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Some Local Library:
Furious Champion Edition
Tuesday, September 30, 2003 - 08:52 p.m. - The Detective
My reasons...
I work 40 hours every week at this library, so I get this kind of shit a little more than everyone else. Asshole.
Monday, September 29, 2003 - 03:23 p.m. - Doc
GO PEDDLE YOUR PAPERS
Don't be fooled. Lots of shit happened this month, most of it I would like to pound into a thin paste with a snow shovel. Me, I've just been either too busy or too fucking tired to write about it.
These other three slackers, though, just got no fucking excuse.
Monday, September 8, 2003 - 07:04 p.m. - Doc
SOME GIRLS ARE BIGGER THAN OTHERS
Hi. Doc here. I'm finished with work, for today - right now, I'm more concerned with getting into my second, third, and fourth screwdriver than I am with anything like objective reportage of the facts, &c. But. Two or three events need to be recorded ("for what?", asks the savvy reader. "alien anthropologists?" indeed. we were not all this terrible. nor were we this generally hopeless, selfish, and vile - those are all just symptoms of the time and place. refer to your scholarly, peer-reviewed materials, please.) and I'm the one to do it. Once again, for lack of anything more imaginative, I'll take the popular "list w/ digressions" format. Let's begin.
Thursday, September 4, evening shift: Les Enfants Terribles. D-Fens over in the childrens' dept. can tell you more about a family - no, actually, a group of humans of this sheer size and self-involved, diffident recklessness could only be referred to as a "gang" or even "horde", ethnic considerations and blood relations notwithstanding - that we at the library refer to as "the Deep Clan" or simply "the Deeps". This is because the group, apparently, consists of one or two adult female caretakers (and I use the word extremely advisedly, i.e. were a shambling horrible vagrant to come into the library and begin systematically raping the children, said caretaker just might look up from their magazine) and anywhere between seven and one thousand children, all of whose names end with the phoneme "deep". I'm sure there's a lesson in here about respecting foreign cultures and their shit-crazy naming conventions, but seriously, people. Until last Thursday, I'd only just heard about the Deeps, that they were terrible and frequent and destructive and pushy. I laughed along, ha ha, sounds terrible, I know what you mean, etc etc, and most notably, glad I don't have to deal with that shit. The Deeps did migrate to the Adult side of the library, and who should be working the desk but myself and the Big Boss (motto: "The Customer is Never Completely Fucking Insane").
Enter two of the Deep children. They approach the Big Boss and tell her that they're bored; can they help out? Can anyone not see where this is going, at this point? They sure did (where "did" = "did not") - the Big Boss put them to work "shelving uncataloged paperbacks". Then the Big Boss disappeared, so that when (a) the Deep children had trouble, and I shit you not, matching colored dots or (b) needed something else to do, good ol' patient, lovable Doc was directly in the line of fire. Fine, I thought, I've got a soft spot for kids. Whatever. I'll help them out. DURRRR BAD MOVE DOC
Their new assignment - and I swear to fucking God this could not be any simpler - put magazines back where they go. No kidding. It is as simple as finding the spot on the shelf marked "Time" and putting the goddamned Time magazines there. This was too hard for them. It literally took me five or six minutes to explain the nature of the task to them; certainly longer than they actually spent on the task itself. After darting about, yammering to each other all high-pitched and giggly, for a handful of instants, they came back to me at the desk and announced that they were "done". Patience, Doc; have another drink and try to remain calm and focused as you relate the next part of the tale:
"I can tell from where I'm sitting that you're not done." It was true; there was a Popular Photography where Wired goes and a Threads in the place of Working Mother. Just for starters.
"No, we're done."
I sighed. "What grade are you in?"
"Seventh." Holy shit, I thought to myself, so much for the stereotype of Indian kids being high-octane baby-genius overachievers. I took a scratch piece of paper, and I wrote the word CAT at the top, in big block letters. Beneath it, I wrote CAT, DOG, and FISH.
"You see this?" I asked, indicating the word CAT at the top of the page. She nodded. "Great. Now can you tell me which word here at the bottom matches it?" She indicated, correctly, the second word CAT. "Good, very good. Now let's take a walk." We walked over to the magazine racks. "What does this say?"
She paused. "Threads."
"And what does this say?"
"Working Mother... oh, I guess we're not done."
"I guess you're not."
Later, I mentioned to the Big Boss that giving a couple of noisy, giggly, really quite stupid children things to do around the library - some of which involved their wandering around, unsupervised, in the workroom - might not be such a good idea. "Hmmmmmmmm," she said. "Maybe." And her big follow-up: NOTHING
Unknown date and time: reported to me by Jackpot on Friday, September 5: The Legacy of SoBig, the Little Virus That Could. Why Jackpot didn't write this up himself, I'll never know - it's a short story, but really quite wonderful. He was working the information desk, and - well, hell, you really need to hear him tell the story for the full effect, even though he never tells the same story the same way twice... I'll do my best.
One of our Internet-lovin' Nigerian patrons came up to the desk, asking for "help with his Internet". He wouldn't state the nature of the problem, instead just grinning and nodding and pointing in the direction of the computer to which he'd been assigned. Wonderful. Jackpot heads over to his computer and looks at the screen - and sees nothing abnormal. "It has a virus," the Nigerian assures him.
"Where?" asks Jackpot.
"There," says the Nigerian, indicating one of those stupid "Evidence Eliminator" pop-up ads that looks like an old-school DOS prompt / readout. You can easily find this pop-up for yourself by visiting any Geocities or pornography website; knock yourself out! And so, Jackpot explains that this is not a virus, that it is nothing more than a clever advertising scheme, and that the computer is fine and still useable, &c &c. Then comes the Million Dollar Line:
"It looks a lot like SoBig," says the Nigerian, patting the monitor meaningfully. Oh, Jesus, how I nearly died when I heard that. It looks a lot like SoBig.
Today: Married w/ Beautiful Children. So I showed up for my shift, and reported to the desk a little bit early, and immediately this weird shambling mess of a man grabbed my eye contact, with a bearing and countenance like he knew me or some shit - which disoriented me, as there are lots of people who I've met and just don't remember, so who knows~? - and asked how'm I doin'. The answer, a pat lie, just fine, and please, God, give me some work to do somewhere else right now. Creep Factor Ten; a skinny, scruffy, wizened redneck with very few of his teeth and a grimy t-shirt reading "Rule #1 of basketball: I RULE". My co-worker (you may remember her as the one that joined Jackpot and I for drinks / vandalized Mr. Blue's car) came out to the desk and blam, she was like flypaper for this specimen. I was soon to find out why.
She quickly messaged me over AIM. This is the guy who was going to show me a picture of his dog. Quick recap: one day, she told me all about this "crazy redneck" that had tried to chat her up; he'd given her McDonald's coupons (what the fuck? is this courtship? some sort of ritual?) and told her all about his dog. The mental picture I'd formed was nothing like this, though - when she said "redneck" I'd pictured some thick-necked, overbearing, doesn't-actually-need-a-pickup-truck, upper-middle class twat just putting the hard word on a public servant Because He Could. This was much more hilarious, and I messaged her to that effect.
Really? This is better than I ever could have imagined.
You've got to help me get out of this.
How?
So I did, eventually, after listening to him talk at her for a good while. He was all over the place - he wanted to know if kids that read twenty books in our summer reading program got ca$h prizes; he wanted us to track down his estranged daughter, who may be working in a library in Wisconsin; he told her that she must be married, with "lots of beautiful children" (I about lost my composure when I heard that line); he assured us that he has no job, no car, no ID, no nothin'.
"You remember me?" he asked my co-worker. She said something non-committal but polite. "Oh yeah? What's my name?" She couldn't answer, and he found this fulfilling and hilarious. "Of course not! I use lots of names!" Wonderful.
Eventually I went into the workroom (badly, I might add - someone [and by "someone" I mean, of course, our increasingly common sense-impaired Big Boss] had stacked a bunch of donated computer shit [and it literally is shit, unless of course you know anyone who wants software and peripherals for an IBM PCjr] directly behind the swinging door, so that the people in the workroom heard the whack of me walking into a door that I thought would open and then the laughter of, well, me) and dialed the reference desk with a "long distance call" that she simply had to take in private. That got rid of him - for the moment.
"You workin' tomorrow?" he asked her, on his way out.
"No, I'm on vacation," she lied.
"Oh," he said. "I'll be here tomorrow!" Wow. We'll see.
Wednesday, September 3, 2003 - 10:41 p.m. - Doc
CONCERNING THE CARNIVAL OF CHAOS, 2 SEPT 2003
I swear, folks, he's an angel in person. Thank the nine hells I had an early shift.
Wednesday, September 3, 2003 - 10:15 a.m. - Defenestrator
DEFENESTRATOR 3:16 SAYS YOU CAN TAKE YOUR SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT AND STICK IT UP YOUR FUCKING FAT ASS!
So this lady comes up to me wanting help with the copy machine. Fine. She wants to know where she can get the "debit card" so she can make copies for cheaper. No problem. I point out where the machine is, and before I can explain the entire procedure to her, she darts off, apparently no longer in need of my assistance. It's all downhill from here. Anyways, I have other work to attend to, so for the moment, Ms. Debit assumes her place among the rest of the refuse that I file away in the "subconscious" file of my gray matter. You can probably guess where this is going. Well, a few minutes later, the lady comes back, debit card in hand, ready to save, save, save. By this point, I am attending to another patron's "emergency" (and tonight, they were ALL "emergencies"), so my boss attends to Ms. Debit, who is apparently having issues with her debit card. She can't quite figure out why her card has no value, when she put a WHOPPING fifty cents on the card. "I'm sorry ma'am, it costs fifty cents to buy the card. You have to add cash value to the card afterwards". Well, in response to my boss' explanation, Ms. Debit points at me and says, "Well, he (indicating yours truly) didn't explain it to me properly." BITCH, WHY DON'T YOU GO FUCK OFF AND TAKE SOME DAMN RESPONSIBILITY!!! MAYBE IF YOU HAD BOTHERED TO LET ME EXPLAIN HOW THE FUCKING SYSTEM WORKS YOU WOULDN'T HAVE WASTED YOUR PRECIOUS FIFTY CENTS ON A FUCKING WORTHLESS PIECE OF PLASTIC!!!
Later that night, this woman and her daughter came up to the desk and asked if we had any dictionaries that she could use for her homework assignment. Simple enough, it seems. So, my boss took the girl over to our reference section and showed her some of the dictionaries that she could put to scholarly use. Well, it seems that our dictionaries weren't advanced enough for the girl as she pouted, "I want an intermediate dictionary!" Boo hoo hoo...if you're so advanced and intermediate, then go find your own fucking dictionary, BITCH!. Later that night, Lil' Ms. Priss complained that she couldn't find the word "spurn" in the dictionary. My boss then took that very same dictionary, flipped a couple of pages, and found "spurn" in its rightful place. Fucking idiot bitch.
Then there was the lady who wanted a book on communities. What the fuck?!
And for those of you who come to the damn library expecting us to do your child's fucking homework assignments for him/her/it, how about you get your lazy child's ass off of fucking-cartoon-fucking-network-dot-fucking-com and make them do their own damned work?! And don't give me that "My
child does not understand English very well" when they damn well know how to come bitching to us about how the computer isn't working.
And for those kids who throw a hissy fit just because we don't spell their name right when we sign them up for computers, well, you can either a) fuck off, b) eat cunt, c) toss my salad, or d) all of the above. AND FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO DON'T EVEN BOTHER
SIGNING UP IN THE FIRST PLACE, GO FUCK YOURSELVES!!!
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