Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Actual Conversations Heard in Actual Libraries #124

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

FEMALE PATRON-- Hi, could you come help us at the computer?

ME-- Sure thing.

(I follow her over to the computer where she is helping her kid with some sort of research.)

FEMALE PATRON-- We only wanted to print that one paragraph, but not the whole page. How can we do that?

(Tears of disbelief and joy nearly springing to my eyes, I show them how to highlight that one paragraph and choose SELECTION ONLY from the print menu, rather than printing page after page after page of the entire website like most of our other patrons do.)

(No, this is not an April Fools Day fake entry. This shit actually occurred.)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good lord a'mighty - someone who knows how to . . . ask for help???

Anonymous said...

It's like a blessing from heaven, isn't it? :)

Anonymous said...

I haven't worked in a library in over a year and I actually shed a tear over that one.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like there's some hope for humanity.

Monster Librarian said...

And they didn't blame you or the computer for being the problem? WHAT!?!

sometimesrandom said...

Maybe the joke is that she was only helping the kid with the project. Most of our parents do the project for the kid so we would laugh at a kid doing the actual work.


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.