Saturday before Thanksgiving

Everyone seems really wound up this weekend, especially the kids. I think it's because a break is coming up. Here's some various news and excitement from today's shift on the adult reference desk.

Dad of one of our clerks who is very slow and was at the computer class this morning: "Right now I'm at the pecking stage, but once I can type I'm gonna be unstoppable!"

A lady spends an hour on the public phone trying to cancel her cable service. We have to tell her twice to keep her voice down and eventually my rule-stickler colleague makes her end her call since the public phone is supposed to be for calls no more than three minutes. All her anger is concentrated at the cable company though so there is none to spare for us.

"My son has a science project about batteries. He's making something out of pennies. I'd like two references for that, please." Not how the library works exactly, lady...

A group needs my help SIX TIMES to print everything they want to print. A new record!

A regular hands me a videocassette that came off the Friends of the Library sales cart. "I found this in the bathroom" (lowering her voice to a whisper) "It was under the toilet!" Eew.

"I'm phobic about germs on your computers and I have an open cut, can I have a band-aid?"

Now the six times printing people are using the copier, which is our number one user-unfriendly machine! Nothing good can come of this.

Nice old couple wants the most recent Consumer Reports on washing machines. As he is looking through the index to figure out which isue it's in the old man says "We had a lady who worked at our home library, a smal town Carnegie library, in the children's section. Boy she was strict about shushing. You whispered in there."

Guy who shouted at me once and then later came back to apologize slides by the desk without making eye contact. I think he's embarrased to talk to me now.