The Jungle Boogie (a.k.a. "Stop, thief, or we'll call your neighbors and have them ask you to stop.")

While I was out, we had a bit of very slow excitement at the "liberry." The Alphabet Squad of Mrs.es A, B & C told me about it today, since they all played a part in it.

Mrs. A began by saying that on Wednesday a fellow stepped into Mrs. A's office upstairs and asked if we had The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. This is a bit unorthodox to begin with, as having patrons step into her office to ask reference questions isn't a typical occurence for Mrs. A. However, she is a librarian and helping patrons comes with the territory, so she fired up the OPAC on her computer to make certain of the floor on which the book was located and then told the fellow that if he were to go to the circ desk in our fiction room downstairs, someone there would direct him to the book.

At this point, Mrs. B chimed in saying that the fellow did come downstairs and asked for direction to The Jungle. She led dude to the shelf, pulled the book for him and passed it to him. He thanked her and returned to the children's room, where a lady Mrs. B assumed was his wife and a kid Mrs. B assumed was his kid, were at.

Mrs. C then joined the narrative saying that after a while the dude, lady and kid wrapped up their browsing, rounded the corner of the children's room, bypassed the circ desk entirely and walked out the front door. Mrs. C and Mrs. B looked at one another, thinking it was odd that dude had left without checking his book out and wondered whether he'd actually taken it with him. They quickly checked the book cart and the kids room, but didn't see The Jungle anywhere. So Mrs. C ran outside where she found the group getting into their car. Not knowing quite how to approach the subject, Mrs. C asked the man if he needed to check out The Jungle after all. He said, no, he didn't. Mrs. C then pointed out that she had not found it on the book cart and was trying to make sure he hadn't simply forgotten to check it out. Oh no, he said. He'd laid it down in the children's room. Taking him at his word, Mrs. C went back inside.

There followed a lengthy and exhaustive search of the entire library for The Jungle, enlisting the aid of all available library employees. Carts were checked. The tops of shelved books were checked. The actual spot in the General Fiction S's where the book normally lives was checked. The book remained unfound.

The Alphabet Squad considered this. The man had clearly stolen the book, but what could be done about it? He didn't have a library card, so there was no contact information for him. Then someone remembered that the woman the man had left with, presumably his wife, had applied for and received a library card during their visit, though she had not actually used it. So Mrs. A phoned her up at the number on her application, reached her and asked to speak to her husband. The lady explained that the man who'd been in with her wasn't her husband but was, instead, a neighbor she'd given a lift to. This being the case, Mrs. A explained the situation and her thoughts about the book and its likely status as being borrowed outside proper channels. Hearing the dilema, the lady offered to go next door and ask her neighbor if he had the book and phone Mrs. A back. And, after a while, she called back and told Mrs. A that her neighbor still insisted not to have the book and that he'd laid it down in the children's room.

More searching commenced. No book was found. Hours passed.

At some point in the afternoon, Mrs. A and Mrs. C were standing at the circ desk when the man from earlier returned. He didn't approach the circ-desk, but instead hugged the far wall, making his way to the children's room. Mrs. A and C looked at one another then made a break for the kids' room themselves. As they rounded the corner, they found the man stooped over, trying desperately to cram our copy of The Jungle into one of the Easy Reader shelves. Unfortunately for him, the shelf was so tightly packed with books that he couldn't open enough space to fit it. Catching sight of Mrs.es A and C, he quickly threw The Jungle on top of the books on that shelf and nervously stood up.

"See. I laid it down in here," he offered, pointing to it for them.

Mrs. A didn't elaborate on any consequences to the man, so I imagine they just let him go. Maybe he was addled about the head. The question arises, though, that if he'd had to get a lift from his neighbor to come to the library earlier, had he done so again to return the stolen book?

THEY live!

Not long ago, Mrs. A alerted me to some new material we have added to our deposit book section: a trucking class drivers instruction manual and video. This might sound pretty mundane to you, but I was frankly relieved to have them as it helps solve a semi-regular dilemma we've been having. In fact, two months back, a couple of adults came into the library and tried their level best to drive us insane over this very issue. Thankfully I was busy riding herd over the circulation desk chaos at the time and didn't have to deal with them, but I could hear the whole conversation as Mrs. A tried in vain to help them.

The female and speaking portion of the couple approached Mrs. A and said, "They told us you had a drivers manual for the driving test."  Her voice was nearly monotone. Her eyes slightly glazed.

We get this question on a regular basis. I'm not saying it's not a fair question to ask of a library, an institution that ostensibly deals in books and manuals of all sorts. However, the fact remains that we don't usually have any drivers manuals nor are we at all responsible for keeping them on hand. That's the job of the Department of Motor Vehicles, thank you very much.

"No, I'm sorry, we don't have a copy of the driver's manual here," Mrs. A said.

There was a pause.

"You don't have one?" the woman asked.

"No. We used to keep them in our collection, but people kept checking them out and not returning them, so we haven't added a new one in a while."

"But they said you would have one," the woman said.

"Well, I'm sorry, but we don't," Mrs. A replied.

The woman stared blankly at Mrs. A for a bit until something else occurred to her.

"Well, do you have the driving video?" the woman asked, very slowly and monotonely.

"No. I'm sorry," Mrs. A said. "We don't have one of those either. Again, we used to have one and we've tried several times to get a new one from the DMV, but so far they haven't responded to our requests."

The woman's blank look returned to full power. It wasn't a distrustful look, indicating that she might think Mrs. A was lying. Instead, it was a devoid of all thought look that indicated she had tried everything she knew to do and was now just going to stand there until her brain farted out some new option. Her husband wore a similar look, but he'd come in with it on, so I'm guessing it was normal.

"But they said you would have the book and the video," the woman said after quite a bit more staring.

"Well, again, I'm sorry, but we really, really don't."

Blank. Blank. Blank.

It was as if the woman thought that if she stared long enough and blankly enough Mrs. A would suddenly realize that, yes, we did indeed have a drivers instruction video and a manual and could go ahead and give them a license on the spot.

By then Mrs. J had wandered up and caught a little of what was going on and then asked what the woman was looking for again. Turns out it wasn't a simple driver's manual she wanted, but a Class C drivers instruction manual for folks looking to upgrade to a commercial license. This is an item we should be expected to have EVEN LESS than a regular drivers manual.

"Have you been to the DMV?" Mrs. J asked.

"No. Where's that?" the woman said. It was exactly as if it had never even occurred to her that the Department of Motor Frickin' Vehicles might be a good place to try.

Mrs. J spent five minutes trying to convey to them where the local DMV is located. This was something of a chore, even beyond the unreceptive audience, as the DMV's location is not the easiest to give directions to. It's located—some say hidden—way in the back of a huge brick building over in Town-B. The building itself does not scream OFFICIAL STATE GOVERNMENT OFFICE. Instead, it screams WAREHOUSE, and rather loudly. This warehousey air is further assisted by the fact that the DMV itself is not located in the vaguely office-like front section of the building, but rather way in the back in what was once the loading-dock of the building. And all official DMV signs meant to lead you to it are written in 12 point type. Add all that to the fact that the building is located on a confusing one-way street, in a town the roads of which are composed of almost entirely confusing one-way streets, and you see the dilemma.

"What's the name of that building it's in?" Mrs. J asked Mrs. A.

"I don't know."

"It's that brown one," Mrs. J said. "What's it called?"

"I don't know," Mrs. A repeated.

"It's right there by the lumber place. What's it called?"

"I don't know!" Mrs. A nearly shouted.

Mrs. A crept away from the couple, taking refuge with me behind the busy circulation desk. Sure, she was being intentionally un-service-oriented, but this was a couple for whom no help could be given. The both of them seemed to be very dim bulbs operating under inaccurate information and increasingly slow to realize that this particular light socket had no power for them. Also annoying was the use of the word THEY in referring to the mysterious cabal that had given them the inaccurate information and sent them to our door.

Just who were THEY?

Why would THEY think we would have any kind of supply of drivers manuals or videos?

Why would THEY send anyone to us for one in the first place?

Frankly, we're a bit pissed off with THEY. THEY've been giving us shit for quite a while now. If it's not for drivers manuals, then THEY've sent people in our direction for newspaper archives, high school yearbooks, obituaries, official county records, directory service (and at least 50 percent of those calls are looking for the super-secret telephone number TO THE DMV!!!!), new Social Security cards, complete biographies of every soul who has ever lived in the county and quite a few of those who haven't, and just about any other odd-assed thing a library should never be expected to have in the first place. Hell, we even got a call last month from someone who wanted us to provide her with a death certificate! Not an obituary, mind, but an honest to God death certificate. And not one of the historical death certificates from the nineteenth century that we actually do have locked away upstairs, (*FLIP*FLIP*FLIP* "Consumption... consumption... consumption... fell off a horse... consumption..."), but a death certificate for someone who died THIS VERY YEAR. Lady, we're not the coroner! We're a EFFing library!

After wasting a large chunk of time trying to explain the way to the DMV, Mrs. J paused to see if any of it had sunk into the blank couple's skulls. It hadn't.

"Could you write that down?" the woman said.

Mrs. J said she didn't think she could.

Wal-Mart Jesus Won't Leave Me Alone

Mrs. A and Mrs. C will be away for the next few days as they attend the Spring Fling the WV Liberry Assoc. throws every year. For something being billed as a "fling" the reality of it is not nearly as exciting as one might expect.

They lit out about midway through the day shortly after I arrived, assuring me that they'd contacted our board president to alert him to the fact that they'd both be away and where they were should he suddenly develop a desperate need to get in touch with them. That's probably the most of our worries, as all the other librarians and sundry state-office officials who might want to call them will be at Spring Fling and can bloody well hunt them down at their leisure.

Before leaving, Mrs. C gave me a sympathetic look and whispered, "By the way, Jesus is in the reference room."

"Really? Wow. Haven't seen him in here in a while."

That's right, it's the return of one of our oldest rogues at the "liberry", none other than Wal-Mart Jesus.

Wal-Mart Jesus has been coming into the library at least as long as I've worked there. He's called Wal-Mart Jesus because... well, he looks an awul lot like the real Jesus, or at least how our Western sensibilities have come to think Jesus looked. He's not Jim Caviezel, but not too far. Plus, he stokes his general air of Jesusness by dressing like a low-rent Arab sheik, with the long flowing robes complete with a long flappy turban. However, his robes look as though they were pulled directly off a roll in Wal-Mart's fabric department. They're white with blue stripes and look like they'd be more at home covering, say, a picnic table than a man. Wal-Mart Jesus also has the full beard and peyo curls, which I believe denote him as a Chasidic Jew.

Now I've visited parts of this country where he wouldn't look terribly out of place, (well, provided someone got him a decent set of robes), but small town West Virginia is NOT one of those parts. I didn't even know the man was simply Jewish at first. The first time I saw him was not too long after 9/11 and I initially thought his mode of dress was some sort of overt statement of pro-Islamic protest. I wasn't angry about it, but I did worry that the local bubba population might not take kindly to it and might administer a beating upon the man's head. I couldn't have been more wrong, though, at least the part about pro-Islamic protest.

Wal-Mart Jesus isn't actually a "liberry" rogue, per se. He's just barely makes it as a benign irritant. I actually kind of like him, cause I'm all for colorful library patrons and he certainly qualifies. Wal-Mart Jesus is, as you might expect, a pretty nice guy to deal with, even though he seems a bit on his guard much of the time. Every time he comes in, though, he's deeply involved in researching a wide variety of topics the reference material for which he has no prayer of finding on the shelves of our tiny library. He's often in the market for lots and lots of information about centuries dead Jewish philosophers that can only be found in a Centuries Dead Jewish Philosopher Encyclopedia which we don't own. We've searched around and found one at another WV library, but they're not keen on loaning it out to us. We've subsequently made requests on his behalf that the other library simply photocopy the pages from their encyclopedia pertaining to the centuries dead philosopher he wants and send them to us. Despite repeated attempts at this, it has yet to come off properly. Usually the other library conveniently loses our request, which annoys both Wal-Mart Jesus and us. And if they actually manage to photocopy what we want they don't actually manage to send it to us, as though we're planning to drive seventy miles to come pick it up. And, on the one occasion they managed to both photocopy it and send it to us, we had already managed to lose the by then crinkly and ancient Interlibrary Loan slip on which we'd written Wal-Mart Jesus's real name and home number and so we couldn't call him about it. I think he may have given up on us at that point, cause until today he'd not been in for several months.

Wal-Mart Jesus can be something of a needy patron. He's back and forth from the reference hall, dragging out volume after volume of the encyclopedias for photocopying, which he doesn't like to do himself. That's okay, though. Serving needy patrons is what I'm there for, so serve I do. Sure, it's a bit irritating to have to drop what you're in the middle of to go run off pages on our devil copier every five minutes, but frankly I can manage to be irritated at just about anything so it's no great slam against Wal-Mart Jesus.

Today I made several photocopies of West Virginia Code regulations, encyclopedia entries on Frederick Nietzsche and some pages from a West Virginia history book. This was pretty much par for the course with Wal-Mart Jesus. However, when he made an interlibrary loan request for a non-specific book that specifically had to contain photos of Nietzsche's Aunt Rosalie, I knew we were in for some fun. Not only did he want Aunt Rosalie but he also wanted a few other Nietzsche family photos and some pictures of Nietzsche's friends, including Lou Andreas-Salome, Rainer Maria Rilke and a few others. He had no idea what book these might be found in, but he wanted the book all the same.

"Have you tried the internet?" I asked. I was already envisioning the headache we were about to send to some other poor bastard reference librarian, not to mention Mrs. C who would have to coordinate this from our end.

"No, I've not tried that yet," he said. "I don't have time right now. I have to catch a bus." Much like the real Jesus, Wal-Mart Jesus doesn't drive.

"How bout this," I said, "I'll dig around on the internet and see if I can find pictures of these folks. If they're out there, I should be able to find them."

Wal-Mart Jesus thanked me, then departed after gathering up his leather satchel as well as the stout, cudgel-like section of a tree branch he carries--one with the stumps of smaller branches spiking out from its gnarled head just perfect for laying a beat-down on any Temple sales-clerks he comes upon. (Perhaps the Bubba Patrol hasn't left him alone after all?)

A few minutes of work on the internet and I'd located pictures of everyone he was looking for. I printed them out, clipped his ILL slip to them and left a message on his answering machine about it. He called back later and seemed very pleased to hear of my success.

Seeing him back, though, reminds me that soon I need to chronicle the tale of our late lamented quintessential "liberry" rogue the Purple Nun.

The Defeat and Utter Humiliation of Mrs. Carol Satan

Ahh, what a most blessed and glorious day it has been. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping and I got to help put Mrs. Carol Satan in her place.

I'd been at work for only a couple of hours when she arrived. I knew her before I saw her by smelling the thick haze of cigarette smoke and brimstone that flowed ahead of her to announce her presence. She dropped a stack of 6 women's novels on the desk and slunk over in the direction of Mrs. C, our librarian. Mrs. C was having an in-person conversation with Mr. Rob, the librarian from the neighboring community college, and she, quite correctly, didn't feel it necessary to pause her conversation in the slightest just because Mrs. Carol Satan wanted a word.

While this was going on, I checked Carol Satan's patron record and saw she was still on hold for Danielle Steel's book Dating Game, which she had been on hold for a couple months ago, back when she decided to tear me a new one because she was four days late picking it up.

For a moment, I considered being the kind and helpful liberry ass. that I usually am and going over to the shelf where I had left the book she wanted sitting for all these weeks and getting it for her. Then I remembered the holy hell she raised for something that was her own damn fault and all the lies she told to try and cover it up. I left Danielle Steel alone and returned to the desk.

In the meantime, Mrs. Carol Satan wandered the shelves, selected several more books and came up to the desk where I checked them out to her. I would just like to say that I was sickeningly sweet and cheerful to her. A passing diabetic went into a coma.

Unfortunately, about that time Mrs. C allowed a chink in her conversation and it was long enough for Carol to jump in with a question.

"Did you ever find that book you said I had out?" she belched.

Mrs. Carol Satan, see, had a book out—ironically, Adam's Fall, by Sandra Brown. The last time she was in, last Thursday, Mrs. Carol Satan swore she had returned the book to us the previous Monday. She swore she had put it in the book return. She swore she never keeps books late because she always keeps library books in the SAME EXACT PLACE in her house and she NEVER forgets them. EVER.

"No, we still haven't found it," Mrs. C told her.

"Well I brought it back! I remember it very clearly because I brought it in with me last Thursday and I laid it on the desk."

Last Thursday, if you will recall from two paragraphs ago, is exactly the day she complained that she had put Adam's Fall in the book return the previous Monday. Already Mrs. Carol Satan has been caught in a lie.

"Yes, I remember," Mrs. Carol Satan continued to spew, "I remember I put my books here and there was a... well, a... a good sized girl behind the counter. And I remember she didn't check my books in right away."

"Yes, ma'am," Mrs. C said. "She is one of our staff members here. "

"And I remember that there were all these..."—and at this point, she dropped her voice down to a low, tar-crusted whisper—"these retarded people running around in here. And they were looking at the shelves and they were over here," she said, pointing to the desk. "Any one of them could have picked it up."

Now this hell-belching gorgon was blaming our mentally-handicapped patrons for stealing her stupid late book—a late book, I might add, that we wouldn't have charged her a fine for ANYWAY because of some computer issues we're going through at the moment. Forget about the fact that this walking poster-child for Not Smoking is lying to begin with because it was on that very previous Thursday, Feb 19, that Mrs. C asked her about Adam's Fall for the very first time

I don't know how, but Mrs. C remained diplomatic. She explained to Mrs. Carol Satan that despite the fact that we did take the book return apart and had not found Adam's Fall within it and despite the fact that the book still wasn't on our shelf, we would continue looking for it and would she please do the same.

"I don't need to look for it! I brought it back already!" Carol bellowed. And Carol continued to bellow on in a similar loud manner. Mrs. C decided to leave Carol to it, and she left the desk entirely to go look for a book for another patron who had wandered in during Carol's earlier diatribe.

After venting her foul air for a while, Carol stomped for the door, pausing briefly to look back and say, "I may be crazy about a lot of things, but I'm not crazy when it comes to bringing back my library books!" She then slammed the door and was gone.

"It ain't library books that's made her crazy," I told Mr. Rob, who had witnessed the whole scene in amazement. He laughed. I then started to tell him about my previous deadly encounter with Mrs. Carol Satan when the door suddenly flew open and in she came.

Carol was no longer fiercely angry. In fact, Carol looked positively befuddled. Still, she managed a nervous sort of laugh as she teetered up to the desk clutching a lone book in her talon, one Adam's Fall by one Sandra Brown.

"I looked in the last place I could think of," she said. "It was under my car-seat."

"Ahhhhhhhhh!" I said in what I gauged was a slightly maniacal-sounding degree of wonderment.
"It must have fallen down between the seat and the door when I put my books in the other day."

"Yeah, that'd do it," I said.

"So I guess I... had it... all along," she said. She turned and left, forked tail tucked between her legs, cloven-hooves clattering on the floor.

Sure, she didn't actually come close to apologizing for raising such a stink. Nevertheless, it was an admission of guilt I will savor for weeks to come. Mrs. C and her friend rushed back in to join the celebration. If we'd had champagne, the cork would have been popped and bubbly poured all round. The great and powerful Mrs. Carol Satan had been defeated....

...for now.

Update on Chesta D. (P.) M.

I think Chester the (potential) Molester may finally be getting the hint that we're on to him as far as his stealing our magazines goes.

On Tuesday we saw his car parked out front, in the half-hour parking spaces, for two hours, and knew a visit from him was imminent. Unfortunately, Mrs. A and Mrs. C fled home before he could turn up, leaving me to deal with him alone when he finally did. As he began his usual rounds, inspecting the place for preteens, no doubt, I figured he'd go right for the magazines and pilfer a Parents or Seventeen yet again. Being the lone gunman in the house, though, I didn't exactly have time to ride herd on him while leaving the desk unguarded. But I did have time to take a load of non-fiction upstairs.

So up I went with my pile O books. Only, instead of sneaking up behind Chester, who I'd assumed was nearly to the magazines already, I found Chester sneaking up behind me, as he'd actually been in the bathroom. (And, no, Chester's not the serial shitter. I've already investigated that avenue.) Well, this is awkward, I thought. Then I had an idea. When I reached the top of the stairs, Chester at my heels, I walked over to the magazine rack and very conspicuously and thoroughly scanned its contents, doing an obvious mental inventory of all the magazines, sending to Chester, I hoped, the message I'll know what's missing when you leave. It seemed to work. Chester grabbed YET another FAFSA booklet, finished his inspection of the upper floor, and then hightailed it to his car.

That was Tuesday.

Today his car was back in the half-hour parking. We'd already resolved to clock his dumb ass and call the meter maid the minute his car's half-hour was up, but he didn't give us the chance. While I was back filling my water bottle at the fountain near the bathroom, here he came on his pitstop at the can. I immediately abandoned my water and raced upstairs. As I did, I caught the eye of Mrs. A in her office. I gave her the international sign-language motion for "Chester's in the can downstairs, but is about to come up and try to steal a magazine. I'm gonna hassle him." To which she replied with the international motion for "Good one."

So I sat back in one of the comfy chairs adjacent to the magazine rack and flipped through a copy of Rolling Stone while I waited for Chester.

...And waited... And waited.

"You can give up now," Mrs. A said from the window of her office. "He just left."

Left? Left without even trying to hork a magazine? No way.

Gosh, I sure hope he doesn't think we don't like him.

The FAFSA Diversion!

Sounds like a Robert Ludlum title, eh?

Chester the (dear God, I sure do hope he's only a Potential) Molester popped in today. We'd already seen his car out front a half hour earlier, which meant he was in the area, probably for his weekly mental health visit down at the local social services place, but intended to come back and inflict himself upon us and needed his car to be close by for that eventuality. With that foreknowledge, we did a magazine rack inventory so we'd know what was there before his visit and what to accuse him of should he take one.

There were children in house when Chester finally shuffled in, so I stood sentinel over the front room and children's room, as usual, while Mrs. A ran upstairs to run interference on Chester himself.

Sure enough, after determining there were no kids upstairs, he headed right for the magazine rack where he was met by Mrs. A, who was using the excuse that she was putting out new magazines. She even said, "Hi. How're you doing?" as she stepped up beside him, a crisp new and no doubt tantalizing copy of Seventeen in her mitts. She reported later that Chester looked at her nervously and quickly grabbed a FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) booklet and fled down the stairs.

I saw him coming and stood guard, watching as he made a big production of folding up his FAFSA book and stuffing it into the interior of his ratty vest. Perhaps I just imagined it, but it seemed to me that Chester looked more than a little irritated. Maybe those FAFSA booklets are piling up at his house.

EWWWW! I just imagined Chester's house.

Nastiest Patron EVER

Yesterday, January 21, 2004, Weird Wednesday, was a historic moment at the "liberry." For yesterday, you see, was the first and I pray only time I have been confronted by a woman I can only describe as the nastiest, most vile, evil patron EVER. She was so unbelievably horrid that she has officially secured the #1 spot in The Liberry Rogues Gallery.

Let me just put this in perspective. To be #1 means that she's beaten out the likes of Ron The (Magazine) Ripper, Chester the Molester, Mr. B-Natural, Billy the Brainchild and even Mrs. Bellows the Video Borrowing Gorgon in sheer unadulterated unholy foulness. Hell, I'll throw the Dufus back in there too cause she's got him beat hands down. Because while some of those people may be unwholesome and evil in their own way, none of them are as maliciously confrontational in their evil as this patron.

I have dubbed her Mrs. Carol Satan.

Mrs. Carol Satan marched up to the circulation desk yesterday accompanied by a thick fog of cigarette contamination. Or maybe it was brimstone. I dunno. Whichever, she smelled like she'd been sitting in an unfiltered Lucky Strike sauna for at least a week.

"I'm Carol Satan. You guys called me about a book," she said. Her breath was a more concentrated version of her apparently natural air.

"Sure thing," I told her. Then I stooped down and began rummaging through the hold shelf where we, naturally, store the books we're holding for our patrons.

I should probably explain that process a bit first. It'll be boring, but it's necessary.

At our library, as at many, we allow patrons to reserve books they'd like to read on a first come first served basis. We put their name on a list in our devil computer and when the book they want is checked back in the computer beeps and alerts us as to which patron gets which book. We then write that patron's name and phone number on a Post-it note, count five days from the date we received the book and write that date as the "pull date" on the Post-it. Then we slap said Post-it on the book, wrap the whole thing up with a rubber-band and chunk it in a three tiered holding shelf by the window behind the desk. Every night the liberry employee on duty calls all the people who have holds on the three tiered shelf. When we call we write the date on the Post-it beneath their name. If we speak to the patron themselves, we write OK by that date. If it's busy, we write BUSY. If we get no answer, we write N/A. If we get an answering machine, we leave a message with all the details and write MACHINE. If we get someone other than the patron themselves we leave a message with them and write "LEFT MESSAGE WITH..." husband, child, dog, etc. so there's always a trail of blame in case the patron never gets the message. Once a message is left or a patron is contacted, the book goes into the HOLD BIN, in a cabinet beneath the circulation desk. The patron then gets five days from the date we received the book on hold, (not five days from when we spoke to them), to pick up the book. If their five days run out, we put that patron's name at the end of the hold list and give the book to whoever is now first on the hold list. If no one's waiting for the book, we put it back on the shelf and usually leave the patron on the hold list so that the next time someone checks the book out and then back in the patron's name will pop up and we start the whole process over. Whichever option gets used, though, we write at the bottom of their loser patron's Post-It note along with the title of the book so we'll have plenty of evidence should someone wish to complain about not getting their hold book.

Can you imagine who that someone might be?

So when Mrs. Carol Satan marched up to the desk, in her thick haze of cigarette pollution, and told me that we'd called her about a book, I naturally looked for it. I opened up the hold bin beneath the desk and began searching for a book with her name Post-ited to it. There were exactly none.

"Uh, do you remember the title of the book?" I asked.

"No, I don't. Something by Danielle Steele," she said, breathing more carcinogenic-smelling breath at me.

I decided maybe I'd missed it on first look and began searching the spine labels of the hold books for a Danielle Steele. Still, there were none. So I started searching the next place we look in such situations... our little bundle of old Post-Its of all the formerly holding patrons whose hold time ran out.

As soon as I picked up the bundle, Mrs. Carol Satan sneered and said, "You don't have the books." She seemed more than a little pissed but not at all surprised.

"It appears we might not," I said, still trying to keep a positive attitude about it all. I began leafing through the pad. Sure enough, about five deep into the stack were two, count em, two Post-Its for one Mrs. Carol Satan. As a visual aid, I have recreated those Post-Its below, with Mrs. Carol Satan's real name changed and her phone number omitted.

(Click on the above images for larger versions)

"Actually, ma'am, it looks like..."

"Just put me back on the waiting list and call me," Mrs. Carol Satan interrupted. "I don't have time to wait around for you to find them."

She said "wait around for you to find them" in much the same tone she might take if saying "wait around for you to make me eat a dog turd." She also seemed to be under the impression that we'd somehow lost her books and had an attitude about it. I thought she should be made aware that we hadn't lost her books, but that their lack of appearance was due to her not coming to pick them up in the first place.

"Actually, ma'am," I began once again, "it appears your hold time ran out." I brandished my Post-its for her to see.

"No it didn't," she said, not bothering to look at the pull date or even the Post-its. I kind of blinked at her for a second. Was she really arguing with me as I stood there with all the evidence I needed to wipe the floor with her?

"Um, yes, ma'am, it did," I said, holding up the Post-its again, both of which quite clearly indicated that her books were pulled on 1/19, a full day after her allotted 5 days since the book had been checked in were over. "See," I said pointing to the evidence, "we started calling you on the 13th and pulled the books on the 19th."

"We're supposed to get five days to pick up our books! I didn't get five days."

Was she stupid?

"Uh, yes ma'am, you did," I said. "Like it shows right here, you were called on the 14th and told your books were on hold."

"No I wasn't," Mrs. Carol Satan snapped. "No one called me! I was home and no one called me. And I have a machine, so if I wasn't there you were supposed to leave a message and you didn't!"

At this point I could hardly believe what I was hearing. This woman was charging right through all my carefully crafted logic. All of the library's failsafes and ass-covering tactics were being ignored--nay, shredded--by this middle-aged, cranky, smog-belching monstrosity. Well, I wasn't having any of it and I was sure as hell not going to rise to her level of anger, at least not to her face. Instead, I turned my already polite and mild-tempered tone a notch nicer.

"I'm sorry, ma'am. Our records show that we did call you on the 14th. We did give you five days."

Mrs. Carol Satan let out what might have been a grunt or perhaps even a burp of disbelief, conveying just how utterly ludicrous I was being.

"Ma'am, maybe we spoke to someone else at your house and they didn't give you the message, but this note indicates we spoke to you."

"I live alone!" she snapped.

No shit? I didn't say.

"And there were no messages on my machine!" she bellowed further.

"This doesn't say we left one on an answering machine, ma'am. It says we talked to you. If you're the only person answering the phone then you're the one we talked to." And upon later inspection I noticed that the Post-Its in question had MY OWN HANDWRITING on them, so I HAD spoken to her sour ass.

Mrs. Carol Satan fixed me with her most fiercesome glare yet.

"I am so SICK of this CRAP!" she shouted. I thought the top of her bat-like little skull was about to come off. "This is ridiculous! I've never been treated this badly. We are supposed to get five days!!! I didn't get five days!!!!!"

No, lady, you got %&*#ing SIX I again didn't shout. Instead, I adopted my sweetest, most calm and measured tone yet and said, "Yes, ma'am, you did."

Mrs. Carol Satan's eyes bulged. She turned on her heel and stomped off toward the door, trailing a wake of Brimstone funk behind her. Before she reached the door, she looked back over her shoulder and commanded, "Just put me on the list for them!"

After the door closed, I turned to Mrs. C the librarian, who had witnessed the whole scene, and said, "You know, I don't think I'm going to put her on the list for jack."

"You don't have to," Mrs. C said, with a weary sigh. "I already did it when I pulled them on Monday."
Mrs. C assured me that my experience with Mrs. Carol Satan was not atypical. In fact, from the moment that stanky beast walked in the door, Mrs. C said she knew exactly what was about to play out and that I would bear the brunt of the woman's wrath.

"I feel... so dirty," I said. "That woman was foul and unholy. She has to be the nastiest patron I've ever encountered! There's something sincerely wrong with that woman!"

"Yep," Mrs. C said. "I don't even get upset about it anymore. I just know that when she comes in she's going to scream at me regardless of what I do. She gets especially angry if you prove her wrong about something, like you did."

I laughed. "Yeah, I love it that she walked in and said we called her about a book, then insisted that we never called her about the very book she had come in to pick up."

"That's Carol."

Mrs. C ran upstairs to tell Mrs. A, leaving me to stand at the desk shuddering with adrenaline and the remaining negative energy left behind by Mrs. Carol Satan. Soon, Mrs. A rushed back downstairs to commiserate with me over my battle.

"That woman is a raving bitch!" Mrs. A said. And this is from a lady who doesn't say such things lightly. "She's been in my face screaming more times than I care to count. And she always smells like she's been smoking all day."

"You ain't kidding!" I said. "I wanted to tell her to, `Have another puff and calm the hell down, lady!'"

We spent the next several minutes laughing and telling stories about Mrs. Carol Satan. Funniest yet was when Mrs. C revealed that Carol Satan used to work as an agent for a greeting card company and was responsible for keeping all the local stores stocked in happy, smiley greeting cards. I guess she was some kind of chain-smoking Hallmark Harpy. Or maybe it was being around all that concentrated happiness that corrupted her in the first place.

Another point of humor is the fact that both of the books that Mrs. Carol Satan wanted turned out to be on the shelf. No one else had been waiting for them, so Mrs. C pulled them and put them back on the shelf for someone else to choose at their leisure. While Mrs. Carol Satan is indeed still on the hold list for them, she won't actually see them until someone checks them out and brings them back.

In the end, we resolved that we would draft a staff-resolution that when the time does come to phone Mrs. Carol Satan about her books, whoever calls her will tell her that she has a book on hold and then will say, "Now, Mrs. Satan, could you please confirm for me what today's date is? Your five days start NOW!"

Dearth and Taxes

It's not even April yet, but tax season has begun at the "liberry". Soon as the new year hits, our tax forms go out and we gotta find space for them.

For the past two years, the tax forms have had a home atop one of our three-foot high floor shelves positioned directly in front of the front door of the library. We did this on the theory that when tax-form-seeking people walk through the door, they should be able to immediately note the tax forms and go right to them without having to bother anyone (i.e. me) with asking where they are. Barring that, they should notice the giant yellow sign we have always placed there directing their attention to the tax forms.

For the past two years, this theory has never... EVER... worked.

No patron has ever managed to notice the sign nor the forms despite their incredibly obvious position. Instead, they walk in the door, practically walking into the forms themselves in the process, then completely overlook them in favor of marching up to the desk where they ask the question we grow to dread and which becomes grounds for an ass whuppin' come April 13, "Do you got tax forms here?" This is when we raise a hand and point over their shoulder at the tax forms directly behind them in front of the door. The patrons then blush and look deservedly embarrassed at their entire lack of observation skills, collect their forms and depart.

This situation leads to many fun patron impersonations that we in the library staff engage in when patron's aren't around to hear us. They go something like this...

"Uhhh, hey! I'm pawin' through all yer tax forms, here, which took me half an hour to find cause I somehow didn't manage to trip over them when walkin' in the front door, even though they're right there in front of ya, with a big ol' arrow pointed at them and a yella billboard for a sign, an' I jest don't see the State of Georgia 1028-C form for color-blind arc-welders who's mothers didn't love them. You got one of them? I want the short form, now, y'hear!"

Fun.

This year, we've moved the forms. Instead of putting them directly in front of the door with big signs, which has never ever worked, we moved the forms across the room, atop a completely different floor shelf, with plenty of stuff blocking any direct line of sight of them from the door, including a support beam, and we have no signs whatsoever.

Where do you think people now habitually look for tax forms when they walk in the door? That's right, atop the floor shelf directly in front of the door where they are quite obviously NOT AT and where we have been practically begging people to look for them for the past umpteen years!!!!

Weird Wednesday

Our Wednesdays have been getting weirder and weirder. I've missed the past several, but the tales I've heard from fellow "liberry" staff back it up.

Evidently the local mental health social services agency, Unobstructed Doors, has mandated that its aides take their mentally handicapped clients to the library and have put it on their schedules of things to do. We're happy to have them, but something about mentally handicapped patrons being force-marched into the library, whether they want to come or not, makes me uneasy.

We have a group of mentally handicapped patrons whose aides bring them in like clockwork every Wednesday around 2 p.m. The group varies in size from week to week, but there have been weeks where nearly all four tables upstairs have been full. Now again, I'm not complaining. Most of these patrons seem to enjoy coming to the library and that's good. However, there's one of them who on more than one occasion has thrown a screaming fit upstairs. And when I say "screaming fit" I'm talking a blood curdling screaming fit. You'd think the girl was being murdered, and I've rushed up the stairs (nearly breaking my ass despite our new sign) to make sure she wasn't. She's not. She just gets fed up with being there or is in some other way offended and just opens up at full squall to protest. This happened yesterday and the whole crew had to leave shortly thereafter.

Meanwhile, there's always Ron the Ripper...

When Ron turns up at the library, he usually turns up alone at first. This is because his primary aid, Donald, is a firm believer in giving Ron as much space and freedom as possible. Donald usually takes Ron to the Unobstructed Doors office downtown, tells him to go to the library and sets him free. Ron walks up the hill to us and Donald follows a few minutes later at his leisure. Now, freedom and space is all well and good, but between the time Ron hits the door and Donald shows up, Ron can rip up quite a few magazines. And Donald, despite our many pleas, doesn't care to check and make sure Ron isn't ripping our good magazines.

While I was out of town there were a couple of Ron incidents.

Mrs. A, our head liberrian, said that Ron came in one morning and went right upstairs to his favorite ripping table as usual. I don't know if someone had beat him to the table or not, but Ron got upset about something and began doing his usual loud caveman bark. It sounds like "Unnnngh! Unnnnnnnngh!! UNNGNGGHHHHHG!!!" only much louder. Mrs. A rushed upstairs and put her finger to her lips to shush Ron. Ron, however, is incapable of being shushed. He firmly knows that caveman barking is unacceptable behavior and he longs for someone to shush him just so he'll have an excuse to turn the volume up to 11. This he did. Mrs. A said it was deafening. About that time, Donald meandered on in, heard the tumult upstairs and came rushing up to see what was going on. He was able to calm Ron down. (In fact, we're pretty sure he's one of the only aides Ron will listen to. From what we've been told, Donald has quit his aid job on several occasions only to be begged to come back because he's the only one who can deal with Ron.)

The second incident takes some setting up...

Sometimes the library staff comes in early to take care of administrative concerns or to clean. While in early, it's quite common to hear the sound of someone trying to open the front door. This happens several times a morning as, it seems, no one in town is capable of reading the posted hours prominently positioned on the door itself and they always try the door anyway before scratching their heads in confusion and driving off. One day, though, Mrs. B, my fellow liberry ass., was in early and was sweeping the walk outside when she saw a seemingly mentally healthy patron walk up to the front door and try to get in. After he failed to open the locked door, Mrs. B saw him notice and read the posted hours. Then he stepped back onto the sidewalk and walked around to the back door which she had left unlocked. He opened it and went in. Mrs. B followed and said, "Excuse me, sir, but we're not open yet." He said, "Oh, I know. I just wanted to come in anyway."

Ron did much the same last week but at least he has the whole mentally handicapped thing as an excuse. This time it was Mrs. C who was in early. Again, she said she heard someone try the front door, then a few moments later she heard the back door open followed by the sound of footsteps walking upstairs, no doubt pausing by the magazine rack to snatch up a few fresh and as yet unripped magazines, and then on into the upstairs room and over to the favorite ripping table. A few minutes later, Donald rolled up and knocked on the door to ask if Ron was in.

"Well, someone came in the back and went upstairs," Mrs. C said. It then took Donald 20 minutes to coax Ron into leaving, with much caveman barking as the soundtrack.

That was all over the past two weeks.

Being Weird Wednesday, yesterday, though, Ron had to come in. This time Donald was nowhere to be seen. In fact, the aid who was with him was brand new and very very green as to the ways of Ron: The Ripper. As soon as they reached the top of the stairs, we could hear Ron start in with the caveman barks. They lasted for a few minutes until both Ron and his new aid came back downstairs and quickly departed. The new aid looked quite embarrassed.

Mrs. A, who was upstairs at the time, later described what happened. As soon as Ron began barking, Green-Aid became horrified and began saying things like, "Ron! No, Ron. You don't scream in the library, Ron. Ron, be quiet. Ron, this is not how you're supposed to behave!" This, of course, just fueled Ron's fire, turning up the volume and forcing their flight.

Dawn of the Dufus Part I

I've had to move another member of our Liberry Rogues Gallery from the Active column to the Inactive column. You might think losing another active member was a setback. However, in the case of this patron, it's good news since we liked him almost as much as we like Chester the (potential) Molester. Not a damn lot.

I am speaking of none other than The Dufus.

Allow me to tell his tale.

I first encountered the Dufus after coming in one Thursday afternoon to hear the library staff complaining about some jerk who had refused to get off one of the patron computers for most of the afternoon. Our computer policy is that each patron gets a half hour on one of our three computers and after that, if someone else is waiting to get on one, they have to relinquish it. If no one's waiting, they can stay til someone is. This guy, however, had been told multiple times by multiple staff members that his half hour was up and he needed to get off--information he chose to ignore. This went on for over three hours, with various staff members popping back to ask him to get off every ten minutes or so. Finally, one of our librarians went back and threatened to turn the computer off in his face, causing him to lose all changes in the document he was working on. Only then did he reluctantly get off. As soon as another computer came open, he was back at it again.

The next day the Dufus came back for Part II of this behavior. The first time his allotted half hour ran out, I went back to his computer and politely said, "Excuse me, sir, but we have a patron waiting..." nodding toward the computer to indicate what they were waiting for.

"For meeee?" he said.

Now, the tone of his question did NOT say, Are they waiting ON me? No. His tone said, Are they waiting FOR me? It was exactly as if he thought there was someone up front who had heard he was in town and had rushed right down to the Liberry to meet the fabled Dufus and shake his hand.

Ten minutes later, I had to go back to the Dufus to again alert him that we had other patrons waiting.

"For meeee?" he repeated, in exactly the same tone as before.

"No, ON you," I corrected. "You need to log off. Now."

Why, you might ask, would someone think so highly of themselves as to actually believe someone might be waiting FOR them? Ahhh, therein lies the rub.

The Dufus, I later learned, comes from local old money and grew up in the area but has spent the last several years living on the West Coast. To hear him tell it--and he takes great joy in telling it--when he was back on the West Coast, he was a minor deity and part time journalist who spent his days hobnobbing with the rich and famous, dear and trusted friend to all of them. He's quite accustomed therefore to people falling all over him, so it would have come as no surprise that someone was waiting FOR him. After all, surely EVERYONE had heard how the Dufus had miraculously returned from the West Coast to grace his home town with his presence (and move back in with his parents).

You only THINK I'm laying it on thick here. I promise you, I am not.

(To Be Continued)

The Patron Who Must Not Be Named

Out of all the members of the Liberry Rogues Gallery, Chester the (potential) Molester is the one we hate the most.

Actually, our hatred for him varies from day to day, depending on who's in the library, as there are actually people who irritate us far more than Chester, but he's probably the most serious threat we have to look out for, therefore he makes the top of the list.

He is the Patron Who Must Not be Named.

Chester looks like the stereotypical child-molester. In fact, he could be the child-molester poster boy. He's in his 30's; he tends to wear baggy, dirty clothing, often of the sweat-pant variety and always, ALWAYS wears the same ratty-assed vest and little short-brimmed hunting cap; he does indeed possess a traditional "Chester the Molester" mustache; and he most definitely has an unsavory interest in young ladies (and by young ladies, I mean under age 16, usually under age 12). He's SO stereotypical in his predatory molester-like behavior that when you see him actually behaving that way you stop to question your sanity, because you think that no one would EVER possibly behave so openly and obviously like a child-molester and you think that you MUST somehow be mistaken. Then you realize that, no, you're not mistaken and he truly is a sick bastard.

In Chester's defense (what little there is) in the year and a half he's been darkening our door, we've never actually had any incidents of illegality from him--in other words, he's never attempted to actually molest anyone while in the library. Otherwise the police would have been called on him long long ago and he would be making "special friends" in prison. However, the fact that he hasn't actually molested anyone may only be due to the fact that we never give him the opportunity to do so. From the time Chester hits the front step, we're on his ass like westerns on shelves at Tabor Evans' house.

Chester's usual M.O. is to enter the library and immediately head upstairs, pausing on the way to case the children's room for any occupants. When he comes in, we do a quick inventory of any and all kids in the library and where they are. If we don't know, we go look and make sure and if there are any kids near Chester we make sure there's a library staff-member tailing Chester at all times. If there are no children, we let him be, but we take special notice of any girls who come in.

Once Chester finds out there's no one of interest upstairs, he comes back downstairs (stopping to check out the parenting magazines, with their usual young cover-girls on his way) and either leaves disappointed or heads for the internet-access computers. We've never been able to catch Chester viewing anything untoward on the internet. We're not sure if this is due to any skill on his part at keeping only harmless pages up whenever prying eyes are around. We suspect he might just not know how to use it in the first place. Almost as though he can sense that there's porn there to be found, but is stymied at how to access it. We've seen him sit and stare at our home page for minutes at a time. Chester's also not a big fan of signing up at the desk to use one of our computers and is always on the lookout for one that's already logged on but unattended so he can just hop right on. (We keep em logged off whenever he's in the house, just to force him to come put his name on our clip-board. Not that we need his name. Everyone knows his name. Librarians in surrounding counties know his name. So far, the only people that don't seem to know his name are the sex-offender registration pages for WV, which we check regularly.)

So Chester usually stays on the computer for a few minutes and then leaves, provided there are no young girls about. If there are young girls about, he will make any and all excuses to leave the computer area and meander back into the kids' room to stare at them. His favorite excuse is that he needs a pencil. Once this is decided, he gets up, goes into the kids room and, instead of making the straight line from the reference/computer hall through the kids room and into the library's front room, he curves around to the left and pretends to be terribly interested in the Easy Reader section, all the while stealing glances at the girl(s) in the room. It's really pathetic that he seems to think no one can tell what he's up to. Chester will also try to move out of line of sight of the front desk, at which time I move from the front desk until I have line of sight on Chester; this usually means planting myself into the children's room door frame, from where I can stare at Chester and give him the "stank eye." Once Chester spies me spying him, he breaks off from his own staring activities and either heads back for the computer until such a time as it occurs to him that he really needs a pencil (i.e. five seconds later) or he heads to the front desk to get said pencil, at which time I point out to him that there are plenty of pencils by each of the computers and that he should use one of those. This happens EVERY SINGLE TIME. And it really doesn't matter to him that it happens every single time, because he only wanted a pencil so he'd have an excuse to go through the children's room and now that he's been told where the pencils are he has his excuse to go back through the kids room to get one. There, once again, he starts to meander off track and tries to stare at the girl(s), restarting the cycle.

I used to try and intimidate Chester as best I could. I'm not a physical violence kind of guy, but I'm told I can exert an intense angry stare when pissed. I used to turn that stare on Chester whenever he came in and continued beaming it at him the whole time he was around. I even followed him from room to room, just to stand idly in the corner and turn the stare on him whenever he looked my way. My goal was to make him as uncomfortable as possible in the hope he would finally realize he wasn't welcome and we were on to his sick little game. As far as I can tell, though, the stare has never had any affect on him whatsoever.

We've talked to other libraries about him to see if they had any better dirt that we did. We even tried to be discrete about it, phoning up the library in the county he lives in and saying, "We wanted to ask you about a problem patron we've been having who lives in your area?" to which the other library responded, "Oh, you mean CHESTER?" That library told us that Chester once confronted their head librarian, accusing her of calling the police on him, as the police had apparently been to his house to ask him about his behavior. The librarian had not called the police on him, but assured him that she would be happy to, should the need arise. More likely what happened is that a concerned parent called the police on him, being as how that particular public library is located on the property of an elementary school and Chester was only there to watch the scenery when school let out.

The only method we've found for keeping Chester out of our library is to stop talking about him altogether. You see, Chester is the Patron Who Must Not Be Named for a very good reason. We found that if we stopped using his real name in common conversation, he stopped turning up so often. Then, on days when we happened to use his name, he DID turn up. So it has become unofficial library policy to never mention his real name. If we refer to him at all, it is as The Patron Who Must Not Be Named. (He knows when you're talkin' about him... so DOOOOON'T even talk about him.)

A part of me would LOVE it if I were to catch him doing something wrong (or something demonstrably wrong, as lascivious staring ain't technically illegal). I would love being able to call the police and tell them something they could actually use besides, "Uh, he was starin' at her," which just doesn't seem to cut it. So far, though, Chester's been playing it careful. But we the library staff remain ever vigilant.

Colorful Addendum

I thought I was going to be able to get away with only one entry today. Then Cap'n Crossdresser, our area's resident transvestite, walked through the door.

Today, the good Cap'n was wearing a very fetching low-cut gray sweater, that accented his thatch of red chest hair. Below that he wore a brown satin skirt, with matching hose. I didn't see his shoes.

The Cap'n is probably the least feminine crossdresser I've ever seen. He's a rather burly, lumberjack of a man with a Larry Fine-style half-doughnut halo of wild, unkempt hair surrounding his bald head.  I've often seen him sporting a beard as well, though today he only had the moustache. I get the impression that it's not his goal to actually become a woman--he just wants to dress like one.

Cap'n Crossdresser, our honorary Twin Peaks patron of the day.

Complaint Department

I think it's important, this early in the blogging game, to establish that I'm really not here to bitch and gripe about my job. I know that pretty much comes with the blogging territory and a lot of what I'm going to do here may seem like that, but I'm really not complaining.

My life is pretty good, all things considered. I live in a beautiful state (And, yes, West Virginia is quite stunning. Just miles and miles of rolling green mountains, gorgeous sunrises and sunsets, snowy peaks, rivers, valleys, and temperate climate.) And I have a great job! I get to work in a library that's in a stately old, pre-Civil War, historic building. I have great fellow employees who are both colleagues and friends. The vast majority of the patrons I encounter on a day to day basis are enjoyable people and there are several of them who actually make my day brighter just by their walking in the door. While this job is far from being the highest paying job I've ever had (it, in fact, is pretty close to the lowest paying job I've ever had, actually--but when your wife's a medical student and her school is located in an economically depressed region of an economically depressed state, you take what you can get) it is certainly the least stressful job I've ever had.

That said, I really really REALLY hate the telephone at work. It might be okay, if it weren't incessantly ringing all the time. Even that might be okay if I didn't have to answer the same question every other time it rang: What time do you close? It's a perfectly legitimate question, but after you've answered it twenty times in a single week it starts to wear on your soul. Some days I actually growl at the phone when it rings. (And while I'm at it, let me give a ringing non-endorsement to GE for this piece of crap telephone/speaker phone/cordless phone combo, no doubt purchsed from $%@#ing Wal-Mart. It's got a main phone unit, with corded handset, hold buttons, the whole works. Then, across the room, is the mobile phone power-station which is not plugged into a phone jack at all but relies upon the mobile phone signal from the main phone unit for all its telephonic activity. This means that every time the phone rings, you have to wait for both the main unit phone and the mobile phone to stop ringing completely, to be in mid-ring, you see, before you dare pick up the main handset, otherwise the mobile phone goes ahead and loudly rings for another three seconds. The whole bloody thing is just too loud in general. It loudly beeps every time you press a number. The volume on the mobile phone handset is set permanently to either deafening-roar or mouse-whisper, with no middle ground. I tell you, it's the devil. Or, if it's not the devil, it's in league with our photocopier, which I assure you IS very much the devil. )

Back to the phones...

In addition to What Time Do You Close?, I also get a number of other irritating calls.

We get frequent calls from Birthday Lady. She's an elderly woman in town who calls us every time a celebrity dies to ask what the deceased's birthday was. Every... single... time. No matter how obscure the celebrity might be, the second they kick off she's on the phone to us for their birthday. And the thing is, there's not exactly a reference book to tell you the birthday of every famous person who might be eligible for croaking--or at least not in our library, there's not. So we have to cheat and resort to looking them up on the internet for her. She also has an irritating habit of not waiting patiently for us to go and look up the information for her, despite our pleas with her to hold for just a moment. So unless you take the devil mobile phone with you and converse with her the whole while you're looking up when Art Carney's mom honked him out, Birthday Lady will hang up on you every time. Then she'll call back the next day to plague you again.

I'm told she's keeping a record of all these famous dirt-nappers. I can just picture a great heaping scrap-book, its bulging covers filled with yellowing newspaper obituaries of famous people stretching back to the 1920s. And, written in pencil, beside each brittle, glue-soaked clipping, is their birthday--information dutifully delivered by her friendly neighborhood library staff. It would be a fascinating tome, for sure. I would love to get a look at it.

That's pretty annoying. But that was LAST week's most annoying phone call.

THIS week's annoying phone call was from a different lady, who began the call by saying, "There's this poem I want, but I don't know the title and I don't know who wrote it. The last line of it is `And all these things will be repeated, at Thanksgiving'."

Just like that. That's all she knew.

Now, I understand her plight. You've got a fragment of an unidentified poem stuck in your head, who ya gonna call? The place that ostensibly deals in poetic works as part of their raison d'etre, that's who.  But it's a crap shoot, really. When making such a call, you almost have to hope the person who picks up the phone will be familiar with the poem and know the answer off the top of their head. As far as I know, there's no book that will tell you a poem's title and author by a snippet of the last line. (We do actually have one that does this by first line, but she was SOL on that one.) If we don't know the poem, we would have to comb through every poetry book in the joint (or find one with a subject index, which we don't have) to come up with an answer. And frankly, we don't have that many books of poetry in our tiny little 30,000 volume collection anyway.

My solution: cheat. I went to Google and typed in, "And all these things will be repeated, at Thanksgiving," figuring if the poem is out there on the web it'll come up.

Nada. Zip. Bupkis. Shite.

I searched under "Thanksgiving Poetry." This was a little more successful in that it actually brought up several sites of poems about Thanksgiving, many of which played tinny little computer music to put you in the festive mood for Thanksgiving Poetry. But again, I'm the guy who'd have to wade through all of it and I wasn't planning on doing that. If it had all been nice, crisp, crinkly Robert Frost poems, and I didn't otherwise have a JOB to do, perhaps I'd have given it a go. But most of it amounted to people who've spelled THANKSGIVING vertically down one side of a page and created a line of poetry corresponding to each of the letters, while the one-voice Casio version of Amazing Grace plays in the background. No thank you.

My thought is, the lady on the phone didn't even have the last line correct in the first place, otherwise I feel sure it would have popped up somewhere. I had to apologize that I wasn't able to find it for her. She seemed a little put out at first, in a way that made me think she was surprised we didn't have the entire poem embroidered on a pillow at the desk, but she didn't offer further complaint.