The Fifth Native Americans

Woman: I need a book on the first Native Americans. Not the second or the third or the fifth, the first. It's for the Boy Scots.
Me (in more diplomatic terms): What?
She wanted books about Native American history and culture in 1492 and earlier.

Marx Translations Guy is here but he does not come over and talk to me for once. Too bad a little because I found a 1906 Modern Library edition of Capital in the stacks earlier this week and I kind of wanted to tell him about it.

Tax forms x2.

A man who came to look for his lost hat is angry because apparently someone (not a staff person) found it and threw it away.

Woman with two small children: Do you have the magazine Consumer Reports, in print or online? We have it in print but we keep all issues behind the desk because people steal them, and we had it online until the CR publisher decided it wasn't worth their while to offer it through our e-magazine service. I tell her all this and she leaves without taking advantage of my repeated offers to help her photocopy what she needs from our print issues, but at least she is annoyed a how publishers treat libraries, which is a small and morally-ambiguous victory.

Woman who just walked in the ground floor entrance of our clearly one-story building: Can you tell me where the tax forms are? [note: they are fifteen feet behind me over my shoulder, directly in her line of vision] [She points at the floor] Are they downstairs?

Artist guy I translated a flyer for once: I have a picture book in Spanish and I need to translate it to English, what should I do? Establish that I can help him send an email copy to his bilingual son in California. Dodged a bullet there but start getting dollar signs in my eyes about the idea of setting myself up as a document translator.

Young man: By any chance did someone here find a phone?
Me: About how long ago was it lost?
Him: Mmm...about ten minutes.

Place an interlibrary loan request for a book about Texas Confederate stamps and a purchase request for some Irish Country tales.

The print release pay box makes the rare choice to accept a five dollar bill--for a ten cent print job. It sounds like someone has been having good luck at the slots.

A guy asks, "excuse me, do you have paper?" and I was zoning out so I stare at him for about three seconds like I have no idea what he is saying to me. Embarrasing.

Paper guy: I need to fax this letter to an email.
Me (silently): Uh oh.

Go over to check on  the catalog computers--sad to see a search for 'dispicable me 2'--no results.

Parenthood, the DVD, for a guy who owes us the case of a previous DVD he checked out--but this is Customer Service's problem, not mine.

Coworker: Yaagh! Oh sorry. I thought I had popped my contact lens out, but I must not have because I can still see.

If you logged out of the computer your document is lost. I'm so, so sorry. There is nothing I can do no matter how sad you are.

Lady with a pile of library books, pointing to *my* book display: That is so great!
Me: Thank you!
Lady: But I already have so many books. I will have to come back.

Self check machine troubles--the self-checks and the copier are my favorite library technology because they are the only ones that send out distress signals when something is going wrong.

Pointing to the printer: Excuse me, do you help with this part too?

Can't find a lady's hold for ages until I figure out it's an interlibrary loan so it's held for $2.50 in ransom behind  the counter.

Take an abandoned bag to the lost and found. When I pick it up I see it has a COMPUTER in it!

Little girl shouting over and over (more in excitement than anger): It's time to go! Time to go! Time to go! Time to go!

2014 so far

The person who is supposed to open the library doors at 10 a.m.: "What, it's ten a.m. ALREADY?"

Found in sad old books I am considering for weeding:
-A partially-used gift certificate to Goodwill
-A fancy paper bird (bookmark? Christmas ornament?)
-A printed-out profile from a dating website, 20-something girl "looking for her cowboy"

Marx Translations Guy comes in: "I've been thinking lately about lawgivers...Moses blah blah blah, Mohammed blah blah blah..." he walks away happily with the name of Numa Pompilious, second king of Rome.

There is information about an already-expired grant program in our not-yet-published 2014 brochure.

Angry lady can't find her holds, was looking under someone else's name instead of her own. Who knows why.

A nice man who does not understand the limits of our powers would like us to know that the self-check-out machine that is supposed to read pictures of library cards on smartphones "is being very picky today."

Coworker apparently forgot that January is her month to do the adult display, so it is still stocked with my "As Seen on TV" items from December, and while I was on vacation my colleagues have filled it with extremely weird stuff.

It's maybe going to be a long year.

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!