I Dream of Gene (Leaving)

Gene Gene the Geneal0gy Machine was in typical form last week. He came in Friday for a long haul session of research and was disappointed to hear it would be a 20 minute wait for a computer. So he plopped down in the front room and set about making us miserable, i.e. by talkin' at us. His topic at least varied from geneal0gy, centering instead on our lack of computers and our restrictive time limits, but these were subjects broached only in the most pleasant and genial manner he could muster. Then Gene asked how many computers the Town-C branch had, compared to our three. 

"A lot," I said in a hopeful tone. "At least five." 

"And are they as busy as these?" he asked. 

"Last time I was down there, they weren't," Mrs. C offered. 

Gene mused on this for a bit and then said that he didn't like having to drive to Town-C to do his work. Mrs. C then suggested that he try the local community college "liberry" because they didn't have any time limits whatsoever. It was only a short walk from our front door. 

Again, Gene decided he wasn't interested in actually going anywhere. Mrs. C then pointed out to him, in her own very pleasant and genial manner, that technically we still have a rule on the books that each patron is to receive a maximum of 3 computer sessions per day, but that we just haven't had to enforce that rule in several years. (This was a new one on me, otherwise I might have campaigned to get it reinstated beforehand. ) The rule itself, as Mrs. C later explained, stems from a time when we only had one public access computer which was constantly being fought over by the likes of Mr. B-Natural and The Untalented Mr. Ripley. It was actually Ripley who got the rule established, for he was even more hungry for computer time than Mr. B-Natural or even Crusty and would stay all day long as the machine's resident user, only taking temporary and highly reluctant breaks when bumped off for other patrons. 

Gene didn't seem to sense the veiled threat in Mrs. C's words. Eventually, he got a computer and stayed there for over 2 hours before the others filled up and it was time to boot him. He did his little frustrated laugh, gathered up his crap and made for the desk to sign up again. We did have another patron who was also out of time at that point, a kid who'd been on for over an hour. I didn't really feel like booting the kid off, either, because it seemed to me that as long as Gene had been on past his initial half hour, the kid should get some consideration too. Plus, it really annoyed Gene that we didn't immediately bump the kid off for him, who he HAD to know was out of time too. Unfortunately, not bumping the kid meant we had to listen to Gene go on and on about how much it would cost him to get good internet service in his neck of the county and about the massive crooks who ran his phone company. I tried to hold out for as long as possible, but after only five minutes of his patented good-natured complaining, I ran for the computer hall and told the kid he had to give it up. 

"Thank you, thank you, thank you," Mrs. C said after Gene had hauled all his crap back to the computer hall. She'd been sitting in closest proximity to Gene and therefore received the brunt of his attention. 

I really shouldn't complain about Gene. As far as annoying patrons go, he's at a pretty low and inoffensive level. We should really pray for more just like him.

The Even LESS Talented Mr. Ripley

With the mystery of our recent gay porn surfing computer patron in its opening chapter, I thought it would be nice to look back at one of the previous ones.

Our library is no stranger to patrons who want to view porn on our computers. Most of the time it doesn't cause any problems and we just live with it, though with a wary eye. I know it's completely stereotypical and wrong to think that anyone who wants to view internet porn, of any variety, on a public computer is somehow a pervert who's out to do harm to kids. However, considering some of the patrons who regularly walk our floors, like Chester, it's behavior that we do try to monitor on a "just in case" basis.

One of our former regular rogue patrons, The Untalented Mr. Ripley, had certainly viewed his share of gay porn on our computers, but he was at least semi-discrete about it. He kept his windows shrunk down to the bare minimum, so he could get a peek at whatever it was he wanted to see without offending anyone nearby. The only person who ever complained about him was Mr. B-Natural, but Mr. B was mostly interested in trying to get Ripley kicked out so it would free up a computer for him to use.

A few months after I started working at the "liberry", though, we were paid a visit by a far less discrete soul, who I've dubbed the Even Less Talented Mr. Ripley (Mr. E.L.T. for short). We're pretty sure Mr. E.L.T. has more than a few loose screws rolling around in his noggin, cause he was completely conspicuous in his gay porn viewing. I never got the impression that he was doing it on purpose, so that people would notice and be offended or anything. It was more like he was just too stupid to realize that if he was looking at porn on the monitor of a public computer the rest of the public could see it too and not just him. He therefore never seemed shifty or nervous about his viewing habits, because he was completely under the moronic impression that no one would bother to look at what he was looking at.

So about once every couple of weeks, Mr. E.L.T. would come in, plop down and start loading up pictures of hoo hoo dillies for all the world to see. And, like most visitors to porn sites, he'd get attacked by the standard pop-up windows. Only Mr. E.L.T., being very stupid, had no clue how to get rid of them so he'd just shrink em to the bottom of the screen. He also had no idea how to reboot the computer when he was finished surfing, so he'd just get up and leave, with all his porn sites and pop-ups still right there.

One day after Mr. E.L.T. had departed and no other patrons were around, Mrs. A snuck back to the computers and expanded all the pop-ups he'd left there so that they were fully visible on the screen. Then she came up front and told me there was a computer that needed rebooting, figuring I'd go see what was there and be shocked. I went and saw it, but was hardly shocked because I knew full well what would be there cause I knew who had been sitting there the whole time. Instead of making any comment to her, I just kept quiet about it. After a while Mrs. A couldn't stand not knowing if her joke had worked and was forced to ask me about it, thus disarming her own joke bomb. It's nice to take the wind out of her sails once in a while.

The Even Less Talented Mr. Ripley continued visiting us for the better part of a year before his cover was blown and the horror that people REALLY COULD see what he was looking at was made evident to him. While he was in one day, hoo-hoo dillying away, a teenage boy came in to use a computer and the only one available was the one by the staircase, next to Mr. E.L.T.'s computer. Mrs. A reported to us later that she had been on her way upstairs when she heard, "Psst," from the kid.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

The kid silently mouthed something to her that she didn't understand and kept nodding his head in Mr. E.L.T.'s direction.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?" Mrs. A asked, oblivious.

Again the kid silently mouthed his words and nodded more frantically, but she still didn't get it.  Finally, the kid couldn't take the frustration any more. "He's looking at naked men!" the boy said in a loud whisper, pointing directly to Mr. E.L.T.

At this, the Even Less Talented Mr. Ripley's ears perked up and he looked around to see the wide-eyed faces of the kid and Mrs. A staring back at him. He stood up, left his porn right there on the screen and walked out of the library.

We've not seen him since.

Stanky Patron Mystery Theatre

Today was stanky patron day at the "liberry". (Not to be confused with Skanky Patron Day, which is a whole other problem.)

First up was a woman who had actually paid us a stinky visit yesterday as well. Today she was still wearing the same black T-shirt and still smelled of old dried, re-moistened, then dried again sweat. It followed her in a cloud, sticking to everything she passed so that she left a wake of foulness. Of course, she wanted to use a computer.

Next up, our friendly Drifter wandered in with his own cloud of week-old funky B.O. He too wanted a computer.

Soon the computer hall was awaft with the mixture of their fumes, which I knew would need fumigating later on. Our can of Airwick Breeze is getting mighty low these days. Granted these two have nothing on some of the stank factories that have shambled in here in the past, but it was still unpleasant. Throughout the time they were in, I kept wandering into pockets of funk that refused to diffuse. It was like getting slapped in the face with a dead fish--your eyes start watering and you feel like you've been personally assaulted. I liken it to walking down Bourbon Street at night.

Speaking of the Drifter, he came up to the desk last week and asked me a question no other patron has ever posed.

"Where in the area is a good place to meet women?"

"Hmm," I said. "Not sure, really. I'm married, so that kind of information is of little use to me."

He said someone recommended one of the local redneck dance clubs, which might not be a bad answer, but from what I hear the place tends to get a little rough once the clientele are in their cups. I told him this, adding, "I'd be a little scared to go in there, myself. But then again, I'm not much for the drunken dancing scene, unless I'm one of the drunks dancing."

After today, though, I could have given him a valuable tip on meeting women: The ladies aren't usually IN to the whole stanky pits thing. And neither are we, so please... A shower?

He's evidently not doing too bad for himself. He's working in the area and saved up enough money to buy a small motorcycle. Granted, it's one of these moto-cross style bikes that's not exactly designed for street use, but it's transportation all the same. He's already fallen off of it, though, and spent much of our conversation changing his road-rash bandage in front of me.

Later in the afternoon, after the place had time to air out, one of our regular patrons came in with something of a mystery for us. The way this patron tells it, it seems his two sons had been in the "liberry" last week and were using one of our patron computers when they noticed that the man using the computer just down the line seemed to be looking at pictures of something involving naked people. Naturally, they were curious and kept looking to see the pictures the man had on his screen. Suddenly, the kids realized that the two naked people in the picture were both men. They were shocked and ran home to tell dad.

The dad wasn't mad at us. He just wanted to let us know what his boys had witnessed so we would be alert. He knew there wasn't really anything we could do about it, as it's not our policy to keep people from looking at porn (though how this guy got through the filters is another good question).

The thing is, we have no idea who the porn-surfing patron was. Mrs. C suggested Parka, but I told her I've never spied anything with a Y chromosome on his screen EVER, so I seriously doubted it was him.

However, our usual suspects for that particular brand of porn--The Untalented Mr. Ripley and the Even Less Talented Mr. Ripley--haven't been seen here in months. Though it does turn out that one of them has been SEEN elsewhere.

While we were discussing possible candidates, Mrs. C mentioned that she and Mrs. A ran actually into the Untalented Mr. Ripley while visiting a library in another county last week. It seems he's living in a half-way house in that county and using the library there. They said he didn't look as bad as they've seen him in the past, but was still awfully scrawny.

As to the Even Less Talented Mr. Ripley, he's another story to tell.

To Be Continued...

Petty Theft

Thursdays are a busy day for us and most of the "liberry" staff is present at one time or another during the day. This is partially due to Thursday being Story Hour day, with a high kid population, but Thursdays tend to be pretty busy all around.

Today we had Mrs's. A, B, C, Mrs. H and me in house all at the same time. This only leaves out Mrs. J, who's out for a few days with a bum shoulder, and Miss E, who only works weekends. Mrs. H took off shortly after I arrived, leaving the rest of us standing around the circulation desk to shoot the breeze until such a time as it struck us as necessary to find something productive to do.

"Hey, you wanna take this to the post office?" Mrs. A asked Mrs. B, handing her a letter. Mrs. B said sure, as we also had several interlibrary loan packages to go out too. Mrs. A decided it would be good to see if we actually had any money in petty cash to pay for such a venture. She took out our petty cash envelope from its place by the cashbox and began counting through it, tallying up the receipts with what was supposed to be in there. The rest of us continued to converse until Mrs. A announced that the bag had come up short. Real short. Real short to the tune of $80 short.

Now, we've been very careful about keeping track of money since our laptop theft incident with The Amazing Bladder Boy and Jimmy the "Anonymous" Snitch. The petty cash had come up short around then too and we wondered if they, or another unscrupulous patron (take your pick, really) might have had something to do with it. We'd even toyed with the notion that The Untalented Mr. Ripley might have returned to rob us again or that at some point in the past he might have managed to sneak himself a door key and was now using it. No one's seen him around, though.

Since we've been doing a daily drawer count and have been far more careful about our receipts, we've not had much problem with money turning up missing. Sure, we might come up a dollar or so behind some days, but other days we come out a dollar ahead and such occurrences are usually due to someone not writing down copier or printing charges. (Mrs. A admits she is the worst at remembering to do this.)

One of the ways we've been more careful with money that I wasn't even aware of until today has been to hide the petty cash bag in a safe place elsewhere in the library. However, for the past week it has been tucked away in its former home down by the cash box. Why was it there? Cause when I returned from a trip to the post office last Friday, that's where I put it as no one thought to tell me it didn't live there anymore.

"Someone just unzipped the bag and took the twenties," Mrs. A said. "There were five or six twenties in there and now there's only one."

Something about this didn't gel with my memory, though.

"Wait a second," I said. "There weren't five or six twenties in there when I went to the post office last week. I can't swear to it but I'm pretty sure there were only three or four." I explained that I rememberd this because I had to use practically all the twenties that were there to pay for shipping the ILLs and buy a roll of stamps. A roll of stamps is $37 and even at library rate the 10 or so packages would have come to... Well, we didn't know off hand, so we decided to consult the receipt...

...only the receipt wasn't in the petty cash bag.

Mrs. A figured that this solved the mystery. She thought I'd just forgotten to put the receipt in the bag at the post office and that accounted for the missing $80. This sort of thing has been known to happen. Trouble with this theory is, I had NOT forgotten to put the receipt in the bag. I'm the guy who had to stand in the post office for ten minutes while the new guy at the desk slowly weighed and put postage on each of the ILL packages then sold me a roll of stamps. I had the petty cash bag with me, had to take money out of it to pay for everything and I put the receipt right in there when it was handed to me. Plus, the total of my post office purchase was not $80 but more like $65, if memory serves. The receipt for the envelopes I had bought at Dollar General immediately after leaving the post office was still in the petty cash bag, but nothing from the post office.

Even with the missing receipt accounting for $65, there was still around $15 missing and unaccounted for. And I'm not convinced that $15 or $20 or whatever wasn't missing from the bag before last Friday. Like I said, I don't think there were that many $20 bills in the bag when I had it at the post office. However, I may be remembering wrong and I can't prove it either way. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me from any angle, though, because the petty cash bag had been in safe hiding before it was placed in my hands then.

The whole situation made me very angry. It's not like Mrs. A or Mrs. C suspect me of taking the money, though I couldn't blame them if they did. I am, after all, the poor starving spouse of a med-student who's been known to mention how short money tends to get. (Of course, the reason I mention this is so that I might get a few more hours of work thrown my way.) What made me angry, though was that the thing took place on my watch to some degree and I was the guy who brought the bag back and unknowingly put it by the cash box. It just looks bad to me, even if no one else seems to think so. Whether I'm at fault or not, I always feel like I'm the guy who screwed this up and who has fingers pointing at him.

Mrs. A's new theory is that whoever took the $15 to $20 that is genuinely missing probably grabbed it quickly and managed to snag the receipt from the post office as well. I don't know if I can go along with this theory. If the one receipt is gone, who's to say there aren't $15 worth of receipts gone also, accouting for the amount that seems to be missing. I know I put that post office receipt in the bag. I just don't know how it could have gone missing unless someone took it out. Then again, why would anyone remove receipts from the bag?

Only a few months ago we were so loose with the money rules that everyone on staff was able to put IOU's for lunch money in there and pay up a couple days later. Or even wait til payday. I fear such days are behind us.

Drama Drama Drama

Okay. We've had a lot of drama at the liberry lately, but today really pushed it to a new level.

Remember a couple weeks back when we had our laptop stolen? Remember how, clever Junior Detectives that we are, we had narrowed down the list of suspects to two people, one of which had been a daily computer user UNTIL the theft of the laptop? Well there have been new developments in the case and we've FINALLY called the police about it.

Now, mind you, the entire "liberry" staff has been BEGGING Mrs. A to call the cops about the theft since it all went down. I don't know why she didn't want to, unless maybe it's because all our evidence as to who did it was based on a hunch. Thankfully, hunches have now been abandoned.

Today, (before I arrived, of course), one of our key suspects came in and asked if he could speak with my fellow Liberry Ass. Mrs. B in private outside. Let's call him Jimmy the Snitch. So Jimmy tells Mrs. B that he knows who took the laptop and he wants to turn the person in but he wishes to remain anonymous while he does it. He said that he didn't learn of the theft of the laptop for four days after it occurred and once he found out about it he decided he wanted no part of it. According to Jimmy, the laptop's hard drive has been wiped clean and has actually been given to a third party at this point by the second party who originally stole it. Jimmy is willing to provide evidence about the laptop, but he's scared and doesn't want the second party--let's call him The Amazing Bladderboy, as it was his bashful bladder that lead him to our private bathroom where the laptop was stored in the first place--to learn that Jimmy was the one who'd snitched on him. Jimmy also doesn't want the cops to think HE had anything to do with it because Jimmy the Snitch has a long history with the local law enforcement already. He's been brought up on embezzlement charges and taken to court on more than one occasion, including one several years ago where our own Mrs. C served on his jury and was only unable to help convict his ass that time because the evidence was too weak.

You think the drama's flying thick yet? Oh, no. It gets better.

Not only are Jimmy the Snitch and the Amazing Bladderboy friends... they are also LOVERS! Well, maybe WERE is the more appropriate word here...

Still, the fact that they ever were leads me to ask the question, what the hell is it with our library and half-assed gay master-criminals? I mean, we already had the Untalented Mr. Ripley and the Even Less Talented Mr. Ripley... now we've got Jimmy & Bladderboy too?

So anyways... Jimmy not only tells Mrs. B he knows who took the laptop, but he gives her a nice typed up anonymous note to that effect too. It even includes the make and serial number of the laptop for added authenticity. Pretty sweet no? What he doesn't give is the name of the person who took it, i.e. Bladderboy. Then Jimmy the Snitch leaves, saying that if the police are interested he's willing to cooperate.

Mrs. C calls Mrs. A, who's out of town, to let her know all of this and Mrs. A finally relents and tells Mrs. C to call the cops and get the ball rolling on the official investigation (I guess since we've already pretty much wrapped up the un-official one). So Mrs. C calls a guy on the force that she knows, but has to leave a message for him as he's out.

Bout this time, I amble in and hear the above sordid details. I say I figure Jimmy's probably telling the truth about not being in on the laptop's theft since he knows full well that Mrs. C works there and that she had served on the jury against him all those years before and has no great love for him in the first place so she would most certainly suspect his previously-nearly-convicted ass of stealing the laptop in the first place, which is exactly what had happened. Makes sense to me, at least.

Now it's all pretty dramatic up to this point. You'd think we were bout drama'd out for the day, no? Uh uh.

"Isn't that the guy?" Mrs. B said from her position by the liberry's front window.

A moment later the door bumps open and Bladderboy himself comes in. Not only that, but he looks SUPER PISSED. He stalks through our main room and then back toward the computer hall where he has a look at the people there. Evidently he was looking for buddy Jimmy, who wasn't there, so he stalks back through and out the door. Mrs. B, still at the window, quickly notes Bladderboy's license plate number as he drives off, earning her yet another gold star on her Junior Detective Score Card.

By mid afternoon we'd finally gotten through to Mrs. C's policeman friend and he came down to take possession of the anonymous note from Jimmy, plus Bladderboy's license number and to hear our version of the whole matter.

"Wow. You all are doing some detective work here," the officer said.

"Are you kidding? This place is information central," I told him.

"So I should probably be coming up here for tips more often?"

"Oh, yeah."

TO BE CONTINUED...

Notes on Yesterday

Beyond our adventures with Chester, yesterday also brought a couple three other developments, only one of which is actual good news.

The good news is that Mrs. J, our library assistant who recently suffered a heart attack is gong to return to work on February 3.

This will take some investigation.

Mrs. A confirmed that our suspect in the case of the Mystery of the Stolen Laptop has indeed NOT returned to use our computers since it's theft nearly 2 weeks ago. This was a patron who was a DAILY visitor to the premesis, so it seems mighty strange that he has suddenly disappeared. He's been sighted in the area, so we know he's still in town. We're debating what to do about it, but my own suggestion is that we track down the Untalented Mr. Ripley and have him retrieve it for us in exchange for computer privilages.

And last night, while trying to get all my crap done in preparation for closing up the library so I could jet over to play practice, I discovered some NEW crap. Yes indeedy Bob, as I went into our little cubby hole of a public restroom to retrieve some garbage bags, what should I find on the SEAT of our toilet but a smear of fecal matter. Not a tiny smear of poo either. It looked like someone had wiped their ass on the rear portion of the seat itself. This also did not appear to be the accidental splatter of someone suffering intestinal difficulties (a.k.a, the screaming shits). This looked almost certainly intentional. And not only was there a dried streak of shinola on the seat itself, but a more liquid manifestation of it had dripped down onto the rim of the bowl itself and underneath the actual TANK! I had to run all our patrons off and lock all the doors of the library just so no one could hear my curses as I rolled out our kitchen strength spray-bottle of Clorox Cleanup and cleaned that riesty mess up.

Who in their right mind would accidentally shit on the toilet seat and then walk away and leave it? Who wouldn't even make an attempt to clean up after themselves?

I can think of only one person who might commit such a deed with forethought...

...The Serial Shitter.

Which is kind of odd, because I don't think that the man we've always suspected of BEING the Serial Shitter even came in yesterday.

The Secret Origin of The Untalented Mr. Ripley

Tis time to tell the tale of The Untalented Mr. Ripley, one of the liberry's former Rogues Gallery members. (Mind you, he should not be confused with The Even Less Talented Mr. Ripley, who is someone else entirely.)

Much like his literary namesake from the Patricia Highsmith book, the Untalented Mr. Ripley was something of a local con-man in our area who also happened to be gay. His is also a somewhat unfortunate tale.

From what I'm told, several years ago the Untalented Mr. Ripley had been living with his ailing father but was booted out of the house wholesale by his disapproving brother following his father's death. He became something of a drifter after that, living with friends or at local shelters or occasionally renting rooms when he had the money. On the surface, he seemed to exist by doing odd jobs around town, such as helping out with heavy lifting at the local antique stores and art galleries that dominate our down town area. He was also a frequent patron at the library.

Having met the man, I must say that Mr. Ripley was a charming and disarming fellow, albeit sometimes a bit grubby. Back in his hey day, he mainly enjoyed reading and chatting with the staff when he wasn't busy fighting turf wars with Mr. B-Natural for use of what was then our one patron computer. Mr. B-Natural hated the Untalented Mr. Ripley, not only because Mr. B is the grumpiest man in all the world, nor because they were competing for the same computer, but for other reasons entirely that we shall get to shortly.

The Untalented Mr. Ripley ingratiated himself to the library staff early on by helping to defeat a member of the dreaded Fagin family. The Fagins, you see, are a huge family with a long and colorful history of theft and trechery of their own when it comes to the library. They first moved into the area probably 10 years ago and began borrowing lots of books, most of which were never seen again. Overdue notices were showered upon them only to be ignored. After so many months of begging for them to bring books back, the library simply blocked the offending Fagin-patron-record so as to prevent them from borrowing anything else. This only worked in the short term. Ma Fagin would come in and be confronted by "liberry" staff as to the many tomes she had in her possession and would be told her status as a BLOCKED patron. She would then claim she had returned all her books, we would deny it, then she would leave, sans any more books. Then, days later, she would get Pa Fagin to come in for books. Months down the road, when his card had also been blocked, they would start sending in their children--and they have LOTS of children. Eventually, every last Fagin was blocked, so they tried to start over. They would wait for an unsuspecting and unfamiliar liberry assistant (not me, mind you) to be at the circ desk then claim they had just moved to the area and needed cards for the entire family. If the library assistant didn't check the computer ahead of time to make sure they weren't already in there, the Fagins would suddenly have a full roster of cards again and would immediately fill them to capacity with poor, doomed books. Their trechery would eventually be discovered and all their new cards blocked. Why we haven't just called the cops on this family, I have no idea.

(A funny aside: Ma Fagin once tried to apply for a job with one of the other libraries in the area. She managed to make a very good impression on the head librarian there, who called Mrs. A to let her know she'd finally found someone she thought would be a good replacement for a previous deadbeat employee. Upon hearing Ma Fagin's name, Mrs. A told the other director to look up the Fagin's patron records in her own computer and see how many books she had checked out. Ma Fagin, and indeed her spawn, were blocked multiple times in that branch's computer, nixing her hiring right away.)

Some time later, according to Mrs. A, she was lamenting that some of our more expensive and irreplacable books were still in Pa Fagin's possession and would likely never see the inside of the library again. The Untalented Mr. Ripley happened to be listening to this lament and spoke up.

"I can get them back for you," he said.

"You can? How?" Mrs. A inquired.

Mr. Ripley explained that Pa Fagin was actually a friend of his who he visited frequently. (This should have been our first clue not to trust this clown.) Ripley said he'd even seen the very books we wanted back at Chez Fagin the last time he was there. So upon his next visit, the Untalented Mr. Ripley managed to slip away with those books and returned them to us, cementing his reputation as a trusted "liberry" friend. The fact that he so easily displayed a knack for theft and cunning himself while rescuing them should have been our second clue. It was one which would soon come back to haunt him, though.

Having already ingratiated himself to the library staff at the time, no one thought much about leaving Mr. Ripley by himself in the main fiction area on the frequent occasion when a staff member might have to go elsewhere in the library. He wasn't even a suspect when the cashbox began coming up short. That is, until he was caught with his hand in it some weeks later and banned from the library entirely.

I'm not sure how much time passed before Mrs. A, who felt sorry for the man, finally allowed him to return. But his return was strictly limited to the computer area. He was no longer allowed to hang about near the circulation desk where temptation might prove too great.

Years passed.


My first encounter with the Untalented Mr. Ripley was shortly after I began working at the library over two years back. At that point, I knew very little about Mr. Ripley including his former status as cash box thief nor his habit of looking for gay porn on the computers. To me he was just a guy who came in and used the computer every day and was someone Mr. B-Natural seemed to dislike quite a bit. The way I saw it, if Mr. B-Natural is your enemy how bad can you really be?

Granted, we had three patron computers by then so fighting over just one computer was no longer the issue between them, but this didn't seem to matter to Mr. B-Natural. He would come in, write his name on the computer sign in sheet (upside down, as usual) and look to see who else had signed in. If he even saw Mr. Ripley's name on the sign up sheet he would growl at it--actually growl at it. And if he knew which computer Mr. Ripley had been sitting in he would utterly refuse to sit there even if it was the only free computer. Such behavior is what helped solidify Mr. B-Natural's title as grumpiest old man in all the world.

One day Mr. B-Natural decided to issue a warning to me, as the new guy on staff.

"You gotta watch out for that RIPLEY," Mr. B said.

"How come?"

Mr. B-Natural dropped his voice down to a low growl. "He gets on the computers and looks for pictures of naked men."

"Oh," I said. At that early "liberry" career point I had yet to see anyone looking for porn on our computers of any sort. Still, I wasn't about to give Mr. B the satisfaction of seeming at all positive about his warning. "Well, what patrons do on the computers isn't really our business," I told him.

"It better be your business!"

"Why? It isn't illegal to look at porn."

"Yeah, but sometimes..." Mr. B continued, "... sometimes he prints them out."

"Again, not illegal," I said. "Not as long as he pays for the prints, at least."

Mr. B-Natural huffed and puffed and waved a dismissing paw in my direction before stomping out of the library.

What I had said was true, though. Our policy at the time was strictly hands off when it came to what patrons looked at. I mean, if he'd been trying to lure kiddies over to the computer to make them look at it, it would be one thing, but Mr. Ripley mostly used his internet time in chat rooms from what little we could tell. (Of course, now we have all sorts of filtering software to guard against kids accessing porn in the library and all kinds of hoops and parental permission slips a kid has to jump through in order to get on the internet in the first place. Of age patrons can still access porn, if they're willing to come up to the desk and request that we come turn off the filter for them. The filters have been in place for about seven months now and so far not one patron has ever made such a request.)

But I digress...

What we didn't know at the time was that the Untalented Mr. Ripley had not given up his con-man thieving ways, he had just limited it to locations other than the library. I think he saw in Mrs. A an ally he couldn't afford to piss off again. After all, she let him back in the library in a limited fashion, was friendly toward him and occasionally gave him rides to Wal-Mart. Of course, once he was in Wal-Mart he would make an excuse to go off on his own, meeting Mrs. A later at the front counter where he bought one or two small items. What Mrs. A didn't realize was that Mr. Ripley had probably stolen several others while out of her sight, effectively making her an accomplice to his theft. This was a theory we all put together a few days following Mr. Ripley's eventual arrest... not for stealing stuff from Wally World, but elsewhere.

It seems that for months Mr. Ripley had been burgling things from peoples homes and even from the downtown businesses he occasionally worked at. Many of these items were of little use to him personally, being antiques or art, but they were something he could sell later on, or give to people as gifts to help further ingratiate himself to them. He would store them away in abandoned houses in the hinterlands of the county. The police eventually got wise to him and the Untalented Mr. Ripley was arrested and packed off to jail where he remained for several months.

The last we heard, he had been released or paroled and had even been seen at Mrs. V's library, using the computers. We warned her to keep an eye on her cashbox. However, as of this writing, he has not darkened our door again. He remains a former rogue.