Eyes of Laura Mars

What is it with patrons that like to stare at you at the Ref Desk?  Are they deluded?  Are they near-sighted?  It's really unnerving sometimes when you feel like you are on 'display'.

Amy 'Whine'house

Do you ever encounter members of the public that are total Internet crack addicts? We have plenty here to spare if you would like one of your very own. You know the ones - they get upset over anything and everything that disturbs their online session or prevents them from getting their full two hours on the Internet every day. People...you need to call Dr. Drew and get yourselves to rehab.

911

Server down! Server down!  The public is ready to mutiny and take off our heads because they can't check their Facebook and watch YouTube.  Send reinforcements. Stat!

Road Rager

I've had the worst luck with discourteous drivers lately.  It's really contributing to my road rage.  I don't know what it is with people who don't know how to use their turn signals.  The other day I was driving through a parking lot at a major retail chain and the car in front of me stops dead in the road and just sits there.  I'm thinking are you waiting for a car to pull out or what but too much time had passed for that to have happened. 
Meanwhile this huge SUV decides to forsake all others and squeeze past us on the left (not knowing if a small child or other pedestrian was just lying in wait to jump out from behind a parked car) all the while the car in front of me just sits there. 

My passenger suggested that I lay on the horn and I held up my hands in a questioning gesture like 'What are you doing?' and finally the car moves into a spot on the right side that a car had just exited and as I'm pulling up I notice not one, not two but three empty spaces just beyond where they pulled in.  Is it me or was that simply rude? Is it too much to ask for you to signal that you're turning?  We did all learn that in driver's ed way back in high school, right? 

Expiration Date

One of my least favorite duties at the public library is being a notary.  There was one crazy lady who kept bringing the same handwritten diatribe in every couple of days to get it notarized every time she found a typo or didn't like a certain paragraph she had written.  She even brought it back when she saw that the person who notarized it stamp had expired.  She thought her document had expired too so she wanted someone with a fresh expiration date to re-notarize it.

Where's Clarabelle?

There is a regular patron who cavorts around the library carrying a dummy.  You know, one of those dolls like Howdy Doody.  I've never seen him attempt ventriloquism. He just carries the dummy around all day.  He walks through the stacks, surfs the Internet and stands in line to checkout materials at the circulation desk all with this dummy in his arms.

Uh, What's Up Doc?

A guy came up to the Ref Desk today wearing pink bunny ears and searching for a lost Easter egg.  Oddly enough, he was not the first costumed creature that I've encountered during a typical work day.  

Mad Hatters

Nothing quite like starting your morning watching a bunch of mad patrons wandering through the library stacks on an Easter egg scavenger hunt.  Too funny!

People With Too Much Time on Their Hands

If I Worked There I Would Slit My Wrists

May I See Your Library Card?

Sounds like a simple enough question for a simple enough task but not always.  A co-worker of mine asked to see a guy's library card so she could sign him onto a public Internet terminal and the guy practically did a strip tease in front of her.  He stood at the Ref Desk, unhooked his belt, unzipped his pants only to expose another pair of pants that he was wearing backwards.  He then took his hand and shoved it down the back of his pants and pulled out a wallet.  He opened the wallet and finally flashed his library card. My co-worker and I just kind of looked at each other in bewilderment.  Did he have it stashed between his butt cheeks or something? 

Irony or Stupidity?

There is a rather peculiar gentleman that has been frequenting the library a lot lately.  He's loud, crude, rude and impossible to talk to.  He wears headphones but the music coming out of them is so loud that he screams instead of taking them off so he can hear what you are saying. He constantly tries to engage the Ref Desk staff in conversations about Mein Kampf and Hitler.  He's a real Hitler devotee.  


He showed up today with swastikas drawn all over his t-shirt with the word "Injun" scribbled above them.  He's constantly asking for books on the subject of Nazi Germany but I don't know if he actually reads them or not. The ironic thing is... he's African-American. Now, it's been a while since I studied 20th century European history but I seem to recall that Hitler wasn't exactly fond of black people.  Weren't they persecuted and brutalized by the Nazi regime too?  

Let Your Fingers Do the Walking

A couple of years ago we had a guy who would call the library and tie up all the phone lines.  He would call one line and then another and another eventually tying up all five of our phone lines. We couldn't call out and no one else could call in.  We tried every trick in the book from *69 to not hanging up to get him to stop.  Eventually we had the number blocked but not before he called the library while a police officer was there filling out a complaint form so I handed the phone to the officer so he could talk directly to the guy and the guy just hung up and called 9-1-1. He kept them tied up for a while which is a criminal offense.  


They eventually figured out that the guy was mentally disturbed.  He had a caretaker that was supposed to be monitoring him and his behavior (he'd been known to harass other people before) but every time the caretaker would fall asleep he would jump on the phone and start dialing.

Hill Street Blues

"Frank", one of regular characters used to come in and borrow a couple of quarters to use the pay phone.  Now, we don't normally hand out change to panhandlers but he was an exception.  After a particularly long day of hanging outside and drinking himself senseless, "Frank" would compose himself enough to call a taxi to take him 'to the hill' to the State mental facility so he could get a good night's sleep and sober up.

Heavy Breather

We have one male patron that likes to call and talk to certain women that work in the library. He likes to keep them tied up on the phone asking tediously obnoxious questions just so he can listen to their voices and play with himself on the other side of the line. The ladies can hear him moaning and breathing heavy on the line but the guy just won't 'get off' and the ladies are too polite or too shocked to just hang up. 

Wrong Number

I know I've harped on the whole schizophrenics and caller id thing before but why do people return phone calls when they know that they don't know the person calling or recognize the number on the caller i.d.?  I don't get it.  Why can't they just let it go?


I had a woman call the Ref Desk the other day all upset because someone called and left several messages on her answering machine from our library regarding tax forms.  I assumed they were returning a call about a question that she had but she insisted that she didn't know us, didn't call us, or need to know anything about anything. So why call us back?  

Sexual Chocolate

A rather funny, yet inebriated gentleman came in one day and asked for help finding books on psychics. He claimed that he had been having premonitions that later came true and he was convinced that he had the psychic ability.  He told me that I would find me a real good man that would treat me nice and then casually asked if I liked 'sexual chocolate'? Since the gentleman was African-American I soon got the gist of his question. Still playing along, I said "How 'bout giving me some lucky lottery numbers?"  He said, "Oh no ma'am, that wouldn't be ethical".

Banned For Life

Our library director has a weird set of priorities when it comes to determining who is eligible for a lifetime ban from the library.  You name it - our staff can be cursed at, spit on, physically threatened, stalked, sexually harrassed, but none of that is good enough to get someone banned from the library.  In my tenure, the only person to ever be banned for life was a guy that they caught taking a pocket knife and cutting the fabric on the library furniture. They deemed him 'crazy'.

A Real Nail Biter

During another jaunt down the aisles doing pick up I kept finding fingernails dispersed throughout the 800s.  The weird thing was, they weren't all in the same pile.  It was like some 'lady?' just went merrily through the stacks peeling off her fake fingernails and leaving them deposited in the shelves and on the floor. What kind of nervous habit is that?

Last Request

I don't know why but all the craziness seems to happen on my evening to work. We were quite busy at the Ref Desk one evening when all of a sudden this guy comes through the front door and announces that there is a guy sitting on the roof of a building across the street threatening to jump so what do all the people on the public Internet computers do?  They all file out in to the street to watch.  The police were there trying to talk him down and the fire-fighters were on standby with their ladder truck.  It really was quite a production.