Saturday, November 6, 2010

To Beg or not To Beg...

A guy came in reeking of nicotine begging to use the computer. He did not have a library card or Id. I asked him to see the manager. He continued to beg. When I asked him to stop begging he ripped me a new one for calling him a beggar. Oops. I guess the truth hurts. Because the definition of to beg is: 1. to ask for money, or to ask someone to do something in an urgent way. That's what he was doing. I guess I should sugar coat it next time. I'm making friends and influencing people. Left and Right.

Invisible Signs and the Printer Blues

It never ceases to amaze me.

Due to budget cuts we aren't always able to get our laserjet printer cartridges in a timely manner. (We used to have one or two stored at the branch)

Yesterday, our printer ran out of ink.

Today we've posted several signs in bright lime green that state:

"No Printing Until Further Notice."

One sign on the post as you enter the library.
One at the reservation station.
One on the printer itself.

Still no one sees these signs and want to print and are extra pissed when they can't.

One girl would not take no for an answer, she in fact insisted that there should be a way we could print for her and why wouldn't we do it.

It took all I had not to pick up a pencil and scrap paper and say knock yourself out.

On a similar note our Reservation Receipt Printer ran out of paper. So I took it apart and went to get another roll of paper. The nice thing about the Reservation Station is that people can make reservations to use the computer and the Reservation Receipt Printer will print out a little receipt with the patrons library card number, computer number and time to use the computer. OK so sometimes I have to show them how to decipher the receipt but if they have multiple brain cells then it's pretty simple. So I return to find a guy trying to make a reservation and wondering why he didn't get his freakin' receipt. With the printer all taken apart in front of him. He had to move parts of it to make his reservation.

All I could do was stare.

I think I may live in a village of idiots.

Blood from a....

This lady walks up to me and asks for a Phlebotomy Handbook. After checking the catalog I inform her that we only have Phlebotomy Exam Review books and she asks me "What's that?"

Crap. Crap. Crap.

....and this chick wants to work with needles?

Friday, November 5, 2010

The Moose Has Landed

An older gentleman came in today with a slip of paper wanting to know if a specific phone number was still valid. After going through the gamut of reference questions where I must figure out what in heaven's name this guy actually wants. It becomes clear, kind of, sort of. This guy wants to contact a long lost friend in order to tell them of a family member's death. The actual interview takes 3x the usual amount of time but I finally figure it out.


My immediate unspoken response was..."Have you called the actual number?"


...I mean come on it's a phone number for God's sake. If you want to know if it's a valid number DIAL IT!



My actual spoken response..."Let's see what I can find out for you" ...Freakin' customer service brainwashing.


The Older Gentleman is uncertain of the spelling of the persons first name which was when I asked myself the question "Um...how close a friend where you if you don't know how to spell the person's first name?"


I am unable to locate the lost friend on the Internet and really don't want to continue this search because the guy has phone number and won't. call. it.


Finally he asks me to look up a relative of the person he's looking for. Okay, I'll humor him so ...whack! irony hits me on the side of the head with....oh yes, a hit. I found the relative on peoplefinder which lists the individuals last known cities of residence and known relatives.



I show the Older Gentleman my results and he starts asking me questions which have no context like...he must be the son, or a nephew and she must be his aunt. Right? Huh? Who? WTF.



I finally said "Sir I have no idea what you're talking about, I don't know these people or their relationship to each other. "

A lot of the websites for finding people just dangle a little bit of information in front of you so you'll pay the $14.95 a month for their services. Which might be worth it for some but not for me and well not for this guy either because even if he gets contact information like, say, a phone number he won't call it.


Finally I convinced the guy to try the actual number that he already had and if that didn't work out he could always call 411 (which he had to write down so he'd remember it, we are talking about the number for information...INFORMATION.) in each of the cities the long lost friends relative has lived in and see if there's anyone by the name of Moose listed. Yes the family he's looking for has MOOSE as a surname.

I almost asked if his last name was Ox as in dumb as an...

But that would be rude and against my customer service programming....