Did you drive here?

Today we had some patrons who caused concern about what might happen if they tried to go out and act on the help we gave them.

First a woman said we had something on hold for her and that it had been on hold for six days, but it wasn't on the shelf. There was a book for her on the shelf, in the right place, but she said it wasn't what she was expecting. I looked everywhere for the title she asked for--no luck. I was shelving at the time so I inflicted her on my coworker at the information desk. Later the coworker came by specifically to tell me, "That woman was so confused. She had never requested that book and kept denying that she had ever requested the one on the shelf, even though it was on the paper list she had with her and it was on the same topic as the book she claimed she had requested. She was really confused. At first she said she didn't want it, but eventually she came back and said she did. She was so confused. I wanted to say, 'lady, did you drive here?!""

Then, this evening a woman called and asked where she could buy raw goat's milk in the area. She was either somewhat deaf or had a terrible phone and I had to shout the names, numbers, and addresses of all our suggestions to her over and over.  As soon as I started to read her anything this would interrupt me with completely unintelligible speech. Not surprisingly, she seemed to really be struggling to write the places down. As you can imagine, there are not a ton of places to buy raw goat's milk, so some of these were going to be quite a drive for her. I didn't have a lot of confidence that she had managed to get the information correctly. I kind of wanted to make her read back the addresses to me because I was worried she'd use them to drive out in the middle of nowhere and then be completely lost. Oh well. If she does, I'm sure she will call the library.