SETTING: My "Liberry." A patron approaches the circ-desk from the direction of our upstairs nonfiction room. He wordlessly drops a heavy paperback book about French history onto the circulation desk and slides it toward me. He then slides a well-folded overdue notice after it. He raises an eyebrow.
ME— You found it on the shelf, didn’t you?
MAN— Right up on the shelf. I knew I brought it back.
ME— Guess I’d better check it in for you, then.
MAN— I guess you should.
ME— Sorry about that.
MAN— No problem.
(I hate it when the patrons are right.)
6 comments:
It does happen periodically. It's rare, but it happens.
Oh, but you must watch them - I've had patrons bring in overdue materials in a briefcase or backpack, go back in the stacks, and then emerge with the "found" material, all righteously indignant. It's happened a couple times, eye-witnessed by some of our shelvers.
oh, c'mon! you BELIEVED him??? or are your patrons not yet so evil that they carry the item in and then pretend to have found it on the shelf?
Flukes happen.
No, I was pretty sure this guy was legit. We have had people sneak back in to return books before, though. I may have written about it elsewhere in the blog (though I can't find it now) but thre was once a lady who called to complain about an overdue notice she'd received and claimed she'd returned the book. Mrs. A checked the shelf, saw an empty space where the book should have been and told the lady that, No, we didn't have it. Half an hour later, Mrs. A sees that very lady sneak into the library, something clutched beneath a long coat, sneak upstairs and then triumphantly march up to the desk and claim that she'd just checked the shelves herself and lo and behold her book was there.
I'm such a goodie-goodie, I did the complete opposite on Saturday. I returned a book I'd had for months and months, even though the system said it was on the shelf, and there was no way they'd have ever been able to trace it.
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