Saturday, November 9, 2013

Solo reference excitement

I am 'running the floor' all by myself this hour because the adult services librarian is at lunch and the children's librarian is supervising a public transit program. It's an exciting time. A small number of reference interactions:

I need A Christmas Carol.
By Charles Dickens?
I don't know. My teacher just told me to get it.
There is a book and a play and a movie, do you need the book?
I think so.
Then I show him our 20 different copies in the childrens' chapter books and he says "No, it needs to be a novel." He won't accept the idea that the original version is a children's book and probably all our editions have pictures and our impasse is only broken by his mom, who specifies the required ISBN. We don't have that edition but I admit I am not as sorry as I am for some patrons who we can't help.

Max Translations Gentleman (he is always very polite to me so I call him a gentleman) wants to know if we have (suppressing a laugh) Killing Jesus, by Glen Beck. I ask if he means O'Reilly, and he says, eh, they're all the same--I know he shares most of my political sympathies and no one else is in earshot so I agree...then he wants to know, "In your opinion, what is the main myth now, that we teach our children?" He is talking about things that movies have been made of so I say, "Well I can't really say about now since I don't have any friends with kids, but for my generation I would say it was definitely the Lion King" so he goes to check that out.

A lovely old man who doesn't have a phone is trying to activate his card for SNAP benefits. Apparently he had trouble and the help line people told him to go to the website, but I think they gave bad advice or he misunderstood. Fortunately it turns out his main problem is that he doesn't have a phone so I offer him the chance to try again using our public phone and he is a lot happier with that. Unfortunately all you can reach on the weekend is the automatic phone system, which I doubt has ever helped anyone. But I tell him he can come back and use our phone any time on Monday.

Adorable brother and sister want help copying and pasting, finding the "Captain Underpants" series, and the sister even accepts my reader's advisory suggestion of The Spiderwick Chronicles!

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