Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Actual Conversations Heard in Actual Libraries #105

SETTING: My "liberry" as a female patron approaches the circ desk.

PATRON— Yeah, I'm trying to get to whitepages.com, but it just stays on your website.

ME— Uh, okay. Lemme take a look.

(I go over to her computer where the screen does indeed bear our "liberry" website, though the address whitepages.com has been typed in the address field.)

PATRON— See, I try going to it, but every time it looks like it's working it just stays here.

ME— Okay. How `bout click in the address bar and hit enter.

PATRON— The what?

ME— The address bar. (I point to it for her. It didn't type in "whitepages.com" by itself, sweety.)

(She waves the mouse pointer uncertainly over the field but does not click within it.)

ME— Just click in it and then hit enter.

(She wavers some more, finally clicking within the field.)

ME— Now just hit enter.

(She does and our page vanishes and whitepages.com appears, albeit slowly.)

PATRON— (Agitated) Well, that's not what it did before. When I clicked the little green button there, it just stayed put.

ME— Um... (Pause to adopt proper diplomatic tone) I might be wrong about this, but to my understanding the little green button with the arrows there is the refresh button.

(Long pause)

PATRON— Oh.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What? Nothing about poop?

I miss the poop.

KIDDING!

Holley T said...

I believe there used to be a button with a green arrow and the word "go" in that exact spot, but IE7 did away with it...probably because no one really used it... except for this lady of course.
:)
htw

the.effing.librarian said...

yeah, it amazes me when people are able to mimic a computer user and then do something so idiotic that you wonder if they learned the computer the same way ABBA learned to sing in English, but maybe index card #2 got shuffled behind #4 and so instead of Agnetha harmonizing "Friday night and the lights are low; Looking out for the place to go" she warbles "Anybody could be that guy
Night is young and the music's high" because, really, to her it's all the same anyway. But we all laugh because foreigners are funny.

Julie M. said...

I've got one.

Student: Hi, do you have a hole punch?

Me: There's one over by the printers.

Student: Yeah, do you have a better one?

Because we're hiding the "good" hole punches behind the reference desk.


An employee of a small town "liberry" chronicles his quest to remain sane while dealing with patrons who could star in a short-lived David Lynch television series.