, it is a valuable community service.

See, the public and patrons in general don't want to see books thrown away any more than we do. In lieu of throwing their own books away, which would be unthinkable, they bring them to us in the belief that their gift will be used for a greater purpose. Either we'll add their books to our collection (the ultimate honor) or we'll sell them in the booksale and the funds will go toward keeping the library running (still pretty honorable). Both of those possibilities MAY be true for any given book. Odds being what they are, however, it is also nearly as likely that their book will be among the leftovers we chunk. Doesn't really matter in either case, though. Our valuable service is that the library becomes the one unloaded rifle in the firing squad that allows each rifleman to sleep at night in the belief that they didn't actually kill anyone. We throw books no one wants away so that average citizens don't have to and don't feel anguished over having done so.

I also realized that what we do is not actually destroying books, at least not in the larger sense. We're merely destroying copies of certain books. Those books still exist out there in the world with plenty of other copies, we've just removed one or two of them from circulation. It happens.

("Oh, yeah? Well if EVERYONE did that then ALL copies of books would be destroyed!" someone out there just said in knee-jerk reaction. Yes, that is true. If everyone destroyed all their book copies then the books would be destroyed. And when and if that happens, we can start making a big deal about it. Since it isn't, and since most of what we destroy are people's old unwanted Chicken Soup for the Asshole's Soul copies and ratty 200th printings of John Grisham, I'm gonna be cool about it.)

On Wednesday, Mrs. C printed out a gigantic banner that reads "WE WILL NOT BE ACCEPTING BOOK DONATIONS UNTIL SEPTEMBER 17!!!" and plastered it across the outside of our front door. Already it has stopped several well-meaning donors in their tracks coming up the front walk.

The good news, however, is that we have also discovered an alternate donation site. One of the libraries in a nearby county was shut down a couple of years ago due to not being able to sustain itself financially. That community has now rallied together, though, and they are about to reopen that branch and are in dire need of books. So now we're sending latecomers their way and may be able to unload a few orphans of our own there after the sale.

D-MINUS: 14

Stank Week

Oh, the unpleasant smells of humanity I have smelled this week. It's enough to put a guy off his cinnamon rolls.

In addition to daily visits from The Sweatiest Woman in All the Land, whose stank is now in danger of achieving Rogue Status all on its own, we've also been visited by an even stinkier person.

Bear Piss Man is his name. I first met him on Sunday when he came in to use a computer. He doesn't live around here, though he'd fit right in. He didn't even smell particularly bad that day and I even talked to him for a bit. He had mentioned not being from the area nor having a library card when he'd inquired about the computers. I asked if he was in town for the Fair and he confirmed that he was. Seems he's something of a professional carny and is in charge of the Freak Show booth. He invited me to come by and said I just had to mention his name to the ticket taker and they'd let me right in for free. I even thought about taking him up on it when I went to get my cinnamon rolls on Wednesday, but decided not to.

I've never been to the freak show at this particular fair before, but from what I understand there are more animal oddities than human oddities on display. And most of them are dead. Most. Regardless, I didn't want anything to spoil my roll, so I didn't stop in. This was a wise move in retrospect, as when I did turn up for work at the "liberry" Bear Piss Man was already there at the computers, reeking of urine.

The staff had already classified the urine smell as cat-piss, as it's in that general neighborhood of unvanquishable stench. Then they had second thoughts.

"I think he runs the bear show," Mrs. J suggested.

"Oh, so it's bear piss?" Mrs. A said in a low voice that Bear Piss Man probably couldn't hear.

"Uh, I don't know about that," I said. "He told me he ran the freak show."

"Freak piss, then?" Mrs. A countered.

Regardless of the species that actually issued his pissy smell, Bear Piss Man was the name that stuck.

He spied me while I was logging on a computer for someone else and asked if I'd been to the fair yet.

"Well, yeah, I was there this morning, but just for the cinnamon rolls."

Bear Piss Man then reissued his invitation that I should stop on by the show, tell the ticket guy his name and come right in for free. I found the urgency of the man's invitation more than a little bit unsettling. I told this to Ashley over the phone last night.

"He probably needs a new Fat Man," she suggested.

I'd argue, but I do still look preggers from my double shot of cinnamon rolls.

Cinnamon Roll Day

Every year, the fair comes to town for a week and every year the whole Tri-Metro area is thrown into bedlam and confusion as people from all over the state descend upon our heads, tie up our roads and make life a good bit more stressful. Many local citizens choose this week to leave the area on vacation just to avoid it. Those of us who have to stay quickly learn the back roads to get around the glut of traffic between us and work. Even the "liberry" reduces hours of operation to close at 5 p.m. all week just to compensate for the lower patronage. This royally horks off the internet crowd, though, so it's not all bad.

I was out of town last year during the fair so I didn't get to participate in what has become one of my life's great culinary experiences, the Fair Cinnamon Roll. It's really the only reason I go to the fair at all these days, cause I'm certainly not there for the rides or the hot dog-food on a bun booth.

I first encountered the Fair Cinnamon Roll two years ago while visiting the Fair with my in-laws. We'd already eaten our share of Fair Food and were feeling kind of bloated from it, but spied the Cinnamon Roll stand on our way out. Ash and I bought a roll to share, but didn't actually eat until we'd been home for an hour or two. Upon having our first bite, we knew we'd made a grave error in judgment. Not because it was cold, mind, but because if we had known how amazing these giant sugar-coated balls of heaven truly were we would have bought several more. To get more, we would have to pay upwards of $7 just to get into the fair, then another $5 a pop for each roll. It was quite an expensive endeavor, but dammit we were addicted now and had to have them! Still, my wallet won the argument, so I finally wound up bribing Mrs. A to buy three cinnamon rolls when she went to the Fair to work the Literacy Booth. Ash and I each had one and we generously gave the third to our neighbor Annie-Bea.

Like I said, I missed out on the rolls last year because I was visiting my sister in Austin, but I more than made up for it by eating my weight in Tex Mex while there.

This year I was determined to get my hands on at least one cinnamon roll and I knew exactly when I was going to do it.

See today was Free Day at the Fair. This doesn't mean you can get into the Fair free all day, but you can get in free between the hours of 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. Just in time for breakfast! So I left all guilt and the chain-rattling ghost of Dr. Atkins at the house and headed out at 8:15 to secure my cinnamon roll.

After negotiating my way through the free-parking lot, running over a bottle in the process thanks to the kindly direction of the parking staff, and maneuvering through the mass crowd of families who were headed in for free day with no intentions of leaving until they ran out of money, I was finally there.

To the right is a picture of my view as I approached the hallowed cinnamon roll booth itself. I felt very lucky that only a handful of people were waiting in line to make off with some of the earliest rolls fresh from the oven. The lines for this booth usually rival those of It's A Small World at Disneyland.

The truly great thing about the cinnamon roll booth is the high quality construction of each of the rolls. The cinnamon roll guys roll out the dough right there in front of the big window. They lovingly put around 16 pats of real butter all over the surface of the dough, not skimping, before sprinkling the whole thing with a quarter inch of sugar and cinnamon. Then they roll that sucker up, slice it into huge chunks, put the chunks on a baking sheet, bake it for a while, then slather the whole piping hot tray in a gooey sugar/cinnamon icing. Eating one is like becoming David Bowman at the end of 2001. "My God, it's full of stars!"

"I'll have a coffee and two cinnamon rolls, please," I told the man at the window. He took a spatula and gathered up my rolls into little plastic containers, slid them into a white paper bag and poured my coffee. My total price was $11 and I knew already it would be worth every last penny of it.

I took my bag of cinnamony sugary carb-laden goodness to find a spot to sit and eat. The picnic tables were infested with teenagers waiting for the rides to open, so I decided to use the mostly uncrowded concrete front step of one of the exhibit buildings as my dining table.

Take a good close look at the full-size picture of my cinnamon roll to the right. A beauty isn't it? My stomach's been living for this moment for months now. This is to be the pinnacle moment of low carb-cheating for my entire year. All other cheats--including eating half a box of Golden Grahams, by myself, in one sitting, a month back--pale by comparison.

I take the first bite. It is every bit as good as I've been hoping it would be. I can taste the salt from the butter as it has a menage a trois with the sugar and cinnamon across my tongue. It's like the best sex you've ever had condensed into a single bite. Only by eating one of these can you understand just how on the money all those scientific studies showing how men equate smells of warm cinnamon buns with sex truly are. I take another bite. It's just as good as the first. I then proceed, bite by bite, through the entire roll over the course of six or so minutes.

While eating, I try to analyze the experience as best I can, cause it turns out there are highs and lows to it.

I've come to the conclusion that, for me at least, the first seven or eight bites were probably the best. Eight put me about half-way through the cinnamon roll. After that, the pleasure of the experience decreased exponentially with each new bite. I'm really not a sweet-tooth at heart and I can only stand so much sugary richness before the flow of endorphins begins to trickle off. At around 4 bites from the end, I could really see the logic in merely sharing one of these rolls with someone else. That way, you get the best parts of the experience and not so much of the whole long haul to the finish line praying for merciful death thing. The penultimate bite was painful, cause I could see the last one coming, and it was a big one. I didn't get sick or anything, but my poor sugar deprived stomach was definitely feeling confused as to what to do with the mass influx of sucrose.

After that, I walked around the fair for a while, looking at all the other food booths that are just opening up. I knew that while I was in for free I really should indulge in some of the better edible attractions, but my gut is full of roll and I just can't imagine eating anything else, particularly something sweet. After twenty minutes or so, I went home with my other cinnamon roll.

I planned to offer my other roll to my sweet baby upon her impending return from KENTSburg. I even mentioned it to her on the phone tonight, secretly hoping she would turn it down.

"Noooo, I don't need any more sugar," she said. "You should eat it. Don't let it sit around in the congealed butter grease and get nasty."

I didn't need to be told twice. I popped that sucker in a bowl, nuked it for a couple of minutes and feasted on warm cinnamon roll that was almost exactly as good as the one this morning. I even ate some of it on the phone to Ashley so she could live vicariously through me.

Frankly, I think she's a bit jealous of my near adulterous relationship with the rolls.

Send in the Clones, Part III

So why is it a guy like me has so many look-a-likes (or like-a-looks, for you Cerebus fans)?

It's not like I'm the most commonplace-looking fellow in the world. I'm of average to stocky build, occasionally fat, have perpetually rosy red cheeks and a collossal cranium that's damn near impossible to fit a hat on. Yet, all my clones seem to match up pretty well for almost all of those traits.

Well, not ALL of them. I actually count my friend Glen among my clones. This is a pretty good trick too, what with him being over 6 feet tall and Korean while I'm a short white guy. We both have goatees, sure, but beyond that we'd hardly be mistaken for one another in a lineup. Yet I have been mistaken for him on more than one occasion and, I think, he for me. I chalk it up to a shared aura of mischief, but have no explanation beyond that.

Then again, it might just come down to a matter of mathmatics. As my friend Gordon Carskadon once told me, "If you're one in a million then there are 10,000 of you walking around in this country alone." And that's assuming I'm only one in a million, instead of one in 242,973, which I think is far more likely. Plus, that figure comes from before the last census, so there are probably even more of me now.

Since college, the clones have continued to turn up unexpectedly in my life.

One of my coworkers when I worked for Onstar was a clone. We were both damn good at our jobs, so at least we didn't cause each other any hassles when we were mistaken.

I've actually known about my current clone down at Pub 1875 for a couple of years now. He's a waiter. Some of Ash's fellow students once had dinner there and mistook him for me. They waved and smiled and waved some more, then began to get irritated that I was studiously not coming over to say hi to them nor acknowledging them in any way. (He wasn't their waiter.) Weeks later, they tracked me down and confronted me about it. That's when I realized I had a clone in the area. Since then that same scenario has played itself out several times, so now I have even more of a reputation for being a standoffish jerk.

It was a while before I actually saw my clone myself, though. I thought I saw him at Wal-Mart one day, but it turned out to be a different one entirely. He looked almost exactly like me only he was blond. (I've always wondered how I'd look as a blond and the answer is: really not all that different.) He was also wearing ski-gear, so I'm pretty sure he was just in the area as a pit-stop on the way to the slopes.

Eventually I did have a sighting of my waiter clone. (Or, at least I assume he was my waiter clone. If not then I have a third twin around here too, dammit.) He came in the library one day and did indeed look quite like me only a good bit scragglier. Mrs. A saw him too and she just stood and stared at him for the longest time before nervously looking over at me for an explanation.

"Clone," I told her.

Later she paid me the compliment that she thought I was the better looking of the two of us. That's good, cause that's what I thought too.

I've since begun to wonder if maybe the waiter clone had come in specifically to get a look at me, though. Surely if I've been hearing rumors about some guy that looks like me haunting a restaurant just down the hill from us, he's hearing the same thing about a slightly better-looking guy who works at the library just up the hill. I've not seen him in since then, so maybe he was just confirming the situation then backing off to a safe distance. Maybe he too realizes that people who talk to themselves never learn anything to their advantage.

My family's involvement with clones has not ended either. Dad reported to me just the other day about spying a clone of my sister in Birmingham, AL. He, of course, walked right up to her and said, "Hey, you look like my kid." The girl took the news well and was pleased to hear that her look-a-like lives in such a cool city as Austin, TX.

That's my dad for you.

I still think this is all somehow his fault.

Send in the Clones, Part II

So having discovered one clone while in college, others were soon to follow and much closer to home.

Within months of returning from NYC, I began hearing about appearances I'd made around campus which I knew I hadn't made. Friends and aquaintances would claim to have seen me at a distance somewhere, called my name to the point of shouting and then would get pissed that I had ignored them or that I'd given them a dirty look for their trouble. It was a mystery for which I had no explanation for quite a while. Then I began having such sightings of myself myself and realized there was another clone at work.

Usually these sightings would occcur while I was on my way to class and would spy a very familiar visage across the campus's drill field moving in the opposite direction. A few times, though, our paths crossed even closer and I was able to get a better look at him. He sure did look like me. It was hard not to stare.

My dad and I even saw one of my clones eating at McDonald's one night. Dad was completely blown away by the resemblance and kept trying to get me to go up and talk to the guy. Dad's a firm believer in the old addage: If someone looks just like you, go hunt them down and point it out to them. He'd actually done this to one of his own clones a few years earlier. (His clone agreed that they did indeed look very similar.) I almost did go speak to mine then, if only to keep Dad from doing it on his own and creating an embarrassing situation over which I would have no control. I could just see Dad marching over and saying, "Hey, you look like my kid," at which time he would point back across the restaurant at me cowering beneath our booth in shame. Nope. That was not an experience I wanted to have, so I forbade Dad to move from his seat until my clone had safely left the building.

Actually talking to my clone just seemed like a very uncomfortable situation for everyone involved. It's like Ford Prefect says in Douglas Adams' book Life, the Universe and Everything: "People who talk to themselves on the phone never learn anything to their advantage." I suspect the same goes for in-person encounters as well.

Within another year, yet another clone appeared. This one was different from the one I'd seen in McDonald's in that he was slightly taller and slightly chunkier than me. However, we also shared several mutal aquaintances, which really began confusing things. Around this same time I grew my hair out to shoulder length and developed something of a goatee. Naturally, my clone decided that would be a good look for him as well. Thanks, bitch.

Questions concerning which of us was the Evil Twin soon began to arise in my mind. I was pretty sure it was him, but perhaps he'd disagree. (TMBG fans sing along.... *I know he looks like me and walks like me, hates work like me and talks like me, he's even got a twin like me!*) I eventually got the chance to ask him myself when some of our mutal aquaintances hosted a party and we both wound up going.

That was a very strange evening indeed for reasons beyond the presence of my clone. My friend Joe, who was also at the party, had just learned that his older brother had died that morning and was understandibly still shaken. My crew of friends present were not really in a partying sort of mood as a result. I tried to console Joe by mixing up some Lemon/Lime flavored Mad Dog 20/20 with Shasta and then drinking it. This cheered him up immensely, if only for the expression on my face as I determinedly choked that reisty concoction down. (Believe me, mixing that shit with Shasta is the only way to make it go down and stay down, and I still don't recommend it.)

My clone, meanwhile, wisely avoided drinking anything nearly so foul, perhaps proving himself the more intelligent of the two of us. We barely spoke at all, except to say, "No, we're not. But, uh, yeah, he does kind of look like me," when people kept asking if we were brothers. It was very awkward. Neither of us really wanted to acknowledge the resemblance and I think we were both irritated that people wouldn't just shut up about it and leave us alone. I did, however, learn that my clone's name was Dennis.

Some months later, one of my clones was attacked on my behalf. I'm not sure if it was Dennis or the first clone and while it was a minor, non life-threatening attack, it was an attack all the same. The attacker was a girl named Dawn who I worked with at the college radio station. We'd only just met a couple of weeks before, but were friendly enough, which is why the attack is all the more odd. According to Dawn herself, she had been walking on campus one day and thought she saw me mosying along the sidewalk some distance ahead of her. In this situation, Dawn did what anyone would have done upon discovering a fairly new aquaintance was walking ahead of her. That's right, she sprinted up behind me, leapt onto my back and knocked me to the ground. Then, to her horror, she discovered that it wasn't me at all and that she had just assaulted a complete stranger. She didn't discover it right away, mind you. She had a brief argument with him over whether nor not he was actually me, before realizing that he wasn't and having to explain to him that she hadn't intended to attack him, per se, but someone who looked just like him.

"Why the hell would you want to jump on me and knock me down in the first place?" I asked her. It's not like we were even good friends. We'd practically just met.

Dawn never gave me a satisfactory answer, but I'll bet she thought twice before attacking anyone else in the future.

(TO BE CONCLUDED...)

Send in the Clones, Part I

A patron was checking out recently when she surprised me by saying, "Hey, I saw you out the other day... Down at Pub 1875, right?"

For a moment my brain was thrown into confusion mode as I tried to make sense of what she was saying. Pub 1875 is one of our fine and expensive downtown restaurants. Trouble is, I've never set foot in the place. Not that I don't want to, I just can't afford to.

Being as how nothing else at the library had made much sense that afternoon, it took me a few seconds to figure out that I wasn't the only one in the room who was confused. Then with an almost audible *PING* my brain realized whom it was she had actually seen at Pub 1875.

"Oh, no. That wasn't me," I said. "That was one of my clones."

"Your clones?"

"Yeah. There's a guy that works at that restaurant who looks a lot like me, but it's not me."

"It wasn't you?" she said suspiciously.

"Nope. Clone."

"Wow. Well he sure did look like you."

"Yep."

I haven't officially met my current local clone, but I've seen more than one of them in the area.

Understand, I don't actually believe these people who resemble me are honest to God clones. That's just a nice short-hand I use to describe them. I could say doppelgangers or evil twins or faerie children with just as little seriousness as clones. Also know that I'm not actually saying there's any kind of sinister plot concerning them, nor is there anything remotely supernatural or conspiratorial about them. (Yet.) There just happen to be a goodly number of gents walking the earth who look a damn sight like me, who keep crossing my path and occasionally causing complications to my life. I'd probably find it unsettling if this sort of thing hasn't been happening to me for the past thirteen years.

In short, I'm not making this shit up.

In March of 1991, I was a Freshman in college. During Spring break that year, my buddy John Robert and I took a trip to New York City as chaperones for a group of high school students my former high school drama teacher, Mrs. Mabry, was taking there on a tour. On the last day of our trip, our flight home wound up getting cancelled and the airline rescheduled us for a later flight. Having an extra six hours in the big city on our hands, our touring organization sent us on a scenic bus tour. So we drove around for a while, going through places like Greenwich Village and eventually past the NY headquarters of the Hell's Angels. A few blocks from there, we wound up getting stuck in a minor traffic jam for a couple of minutes. I was looking out of the right-side bus windows when from the left side of the bus Mrs. Mabry suddenly shouted, "Hey, look, there's JUICE!"

Everyone turned and looked out of the left side bus windows and sure enough, there I was on the sidewalk. It was boo-creepy! The kid looked exactly like me, though perhaps a couple of years younger. He had my face, he had my hair, he had my gargantu-head. He even had my ass.

Clone kid didn't notice us. He was too preoccupied helping a friend sort through a big cardboard box which seemed to contain lots of magic markers. I don't know what they really were, as magic markers don't make a lot of sense in that New York City sidewalk context. I've always imagined they were something more illegal in nature, but still have no idea what. Just white plastic magic markery-looking tubes.

Only later, after we'd driven on, did I realize that the greatest practical joke of my entire life had been within my grasp and I'd missed it. If I'd been on the ball, I should have stepped off the bus, walked over to the clone kid and said, "Mom lied!" then just got back on the bus. It would have shattered his world. Actually, the idea disturbed me a bit too and as soon as I got home I began grilling my dad as to whether or not he'd spent any time in the NYC area around 16 years previous. He denied having been there, but I think I caught a glint of fear in his eye for just a second.

This was only the first of my college clones. By the time I graduated, I'd seen a succession of them.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Sundy Shift

Had a fairly enjoyable Sunday shift today. No ILL's to pack up. Very light patron traffic. No one yelling at me. It was great.

Even Mr. B-Natural, our first patron of the day, offered to help me carry in books from the book return. He used to help Miss E all the time and I'd been mildly irritated that he never offered to help me until today. Alas, there were an amazingly low 8 books in the return, so I didn't need any help.

Our only other rogue--well, other than Parka, who put in a mid-afternoon appearance--was Ron the (Magazine) Ripper, who came in with his Unobstructed Doors aid around 1:30. Shortly after his arrival, a young lady came in carrying a massive and familiar anatomy book most first year med students have to lug everywhere they go about this time of year. Sure enough, she was a first year looking for a place to study. I told her we had tables upstairs before remembering that Ron was up there too.

"Oh, uh... Just to let you know, there's a guy up there right now who likes to rip through magazines kind of loud. If he bothers you, let me know."

She gave me an almost worried quizzical look but hauled her book upstairs all the same. Ron evidently behaved himself. At least, I heard none of his usual noises coming through the floor.

I'd brought my newish digital camera to work, though, and kept busy by taking photos of the 58 donated items the county's literacy group will be auctioning off to raise funds. I kind of still owe the literacy people some web design work after helping my friend and writing workshop leader, Linda, break their dry-erase board a couple years back. It was one of these portable models with dials at the top that we thought were there to help adjust its legs. Turns out we were very wrong as the legs snapped right off when we both tried to adjust them in different directions at once. At the time, we thought we'd merely broken the library's dry erase board, since the damn thing was being stored at the library. We found out later it belonged to Literacy and so we would have to work it off for them. Turned out to be a fairly expensive dry erase board too, for such a cheap piece of crap. Linda, being a publicist, did free publicity work for literacy. I, being a computer genius, (at least as compared with everyone else who walks through the door), was conscripted to do construct an online auction page for them.

This auction page was supposed to happen last year but entirely failed to for a variety of reasons. I personally blame Literacy for never actually sending me any photos of the items nor items to photograph. Literacy probably blames me for inconveniently leaving to visit my sister in Austin that week. So who can really say who's at fault? This year we're all doing our level best to work together on the project and pull this off. I can now say I've made a start of it.

Most of our items are donated by record companies whose artists are playing in the state. Lots of autographed CDs, tour T-shirts, hats and 8"x10" glossies for country music artists, many of whom I've actually heard of.

Instead of including a picture of any of the mostly boring auction items, here is another picture of the largest fly I've ever seen, as photographed on the edge of the full size patio table on my back deck this morning. Enjoy.

It Takes a Village

This has been a pretty heavy work week for me, actually. I subbed for Mrs. C on Monday and for Mrs. B on Tuesday. I actually had a Thursday off for the first time in forever, so I used my free afternoon to go see M. Night Shyamalan's The Village.

I'd been hearing bad buzz about the film on AICN for a while, but I don't always trust the particular reviewer who buzzed badly. (After all, anyone who claims not to "get" Babylon 5 is obviously not going to share the same sense of quality as I do.) Before I went to the theatre, though, I also heard some second hand bad reviews from Garin the Comic Shop Guy. He'd not seen it yet, but had several customers who had told him it was incredibly predictable and that they'd walked out of it due to it being so bad.

Even with that knowledge, however, I was going in anyway. I've loved Shyamalan's last few films and feel that he's more than earned my movie watching dollar even if it turned out to be a turkey. Plus, I haven't walked out of a movie for being bad in 15 years, though Lord knows I probably should have with some. (I did fail to finish watching the DVD of Made I rented last week because Vince Vaughn's character was making me crazy.)

So I went.

My non-spoiler review of it is that I don't think it was a turkey at all. In fact, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's not Shyamalan's best, but it was enjoyable for what it was. The trick is to go into it with no expectations, though. The movie is being mis-marketed as a horror movie filled with frights and chills. However, while there are a few spooky moments, it is NOT a horror movie nor do the scares live up to the marketing. I think that's why some people may be disappointed with it. They went in for cake and were given whole-wheat bread.

As to the predictability of it, I did figure out what the big twist ending was going to be within the first half hour. However, I don't really think this was the fault of the film itself. I think it's my own fault as a viewer who's seen too many M. Night Shyamalan movies and that I knew there was going to be a twist coming and deduced it. I just asked myself, "Hmm. If I was going to put a twist ending on this film given the story presented thus far and the fact that it is more than likely set in Pennsylvania, as Shyamalan almost always does, what would be the most twisty ending that could come up?" I turned out to be right on the money. I didn't have all the specifics nailed down, but I had the broad brush strokes spotted well in advance.

There were still a lot of surprises to be had. The story itself bobs and weaves around common expectations pretty well. And given some of the major dramatic shifts in the story, I also found it ironic that Sigourney Weaver had been cast.

Overall I think this movie would have been received far better by viewers had it been Shyamalan's first film rather than his 5th. It would be a good one to take a Shyamalan newbie to.

One Week, Two Kreskins

At the risk of having readers question my honesty, I must report yet another Mr. Kreskin incident. Two in one week. Who'da thunk?

Mrs. C was unavoidably out on Wednesday, so I came in at 11 a.m. to help Mrs. A man the ship. She seemed nice and refreshed from her vacation that early in the day, but I suspect by the end she was on the verge of scheduling another one. Last week, most of the people who usually call desperate to speak to Mrs. A had been told she was out for the week, so they just saved everything they desperately needed up to phone in for Mrs. A's first day back on Wednesday. The phone was thus almost constantly ringing. After three hours of it, my silent curses began to be voiced and every ring was met with at least a growl.

Around 2 p.m., Mrs. A left for lunch, which really irritated the 30 people who called during the next hour, but one of them in particular: Mr. Kreskin.

It's uncanny. An example of true psychic phenoma if ever there was one. That's the only way I can explain how the man is able to call ONLY when both people he wants to talk to are gone EVERY SINGLE TIME. It's astounding.

I was able to help him with what he needed this time, which probably saved Mrs. A a stern talking to later. He really gets royally peeved when neither Mrs. A nor Mrs. C are in. He's tried to lay down the law with them before, insisting that one of them HAS to be there at all times. By "all times" however, I'm pretty sure he means "24/7." Even if he just meant "during normal business hours" it's still such an unrealistic expectation that it didn't stick for very long.

"MR. KRESKIN called," I told Mrs. A when she got back. "I helped him, though."

She pointed out Mr. Kreskin knowing that I'm a capable human being with skills is not necessarily a good thing. That knowledge will surely mean more work for me when they're not around. Not more hours, mind you, but more work during the hours I'm already scheduled for. Mr. Kreskin tends to view Mrs. A and Mrs. C as his own personal secretaries, and has them type up correspondence for him regularly. Most of it is library related, so they don't mind so much, but it can still be inconvenient. Hopefully he won't learn of my 80 wpm typing speed or copy-writing/editing background.

The Grampy Patrol (In Color!)

So I go to Wal-Mart the other day. Sure, I know I'm depriving my community of needed revenue by shopping at the corporate giant, but dammit I needed Russell Stover sugar free low-carb peanut butter cups and all the locally owned businesses charge $8000 for them if they have them at all. I'm only human!

(Oh, and by the way, you low-carbers out there, allow me to assure you that it is a VERY bad idea indeed to eat the suggested serving size of 5 cups of the Reese's brand of sugar-free mini-peanut butter cups. That is, unless you've got a hankering to spend the rest of your evening running carefully to and from the toilet to do your best impression of the Serial Shitter. Not so much trouble in that department with my boy Russ, so that's my brand.)

As I was maneuvering my Malibu through Wally World's parking lot, I got behind an older gentleman driving a big Pontiac who was slowly turning into one of the parking aisles near the store's southern entrance. I immediately recognized him as a member of that international cabalistic society known as the Grampy Patrol—that loose-knit organization of elderly men who drive around in big vehicles, preferably pickup trucks, at irritatingly slow speeds, take twenty minutes to make a turn and who always wear hats while doing so. They are among my many arch-nemeses and will remain so until I'm old enough to join them and subvert them from within.

I pulled into the same aisle and then had to slow down to maintain the car-length of distance between my car and his as he refused to go any faster. It was a good thing I was that far behind and going that slowly, however, because the man suddenly came to a halt. Much to my surprise and annoyance, he then threw his car into reverse and started backing up toward me. Turned out, the man had driven right past the empty handicapped parking space near the door and had decided he wanted it after all. However, my car was at that moment perpendicular to that space, blocking the way. The man didn't seem to have noticed this, though, as he had not bothered to even look in his rear view mirror to check if anyone was behind him before throwing it into reverse. He wasn't exactly flying back, so I kept waiting for him to catch a glimpse of me and stop. He didn't, because he was not only NOT using his mirror but he wasn't even turning his head to look behind him at all as he backed up. Instead, he was watching the parked cars to his right to gauge his progress.

Seeing that he was going to hit me, I threw my own car into reverse. Fortunately, I DID check my mirror and saw there were several people in the pedestrian walkway directly behind my car. I couldn't back up at all without backing over them. I was trapped!
*HONK*HONK*HONK*, I honked. This seemed to get the man’s attention and he slowed to a halt. For good measure, I gave him several longer, angrier honks. Only then did his head finally swivel around and actually look at me. Still the man remained in reverse. He was actually waiting for me to get out of his way.

FINE!

When the crosswalk was clear, I backed up and took the next aisle down where I found a parking space and quickly got out of my car to go find this guy and vent my fury.

How could someone have such a colossal failure to exercise common sense in driving? The guy was old enough to have been driving for several decades, so he should know better! Anyone could have been behind him, closer than I was. Hell, a pedestrian could have been behind him and he hadn't bothered to look at all!

I soon spotted him. He had exited his car and was slowly making his way across the pedestrian crosswalk; had his Grampy Patrol hat on and everything. I started in his direction and noticed that he was already looking nervously back over his shoulder in my direction. (Oh, sure, NOW he looks over his shoulder?! ) I'm sure I had a fiery expression of death on my face, but as I watched this frail little old man hobble along toward the door of Wally World, I was internally starting to soften.

What good could really come from me yelling at this guy for nearly testing my front bumper? Probably none. No one had been hurt, he had hopefully learned the lesson that it was a mistake to blindly throw his car into reverse and I'd already gotten to righteously honk at him, which is always fun. Embarrassing the man in front of half of Wal-Mart was probably not a good idea and would definitely not be respecting my elders.

By the time I'd crossed the crosswalk myself, I'd decided I wouldn't yell at him at all.

"Pssst! Hey, pssst!" I heard from my left. It was an equally old man seated on the bench outside of Wally-World's entrance. He was jerking his head at me in an effort to beckon me over. He wasn't wearing a Grampy Patrol hat, so I figured it was safe.

"Yeah?" I said, coming closer. The man nodded in the direction of the thoughtless older man, who was only then reaching the doors of Wally World.

"That's him," the man on the bench said, still nodding in the first one’s direction. I nearly burst out laughing. Dude on the bench was trying to start a fight. Oh, sure, he was wrapping it up in civic-duty, trying to make it seem like he was just helping me find the man who nearly backed into me, but deep down this guy was trying to cause trouble.

Then, as though he had judged me too dim to "get" what he meant, the man on the bench lifted a hand and pointed his finger at the first man, now well within Wally World’s breezeway and said, "That's him. That's the guy."

"Yeah. I know," I said.

I didn't bother hunting down the Grampy Patrol driver, though we did see one another a couple of more times while I was shopping. Whenever he saw me, he'd look nervous again and maybe shuffle his shopping cart a little faster down the aisle.

Great, I thought, now I'm inadvertently bullying the elderly.

Where's Jan Brady when you need her?

There are a couple of homes for wayward youth in the area. They send groups of their kids out on outings into the real world and occasionally these lead them to the library.

These visits have been a bit of a tricky situation for us in the past, as we have to walk a fine line with them. We want to encourage their rehabilitation as much as we can by allowing them to check out books and videos. However, doing so is a risky gamble since our stuff often fails to come back by its due date, or indeed ever. These kids are usually only at the home for x number of weeks and many of them don't seem to mind taking our materials with them when they go. Or, they "lose" them, at which point they begin claiming that they "brought them back already" and we still never see them again.

The administrators of the homes in question are often unsympathetic to our plight. One of the homes even received a banning due to their poor attitudes about the borrowing/stealing behavior of their residents. They were only allowed to return once Mrs. A established with them that they the administration of the homes were in fact responsible for returning all our materials to us. It's still probably a 60/40 success ratio, skewed toward those who do return our material, but at least when the kids don't bring stuff back the home now pays for the lost items.

So yesterday, in walked a group of around seven 15-17 year old boys from one of the homes. Nearly every one of them had a book or two and came up and plunked it down on the circulation desk, under the watchful gaze of their daytrip supervisor, an enormous muscle-bound man who looked like he could take the whole lot of `em using only his steely no-nonsense expression. They quickly spread throughout the "liberry" to search for new stuff to borrow. I was just thankful they all already had cards--well, except for one of them, who managed to lose his card since they were in last and didn't seem to like the fact we were going to charge him a dollar for a replacement card.

About this time, Mrs. C decided to take her lunch break, leaving me and Mrs. J to run the ship by ourselves. I didn't really like this, but I also couldn't really say why I didn't like this since we never have trouble from the group home kids while they're actually IN the library. It's only after they leave with our stuff that the trouble occurs.

They behaved, as far as I could tell, though. The group stayed for around fifteen minutes and a few of them found things to check out. When it was time to go, their pro-wrestler-looking supervisor herded them up and back to the van they obediently went.

A few minutes later, I went back to the computer hallway to log off the vacant computers. I'd done one of them and was nearly finished with the second when I realized that the familiar smell my nose was detecting was not actually familiar to the library.

*SNIFF*SNIFF*SNIFF*

Yep. It was definitely coming from in-house and seemed to be stronger near the stairs. I ascended and the smell became even stronger. I went into the non-fiction room. The only people there were a lone patron and Mrs. J. I didn't think the smell was coming from them. Besides, it seemed to diminish in the non-fiction room.

I turned around and traced it back to the top of the stairs, then into Mrs. A's office, then into the private staff restroom, the door of which was left open, the light of which was left on. That's where the smell was at its most concentrated.

Someone had been in there and... (*ADOPTS BEST JAN BRADY VOICE*)... they were SMOking!

If the smell of smoke hadn't been enough of a clue, there were ashes on the toilet seat to back it up. My guess is at least two of them had been in there. (After all, what fun is it to be bad and rebellious and take a smoke break all by yourself?)

Mrs. J had smelled it too, but couldn't figure out where it was coming from or who had been doing it. She also seemed to think it smelled like marijuana, but I assured her it was most likely Marlboro.

Mrs. C was unhappy about this when she finally returned. I asked her if she knew which home that group had come from and she did. She phoned them up and advised the administrator she talked to that the entire library was most definitely a non-smoking facility.

Course, now the kids will probably all get in trouble and our library materials will likely bear the brunt of any revenge they seek upon us.

R.I.P. Super Freak

Dear Rick James...

...you bitch. Thanks ever so much kicking off dead a mere three weeks after I borrowed your name to use as a pseudonym for one of our problem patrons. Now I'm going to look like an asshole in poor taste for using your name when I only just learned of your passing today in Newsweek. And I'm going to feel all creepy and stuff when I keep using it in the future.

Love and kisses,

--Juice

Boy, someone needs a nap.

Other than that, my Monday was pretty typical; busy and full of primarily semi-irritating and actually-irritating patrons.

Our only major problem patron of the day was a middle-aged lady who seemed somehow offended that all of our computers were full and she couldn't have one. Offended. That's the best way I can think to describe her ire. I told her she could have one in two minutes, when Mr. B-Natural's time ran out. I said this in earshot of Mr. B-Natural, though I didn't mention him by name. Happily, he took it as the hint it was meant to be and relinquished his computer without having to be asked. I put her on it and started the timer for her half hour.

Slightly over half an hour later, we had another rush on the computers and I went back to tell her that her time was up. Again, she was instantly offended.

"But I'm not out of time!" she said.

"Yes, ma'am. I'm afraid you are."

"No I'm not."

"Ma'am, I was timing you. You got over half an hour."

"Well, I'm used to getting the full hour," she huffed.

"Ma'am, we give patrons half an hour."

"Every time I've come here I've gotten a full hour!"

"That may be the case, ma'am, but it was probably because we don't ask patrons to get off unless someone is waiting."

The woman adopted an even huffier tone. "Well, I've never been told it was a half hour limit."

I calmly reached over and flipped down the orange sign taped to the monitor and pointed to the line that said "TIME LIMIT: 30 MINUTES". I was waiting for her to say that she hadn't seen it, just so I could say that I wasn't responsible for glaringly obvious policy signs that our patrons don't read. (Course, that's technically not true, as I was responsible for that particular policy sign that patrons never read.) She declined to go that route. Instead, she took a much more childish one.

"But I'm not finished. I have a lot more to read here and my husband won't be back to pick me up for another half hour!"

My voice remained admirably calm as I said, "Regardless, ma'am, we DO have someone waiting to use this computer and your time IS up." Then I turned and walked away. If she wanted to argue more, she could do so without me. It's the same tactic I used to use on Mr. B-Natural, back when he was a much surlier patron.

Within a minutes, the lady had signed off and stomped up front. Just to further irritate her, I decided to continue being terribly nice to her. I cheerfully told her she could sign on for another computer, since we'd have one opening up in about ten minutes. She groused that she wouldn't have enough time, since her husband was coming to get her soon. That's when I realized the joke was on me, since she was going to determindly stand there in the middle of the room and wait for him for the full half-hour, subjecting me to her pleasantness. Fortunately, hubby turned up early, but not before she could try to make sour prune small talk about the best times to try and use the internet and how she went to college with Mrs. A, my boss.

If that was meant as a veiled threat, I'm not threatened. Mrs. A does not suffer grumpy fools lightly, and I can't imagine her actually being friends with such a grumpy fool as this woman,let alone getting angry with me that I hadn't let her violate internet policy.

The Kreskin Prophecy

Last week, Mrs. C asked if I would substitute for her usual 1-5 monday shift today. Foolishly I said yes.

I know better than to volunteer for Monday desk duty, but in addition to liking cash I also like to be Mr. Nice Guy Subber whenever I can. It allows me to build up a backstock of favors owed, which I can cash in for prizes later.

Before leaving the house, I remembered that Mrs. A wasn't scheduled to return from vacation until tomorrow. This would mean only one thing: At some point during my day, I was going to get a call from our board president, Mr. Kreskin.

As I've mentioned several times before, (1, 2, 3, 4), the president of our library's board of directors has the mutant ability to sense when both Mrs. A and Mrs. C are not at work, at which point he develops a sudden desperate, earth-shattering need to speak to one and/or both of them and will subsequently not rest until he has done so. The only time in my experience that this has failed to happen was on a day when he had a really bad cold. Otherwise, an enterprising guy could win a lot of money by wagering on it.

Well, he didn't phone today. However, five minutes after our doors opened at 1 p.m., he walked through them, on the usual desperate mission to speak to Mrs. A/C.

"I'm sorry, neither of them are here today," I said, trying not to grin at my prophecy having been fulfilled so vividly and soon.

"Well, that's okay," Mr. Kreskin said. His tone of voice, however, said it wasn't okay but recognized that there was hardly anything I could do about it. Mr. Kreskin decided to leave them a note, so I passed over the legal pad and continued dealing with the throng of patrons at the desk.

A few minutes later, Mr. Kreskin passed back the note on the pad and started for the door. A quick glance at it showed that he was looking for a copy of some sort of correspondence he'd sent out before.

"Uh, sir. I can probably find this for you, if you like," I said. Backstock Board President Favors Owed are better than most other kinds of favors owed. (In fact, it's trumped only by Bedroom-Oriented Wifely Favors Owed, and by quite a large margin.) I figured that the correspondence Mr. Kreskin wanted would be in the previously secret Kreskin Correspondence folder in the filing cabinet. I hauled it out and began flipping through it for him. It wasn't filed in a noticably particular order, however, so the search was not an easy one. Finally, Mr. K offered to to just look through it himself, freeing me to return to the busy circ desk.

Mr. Kreskin eventually found what he wanted, photocopied it and left happy and grateful.

Chalk another point up for the Juiceman.

The Return of Conspiracy Guy

As is usually the case, once I report on a long lost liberry rogue who hasn't been in to see us in months and/or years, they turn up.

Yesterday, Conspiracy Guy popped in for a visit. He didn't use a computer but was in to research something mundane and non-conspiracy related. (I think it was home improvement, but that's just a hunch.)

Once he'd found the book he wanted and had brought it to the circ desk, it fell to Mrs. B to break the news that he would need a new "liberry" card. Though neither of us spoke about it until after Conspiracy Guy had left, both Mrs. B and I knew that he would be none too keen on getting a new card, particularly after he saw the Drivers License and Middle Name blanks that are now required information. He asked if they really were required and when Mrs. B said, yes, he decided that he would rather just take the book upstairs and make notes from it.

So no card for Conspiracy Guy, but at least there wasn't a screaming fit either.

Can't say the same for another disgruntled patron, who Mrs. C reports became very angry when he learned he would (*GASP*) have to bring his card in if he wanted to check out a book. Never mind that we TOLD HIM that when he first signed up for it. So he didn't have his card on him but didn't want to leave without his book either and was prepared to get quite huffy about it. Mrs. C said that she could verify his patron record if she could see his driver's license number and he reluctantly let her do this. Then, after he had already gotten his way, he kept right on ranting, threatened to call our superiors and demanded to know the names of our board of directors so he could complain to them. Mrs. C told him that it would do no good to complain to the board of directors since they have nothing to do with it. This was a policy created by our particular "liberry" network and not a local one. Mr. Cranky still wanted to know the "liberry" commission's phone number so he could register his ire with them, so Mrs. C gladly handed it over.

I'm glad I wasn't there. I don't know how I would have handled that. I'm finding my patience with cranky patrons is pretty thin these days.

Secrets and Lies

Found out our Print Stealing New Devil Twins, Brent & Brice, weren't on file in our permission slip folder after all. So I have no way of tattling on them to their mom. Of course, since they don't have permission slips, they also won't be using the computers any more until they get one. And when they do, I'll tattle on them to their mom.

The twins came in and tried to sign on Monday, when Mrs. C was running the joint solo. She'd read my note about the darn nigh quarter ream of paper they'd printed and stolen, Sunday, and had already checked the permission slip folder for them. When she told them they couldn't have computers without a permission slip they were plenty pissed. So mad, in fact, that she didn't even bother to bless them out for their theft of our paper and ink. Instead, Mrs. C gave them permission slips to take home for signing. If they return with them, we'll ban them until they pay up AND tattle to their mom.

Beyond them, though, I'm getting royally sick of deceptive patrons.

A mom and her two daughters came in yesterday to check out some videos and a few books. As they were browsing, I overheard both of the daughters tell their mom they'd forgotten their library cards. I figured I was going to be in for a fight when they were ready to leave until Mom decided to get a card for herself. No problem. We signed her up for one and she filled it full of eight videos and two of the three books her youngest daughter wanted. I explained that they'd already reached their 10 item limit and would probably need to put something back if they wanted that third book.

"Well can we just sign them up for a card?" Mom asked.

"That depends," I said, sensing the impending ruse. "Do either of them have cards with another area library already?"

Mom was noncommital on this point. The youngest daughter seemed to waiver on it for a bit too, but finally admitted that, yes, she did have a card with Town-R's library. The older daughter, however, claimed she had no card anywhere.

"You don't have a card at any other area library?" I asked again, just to make sure her statement was on record.

"No," she said.

I raised an eyebrow at this, but decided that if she was lying the computer would soon sort it out. I should have just tried looking for her by name, which would have been quicker, but instead I gave her some rope by letting her fill out an application form.

Oldest daughter seemed reluctant to put down an address. When I pressed her for one, she put down her Mom's address in Town-C. Mom asked her why she'd done that, as the girl actually lives with her dad in Town-R. Hearing that, I pointed out that we had to have the actual address where she lived. Daughter didn't seem to like this but took her form and filled out the line, putting down a post office box in Town-R. I pointed out we also needed a physical address, so she reluctantly gave me that too. As soon as that bit of information was plugged into the computer, it spat up an existing record for her, just as I suspected it would.

"Well, it looks as though you already have a card through TOWN-R's library," I said. I kept my tone diplomatic, implying with it that she had simply made a mistake and not lied through her teeth as I knew she had.

"But I don't have a card there," daughter claimed.

"I'm sorry, but this says that you do."

"But they didn't give me a card. They said I didn't need a card," daughter quickly revised. Though I knew she was lying, it still wasn't beyond the realm of possibility. After all, when we first got our new circulation system, some of the area libraries who had not yet received their shipment of new library cards began foolishly issuing patrons new patron accounts anyway. Their logic seemed to be that other libraries WERE issuing new accounts WITH new cards, so they didn't want to be left behind just because of a little thing like having no cards. Makes a lot of sense, right? I'd not heard of Town-R doing this either. And daughter's account actually had one of the new 14 digit card numbers attached to it, so a card HAD been issued. Still, I continued to appear to give her the benefit of the doubt.

"Well, they have one of our new card numbers listed here for you, so if they didn't issue you an actual card when you signed up, chances are they'll have one on file for you now. You'll need to see them about it."

"Can't you just give her a card here?" Mom asked.

"No, ma'am. She already has a card. It's one big system and we can only issue one card to a patron."

"So she can't check out any books here?"

"Not unless she has her library card," I said.

Mom rolled her eyes and huffed, as though this was the most ridiculous thing she'd ever heard of and made a big production of dragging out one of her videos to trade in for younger daughter's book.

Technically I had the capability of going ahead and checking the extra book out on the daughter's card. I could even have rationalized it because I'd already called up her REAL account and verified it had the same physical address she'd given me. I decided not to be nice, though. After all, she wasn't being nice by actively lying to me because it served her purposes. And mom had done nearly everything to aid and abet the girl as well. So I'm not about to reward such collective familial dishonesty like that.

And that's really what makes me sick--that a mother would actively assist her daughter in an obvious lie just so she wouldn't have to put one of her own videos back. I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the selfishness and dishonesty of humanity. I'd be willing to bet I've even been guilty of such in the past myself. I still don't have to like it.

BUSTED!

When I went to work yesterday, having my secret identity as a "liberry" blogger unearthed was the furthest thing from my mind. It was about to happen all the same, though.

Nearly nine months ago when I first started writing this blog I knew in all likelihood I was eventually gonna get caught. Sure, I tried to be careful about who and what I wrote about. Well, a little careful. I did rename most of the people and places that showed up—sometimes thinly—to limit the clues within the blog itself that could lead back to me. However, I've been plenty sloppy in a lot of ways too. Sometimes this has been intentional. Sometimes not.

It's one thing, however, to not care if readers in other states and indeed other countries know my secret identity. It's a whole other ball of dung for someone here in the Tri-Metro area to find out and that's where the sloppy comes in.

I didn't realize just how sloppy I was in other less obvious ways until a few months ago when I started checking my stats and saw the kind of search engine searches that sometimes lead people in my direction. (And by the way, what the hell kind of person does a subject search for "Chris Farley's Dead Ass," anyway?) The stats showed me that even having such words as "West," "Library"and "Virginia" in proximity to one another on the same page could lead people right to my door if they were merely doing a search for something using those words. There are plenty of other words that, while innocuous enough on the surface, could lead someone local to the blog. So I went back and changed some references, eliminated others and tried to tart the place up a bit to further decrease the chances of someone accidentally stumbling in.

Still, there's only so much you can do to disguise yourself if you're writing a page about working at a "liberry" in WV to keep those terms from coming up. Eventually, the state and the word library are gonna get together and someone is going to find them in a search. With that in mind, I figured it was likely that someone from library HQ would eventually find me. They may already have. If so, they don't seem to be inclined to rat me out to my boss, Mrs. A.

Frankly, though, I wasn't too concerned about being ratted out that way. I think most of my co-workers would really dig the blog and would quickly become some of my more avid readers were they to learn of it. I've even considered letting them in on it if only to get more accurate reporting out of them on the crazy stuff that happens while I'm not at work. I decided, though, that doing so would cause a chilling effect on what I could say. Granted, I've always made it a point not to talk too much trash about my co-workers, (except, of course, for those who abandon their jobs and make me have to pack up all their interlibrary loans on a day I would otherwise not have been at work—thank you oh so very much, Miss E). Still, I'd much prefer the freedom in which I have the choice to behave myself.

I figure they'll eventually learn of it, either by admission or by a ratting. My hope is that if they're angry at me, it will be because I didn't tell them about it sooner.

No, my imagined worse case scenario was much different. In it, I would go in to work one day, walk back to the computer hall and find somebody there reading my blog. They would turn and look up at me with realization in their eyes and then either wink knowingly or give me the finger. Worse yet, what if they came up to the circ desk and yelled at me about it? Even worse still.... what if it was PARKA? That chest hair entry alone would net me at least a bloody nose. Hell, the rest of my rogues gallery practically rivals Spider-Man's already! Sure, I might do okay one on one with most of them, but what if they ganged up? Carol Satan would tear me to shreds with her talons! Wal-Mart Jesus would clock me with his cudgel! Ron the Ripper would try to rip me, or at the very least fart on me! And Cap'n Crossdresser would hit me with his purse!

No sir... I don't like it.

Like I said, though, when I went to work yesterday, I wasn't thinking about any of the above scenarios. And when I left to go on break, I still wasn't thinking of them. So when it happened, it took me by surprise.

As per my usual Wednesday afternoon routine, I ambled down to the local "mall" comic book kiosk, to see what the new shipment had brought. Garin the comic book guy was there at the desk as usual. For some reason, he seemed especially happy to see me. He just kept saying my name over and over, taking an unwholesome amount of glee at some unrevealed nugget of information. I was oblivious.

"You will NEVER guess what I saw... on... the... internet," he said with a devilish grin. Still, I was clueless. I was somehow picturing that he'd found stills from the new Sin City film adaptation, or the full script for Spider-Man 3, or clips from Catwoman: The Version that Didn't Blow Goats.

Garin continued, slowly letting out his verbal fishing line in preparation for yanking it back suddenly. "I found a website that mentions me AND my shop."

That's when it hit me and I instantly knew I was busted.

I always expected such a busting to come with the requisite chills and stomach vertigo that usually accompany major revelations. I didn't get so much of that, though. I must have at least looked properly shocked for a few moments, because Garin just continued grinning triumphantly. Pretty quickly, though, I settled into my new role as the grinning little low-carb dieting kid caught with his hand in the Nutter Butters but who knows he's far too cute and adorable to be punished.

What had happened, as Garin explained it, is that one of his customers decided to look his shop up by name and see if it had a website. They typed the name into a search engine and came up with some ebay entries as well as a little blog entry called The Fix Is In. They took a gander at it and alerted Garin that someone was writing about him on the internet.

"So I see this Tales from the `Liberry' site that mentions my shop," Garin said. "I knew immediately who had to have written it! Just the language you used was SO EXACTLY YOU."

Not only did Garin read his own initial appearance in the blog, but read most of the other entries as well and liked them. (Hey, I told ya I was cute and adorable!) Even my slightly less-than-favorable early review of his store, ("I can't say this one ranks with the best of them. But then again, it's only a kiosk store—what can you really do with a kiosk store?"), written a mere one month after he opened for business was met with smiles and appreciation for my honesty. (And just for the record, I also predicted that his store had a lot of potential and in the ten months since then he's proven just what you CAN do with a kiosk store. It's become quite the quality comic retail outlet. *WAVES TO GARIN* In fact, Garin's search engine search also turned up an award he'd won from Marvel Comics themselves, but which no one at Marvel thought to tell him about.)

Garin's one complaint to me in the whole matter: "So why didn't you tell me about this sooner?"

I explained that I was trying to keep things on the Q.T. as far as local publicity went. As much as I didn't care that he knew about it, I'd much prefer most other locals NOT knowing about it. Particularly the mentally-unbalanced locals who occasionally turn up as subject matter.

Then, as if somebody rang the crazy bell, who should show up at the kiosk right on cue... Doc Oc-Fetishist Woman!

This time she wasn't looking for the New Doc Ock or the Old Doc Ock or any Doc Ock. Instead, she had come to see if Garin had any other toys for her husband. Sure enough, a great huge Fantastic Four Four Pack set of figures has been released, including figures of all four members of the FF plus Franklin Richards, Doctor Doom and even Robbie the frickin' Robot. This, apparently, is what DOF Woman's husband had ordered and she was overjoyed at its arrival. Naturally, there had to be a wrinkle, though. In addition to the Fantastic Four Pack, a brand new Thing figure had also been released, which was a different sculpt than the version of Thing already in the pack. Garin just wanted to call her attention to it in case her husband was interested, as he knew the guy liked the FF characters. This completely threw Doc Ock Fetishist Woman into a tizzy, though. Garin had to explain to her several times that her husband hadn't ordered the extra Thing so she didn't need to buy it, but if her husband was interested it was there. I had to walk out of sight of her to keep from cracking up laughing as DOF Woman struggled with these concepts for a couple of minutes, dancing perilously close to but never actually crossing the line into understanding. Finally Garin took the extra Thing away from her and told her he would hold on to it and save it for her husband should he want it.

"You'll save it for him then?"

"Yes."

"You'll save it for him then?"

"YES."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I cannot make up shit that crazy!

So guess what, Garin... If I do get drummed out of the library for this blog, I'm moving into your comic shop and starting a new one there. Seems like it's just another station for the local Crazy Train.

Goat Wang

I would just like to take this moment to say a hearty "I told ya so" regarding my prediction last February of the goat wang fellatio capabilities of Halle Berry's version of Catwoman.

I've not seen it, nor am I going to, but the consensus of reviewers does seem to back me up.

Granted, most people aren't going in to Catwoman expecting Citizen Kane. Most of the audience is there to see Halle jumping around in a leather getup most self-respecting hookers would be embarassed to wear. Believe me, I can sympathize.

But may I suggest an alternative?

Why not go rent the DVD of Monster's Ball where you get to see a damn lot more of Halle's lovely physique plus the added bonuses of both frame by frame pause AND an engaging story.

Remember: Friends don't let friends see Catwoman.

Orient Express

Today I went over to my wife's school to appear as an example of a 4th year spouse on the q&a panel of the school's spouse/significant other orientation program.

This will be my 4th year to be involved with the program, having served as an example of a 3rd and 2nd year spouse on the panel before and having attended it as a 1st before that. The program was quite valuable to me when I first went through it and I'm happy to return to help alleviate some of the many fears the new classes always have. They already know that med school is a rough gig, but my ultimate message is that it is a doable gig and they should stop worrying so much, but also don't listen to those lying sacks of crap that try to tell them second year is easier than the first. Doesn't usually matter, though. From all the deer in headlights looks I could still see at the end of the panel, it's going to take the healing power of time to alleviate their fears.

It's a lot for them to take in and can be quite scary. Here they are, most of them freshly new to the area, most of them having been advised by countless people who don't know any better that they're never going to see their spouse/student again once school starts, that med-school is the marriage killer and that life as they know it will soon cease to exist. Every year the panel tries to be the voice of reason and calm for them and explain that none of that has been true in our experience. I tell them I saw my wife at least as much if not more while she was in school than when she worked for Lane Bryant back when we lived in Charlotte. And as far as divorce goes, the school's only seen one in the past few years and they were a couple who got married shortly before school after having known each other for all of two weeks. It's not to say that divorce and problems don't occur due to med school or may not occur down the road, but it hasn't been our particular school's experience. I think today's session went well, but I always leave feeling like I've scared them more than I helped them and I always remember other stuff I'd wanted to say but forgot about after I left. One thing I was glad of, though, was that one of the anatomy professors, Dr. Wells, was able to come in and give them his "Contract Speech". This was a speech he made during my first Smart Start program which made a world of difference in how I viewed my own role as the spouse of a student. The basic gist of the speech is that for the first six weeks of school, until the students have taken their first set of block exams, the spouses and significant others should make a contract with their student to try to do everything in their power to free them up for study. They should take over all household duties, (cooking, cleaning, bill paying, cat-beating, etc.), completely letting the students have all the time they need to absorb the material as best they can and hopefully get a good grade in their first week of block exams. After that, this contract may be renegotiated to allow the student to take a more active role in household duties.

Upon hearing that speech, I realized that I was about to play a far more active role in my wife's education. School was, after all, the whole reason we moved to the area. It made sense to me that both of our lives should, for a while, be devoted to making that education a successful one. Suddenly, having a part time job at a library didn't seem like a bad gig. I had TIME to do the household work and money coming in to help supplement our loans.

It was such a good speech that I wound up giving it during my second year in Smart Start when Dr. Wells was out of town. Same goes for the third year. But I never gave the speech as good as Dr. Wells and told him as much. So when he walked through the door today, I was happy to see him there.

I guess this will be my last year doing Smart Start. There's not much call for spouses to come in after the students have graduated. That's so far off in the minds of entering freshmen that it's nearly pointless to even show them that Yes, people do survive.

"Mawage!" Part II

Something seemed a bit fishy about Dr. Vet's story. For months he'd made claims of being interested in Annie-Bea and even gave her his private cell phone number and told her to call him any time she wanted. However, when she called he never answered. Never once. His excuse was always that he was busy with a customer. With lots of farm-land and cattle in the area, he was constantly on the move checking cows, horses and sundry farm animals for illness. However, we didn't realize just how true "busy with a customer" was until much later.

It took some detective work and the investigative help of Dr. Vet's secretary, Dawn, but Annie-Bea eventually learned that Dr. Vet was a two, three, four and five-timer when it came to juggling relationships. It wasn't difficult to figure out. Beyond the whole phone thing, Annie-Bea had noticed a tendency for strange women to be walking around Dr. Vet's house, located within eyesight of his clinic. Turns out he was dating or otherwise shtupping several of his customers. (I guess I should say, the owners of several of his customers, as he wasn't actively shtupping dogs as far as we know.) And while Dr. Vet was indeed serious about seeing more of Annie-Bea, between the demands of his job and the demands of the other women he was stringing along, he truly couldn't find a moment to get away. Not only that, but her detective work unearthed the fact that he'd been telling the other women that she was some kind of stalker in order to stay out of dutch with them whenever her number turned up on his phone or she popped by to see him.

Annie-Bea was justifiably furious and hurt. She'd invested a lot of time and far too much of her heart only to have it stepped on. Shortly after she learned what had happened, she marched into his office, transferred her dogs from his care permanently and then verbally tore him a new one. She recounted the whole thing to us multiple times that night just to relive her victory. She also promised him that if she heard any more of this stalker rubbish float her way, she would go straight to the state veterinary ethics board about him. He might not be interested in keeping his reputation clean, but she would be damned if she'd let him drag hers down through idle chatter.

Annie-Bea was still incredibly hurt and angry over the matter for several weeks, but the fact that she could go out as the victor certainly helped.

So, no, Annie-Bea did not marry Dr. Vet. That would have made for a charming story, if he wasn't a complete dickcheese. Instead, she actually met her future husband not too long after the grand and triumphant dumping.

While hanging out at the local redneck dance club with Dawn, Annie-Bea was introduced to one of Dawn's friends, a guy named Bill. He was a local boy, a few years younger than Annie-Bea. Like her, though, Bill had been previously married and not real happy with the dating scene. Soon the two of them went from sharing rides to parties to dating proper. We were a little scared at first of the dangers of such a rebound relationship, but our fears turned out to be groundless. Bill turned out to be a great guy and the whole situation became yet another classic example of how good can come out of a truly bad situation. If she hadn't gone through the whole Dr. Vet thing and hadn't befriended his secretary, Dawn, she would never likely have met Bill.

We like Bill an awful lot. Now that both she and we have been out of that little apartment complex and in different ends of the county, it's nice to know she still has support. Bill's been there for Annie-Bea through the ups and downs she's had for the past year, and with the whole board exam situation there have been quite a few. We also couldn't have been happier to hear he had proposed to her this spring.

Annie-Bea's wedding day was just about as stressful and chaotic as you might imagine. Weddings tend toward that in the first place, but this was the wedding of Annie-Bea: Chaos Magnet, so the drama just blossomed.

The ceremony was scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon. Naturally, Annie-Bea didn't get her hair fixed until 12:15 and didn't actually leave her house until 12:20 for the half hour drive to the church where she still had to put on her wedding dress.

"Well, is Annie-Bea stressing out?" I heard her mother ask.

"Bwaaa ha!" I laughed aloud, knowing full well the answer was YES!!

Ashley was there by Annie-Bea's side the whole time, though, telling her, "Don't stress about it. They can't start the wedding without you. They'll wait."

Wait we did, though not nearly as long as you'd think. At 1:15, Annie-Bea walked down the aisle and said "I do" to Bill. He "did" too. I know, cause I had a front row seat for it, having been drafted at the last possible second to videotape the ceremony. It was beautiful, sweet and perhaps even shorter than my own wedding. (Which is another very funny story, that I'll save for another time.) Unlike my wedding, though, the minister at Annie-Bea's managed to forget her name twice during the ceremony and was only saved by the timely whispered intervention of the groom. In the end, it appeared as though the ultimate goal of any wedding had been achieved and two people had been married.

We were, as it turns out, quite wrong on that point.

It seems the freshness date on Annie-Bea's marriage license, which they'd applied for two months prior to the ceremony itself, had just expired. So there they were, off on their honeymoon with both the county clerk's office and the minister trying like hell to track them down to let them know they weren't actually married. They never knew until they came home and listened to their answering machine. And they were actually far angrier to find that their house had been trashed by Annie-Bea's crazy family.

Chaos magnet, I tell you.

Chaos magnet.

"Mawage!" Part I

Annie-Bea, one of my wife's fellow med students and one of our best friends over the course of the past three years, just got married a few weeks back.

Before my wife started school here, I'd been advised by the wife of a local doctor that I should keep a journal of the med-school-spouse experience, because the two of us were about to be awash with experiences both hellacious and wonderful. (She was right on both counts. Hell, the second month of school, in September 2001, qualified as serious high drama already.) Had I taken this advice, and started blogging in 2001 instead of 2003, Annie-Bea would certainly have been a major player in this blog and would have played a big part in the hellacious and wonderful bits.

We met Annie-Bea in August of 2001 after we moved from Charlotte, NC, to to the Tri-Metro area of WV. A few days after we moved into our old apartment, Annie-Bea moved into the apartment directly next door. We quickly learned that she too was a medical student--all fresh-faced and hopeful about the next four to seven years. Along with Annie-Bea came her constant companions, three elderly hypochondriac dachsunds named Spunky, Heidi and Trouble.

Annie-Bea was very different from just about any sort of friend either Ashley or I had ever had before. She was just a different style of person than we were used to. Not a bad style at all, but much more outgoing, gregarious and loud than either of us tend to be. I've often wondered if we would have become as close to her if not for the fact that she and Ashley shared the trial by fire that is the first and second years of med school. (They say people who go through traumatic situations together become closer and I think we're living proof.) Whatever the case, within weeks of the start of school, we'd pretty much adopted Annie-Bea and her dogs as part of our family. They spent more time at our house than at theirs, and ate dinner with us nearly every night. And when we weren't all stressing about school, we wound up stressing about the various chaos bombs that were going off in Annie-Bea's life in general.

Annie-Bea, you see, is something of a chaos magnet. Drama, tragedy and complication just seemed to hound her every step. We decided she suffered from Charlie Brown Karma, as bits of her world just kept crumbling off from month to month. Some of it was naturally due to poor choices on her part, but I'd say the vast majority of the chaos stemmed from her having shitfer bad luck and a family crazy enough to be patrons at my library. Her life seemed to be this massive soap opera and there were few corners of it safe from unwanted drama.

For instance, one night after emerging from a late shower, I came downstairs to find the back door wide open, my wife missing and screams coming from next door. I somehow knew what had happened before I could even run over there. Annie-Bea's door was open too. Inside, on her kitchen floor I found Ashley hugging Annie-Bea as she in turn was cradling the body of her dog, Spunky. We all just sat on the floor and cried for a long time while her surviving dogs, Heidi and Trouble looked on.

Spunky had enjoyed a great last evening. The dogs had come over with Annie-Bea for dinner, enjoyed treats from the table and afterwards accompanied us to Dairy Queen where the dogs shared a Blizzard of their own. Spunky had returned home and gone to bed, passing away quietly shortly thereafter. We learned later that unbeknownst to anyone, Spunky had been riddled with cancer which had finally caused an internal organ to rupture. He essentially bled to death internally and there was nothing that could have been done about it. We learned this after the autopsy performed by Dr. Vet, Annie-Bea's favorite veterinarian with whom she had been smitten for nearly a year.

The Dr. Vet saga was yet another storyline in Annie-Bea's soap opera life. Ashley and I found it fascinating and were always rooting for her success. Annie-Bea had been actively hoping to pursue a relationship with Dr. Vet for several months to little avail. It wasn't for a lack of interest on either side, as they both were very interested in one another but incapable of finding a spare moment in their tremendously busy schedules to actually have a date. They saw one another often enough, what with the two surviving hypochondriac and allergy-ridden dogs for Annie-Bea to haul in regularly, but they could never quite make their schedules work. During the months, Annie-Bea also become good friends with Dr. Vet's secretary, Dawn, and the two of them often hung out and went "clubbing" together. ("Clubbing" is something Ash and I had no interest in doing ourselves considering that the only "club" in the area is a redneck dance bar reknowned for its frequent drunken fights).

Ash and I figured that Spunky's death was just the sort of traumatic incident that would bring Annie-Bea and Dr. Vet closer. And for a while, it seemed like we were right. They did get closer and even went so far as to lay their mutual feelings on the table.

Of course, that's when the bottom fell out.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Handbasket Update II

Our friend Annie-Bea is doing surprisingly good, all things considered. She's already planning to take the boards again in October, but is still fighting mad that she didn't put it behind her for good in June.

Turns out, she's not the only one in her class to fail the first round of board exams for the third time. Three other students from the 2005 class are in the same boat. And a full 17 from the 2006 class failed. This is only a slight improvement over my wife's class, which had 18 fail creating a new record of failure for a school whose previous high failure record, for the 2004 class, was 8.

No one's real sure what to make of all this, except that the school is super pissed that so many of their students are obviously not prepared for the national board exams and the students are super pissed off for exactly the same reasons.

My wife went into her board exams in June of 2003 with a GPA of around 90. She came out of them sick to her stomach with worry that she had failed them. In fact, she was convinced that there was no way in hell she had passed them and had to spend the month and a half it took for the results to come back with that assumption in her head. It turned out she did pass with a very middle-of-the-road average score, but she firmly believes it was through miracle alone. The exam was that nasty. Ash thinks any student with her grades and her solid medical background should not be coming out of the board exams worried that they didn't pass. It might also be said that equally intelligent people with good grades and experience should not be coming out of the board exams having failed them. Something, it might be supposed, has gone wrong somewhere.

Some are pointing fingers of blame at the school. Others the board exam itself. I rather think a bit of both is most likely. After all, the school has the unenviable task of not only teaching its students what they need to know to pass the second year of med school, but they also have to prepare students to pass the boards at exactly the same time. Frankly, there's not time enough in the day for both. There's barely time for either. Yet, that's their task all the same. I have no answers for how to do it better. I don't even know if the school's curriculum is markedly different from the dozens of other classes that managed to get through the boards with fewer failures. But people always want to have someone to blame and the school has a big target on them in this regard. Whether or not it is deserved has yet to be seen.

I tend to favor blaming the board exam itself. I haven't taken it and never ever will, but I'm married to someone who has and am friends with lots of other students who have. It's insanely evil. I'm not talking just difficult--a difficult National Board Exam is to be both expected and demanded since most med schools are not in the business of turning out shitty doctors and we need their knowledge to be thoroughly tested. However, there is a difference between difficult and demonic.

To pass the board exam, a student must answer at least half of the questions on it that count correctly. The questions that count, mind you. See, in addition to the actual test questions which count toward the final score there are also a large number of questions on the test that don't. These questions are test-test questions that might be used on future versions of the boards (or perhaps, as I suspect, just to screw with the student's mind). I may be wrong on this, but from what I understand there is no rule that these questions have to be at all fair or even based on what students might learn in the average med-school curriculum in the first place. I argue that while this may be hunky dory for sussing out future tests, it's detrimental to the students actually taking the boards.

Say you're a student, chugging along on the boards, answering the sort of stuff you'd expect to find, maybe not getting all of it right or even remembering everything, but you're at least functioning in your role as a student. Suddenly, you hit a pocket of these weird-ass out of left field test-test questions and you have no idea what you're even looking at, let alone what the answers might be. Sure, you know they're probably test-test questions, but who really knows? What if they're real and you just forgot that month of classwork. You were second guessing yourself already on the stuff you KNEW. It's the sort of thing that could throw you off your game, no?

My point is: the students have enough on their plate worrying over the stuff they're supposed to know for the exam without having to contend with a bunch of shitfer questions they have little chance with. The damned exam is hard enough as it is without compounding it.

Thankfully, Annie-Bea is getting back on the horse and preparing for another ride on the board bronco. Provided she's allowed to have one. Frankly, I wouldn't want to be the person who told her she couldn't. Annie-Bea may be a lot of things, but afraid of a fight she's not.

Another thing she's not is single, thanks to her recent marriage. That's a tale I don't think she'd mind me sharing...

Sunday Shift

So with our weekender Miss E effectively out of the picture, I hit the library at 1 today for my first Sunday shift in quite a while.

Sunday shifts are usually plenty boring, but I knew I was going to have a busy enough day. See, Mrs. H has now been recruited to become our new Saturday "liberry" ass. leaving Mrs. B and I to rotate Sundays. This is fine with me. Trouble is, Mrs. H doesn't seem to know how to prepare and pack up the week's worth of interlibrary loans, so it's fallen to the Sunday shifter to do that for the past couple of weeks. This is okay too. I'd rather have something to do. Beyond that, though, today's shift was far from boring.

There was, of course, a crowd at the door as I arrived at 12:55. Great.

When I went upstairs and flipped on the light switch, the lights all came on then immediately went back off as the breaker tripped from the surge. Double great. Even greater is the fact that I have no idea where the breaker switch box is. I looked around for it, but it wasn't in any of the obvious places like closets or bathrooms or walls. Damn, it was probably in the basement.

Mr. B-Natural was among the crowd outside and was the first to sign up for a computer. More followed, including Brent & Brice, two twin teenagers who have been making a nuisance of themselves for reasons which will become apparent. They're not related to the Devil Twins, of Rogues Gallery fame, but they probably should be.

Ashley turned up around 1:30 with lunch for the two of us. She's on her way out of town, headed back to KENTSburg until later in the month. After lunch, I decided that while she was there and was able to guard the desk, I'd go to the basement and see about the breaker. I was headed for the door on that very quest when Jimmy the "Anonymous" Snitch came in and started signing in for a computer. Jimmy's been in a couple of times recently. One day last week, I actually had to ask a patron I liked to get off the computers just to give one to frickin' Jimmy's dumb criminal ass. And just minutes earlier, I'd had to bust another favored patron off to give one to Parka. At the time I thought, Who's next? Chester?

The computers were all full today and not due for any openings for 16 minutes, though. I mentioned that to Jimmy on my way out the door.

Despite high expectations, I could find no evidence of a breaker box in the basement. I didn't want to spend a lot of time in there, though. Jimmy was lurking in the library and while Ash was standing guard on the cash box no one was guarding the upstairs restroom, where Jimmy's pal Bladder Boy once found and stole our laptop. I rushed back up to the main library and then upstairs. Jimmy was sitting in a chair at the top of the stairs near the periodicals. I walked behind him and into Mrs. A's office where I retrieved the restroom key from its hiding place then made a big conspicuous production of locking the restroom door as loudly as I could.

Back downstairs, a few minutes later, I was telling Ashley what I had just done when she suddenly signalled to me to be quiet. Too late, I was still finishing my sentence, "...conspicuously locked the bathroom door" when Jimmy entered the room behind me. He had to have heard what I was saying and he would also have to know what it meant. I realized that I didn't care if he did hear me. I really don't mind if he knows that I know he's a sneaky little weasel. If I were really ballsy, though, I would ask Jimmy how his sentencing went this month. I'd honestly like to know, cause I haven't heard.

I had to tell Brice and Brent to relinquish their computers to let Jimmy and another patron have them. B&B, who are probably 13 years old, are infamous for coming in, using our computers, printing lots of pages and either leaving the pages unpaid for or, more often, taking the pages unpaid for. Mrs. A and I both have spoken to them about this and told them they had to pay for everything they print, but they don't seem to care. I figured with Ash still guarding the desk they wouldn't dare grab their prints and leave, but they did. They probably even felt safe in doing it, since they're not card carrying patrons so we don't have their home number to rat them out to their mother. Unfortunately for them, they neglected to remember that we have their phone number on file as part of their parental permission slip. Unfortuately for me, I didn't remember that until just now, so I'll have to phone her up next time I'm in. Should be fun.

Handbasket Update I

Well, Miss E is now DEFINITELY no longer an employee of the "liberry".

As of closing time Friday, she still had not returned any of Mrs. A's calls further convincing us that she was trying to quit through sheer neglect. This would seem to be the case as Mrs. A has spoken with Miss E's mother and learned that Miss E has taken a factory job two towns over and has actually been working it for the past week and a half. It's a second shift position, meaning she doesn't leave work until 1 in the morning. This further indicates that the story we were told about her being very sick last weekend was a lie.

This is very disappointing to us all, but primarily to Mrs. A, Mrs. C, Mrs. B and Mrs. J who have known Miss E for most of her life. They were her friends as well as coworkers and say that this sort of behavior is not what they would have expected from her--or at least not from the Miss E they used to know.

Miss E has been a common sight at the library since she was a small child. She practically grew up in the summer reading and story-hour programs and was among the students in Miss E's first Summer Reading group. Eventually, she outgrew the programs and began volunteering to help out with them. It was because of this formerly good relationship that Mrs. A offered her a job as our weekend library assistant last year when she was only a junior in highschool. She was already among the handful of high school aged kids who we practically consider library staff, so it made sense to bring her in part time. As an employee, Miss E had been fairly decent. Weekend shift is never the most exciting, but she usually did a good job of it. Sure, she's been guilty of doing so using less than her whole ass on occasion, but what can you expect? She was in high school!

Unfortunately, things haven't gone so well for Miss E's personal life this year and they weren't that great to start with. There are a lot of things I'd like to write about it, both bad and good, but I won't go into it here. Ex-coworker or not I still don't care to spread around her personal business no matter how pseudonymously.

What I can say is that I think Miss E's trying to grow up too fast. In the process, she's trying to escape any and all authority over her, including family, friends and coworkers who might disapprove or be disappointed by how her particular path is working out. I think this is exactly why she abandoned her job the way she did.

I still think Miss E is a good egg at heart. However, she's a good egg who comes from a carton full of spoiled and otherwise cracked eggs. Despite her best and half-best efforts, theirs is an influence that's proving to be very difficult to escape.