The Digital Age without It's Digits...

Lately I've been wondering why I'm getting all the communicably challenged people. I swear I don't know if it's me or if it's something in the tap water that's making it near impossible for people to communicate. Sometimes it's people's listening and comprehension skills or sometimes it's critical thinking and speaking. For instance a patron wanted help making a reservation for one of our computers and I verbally walk this guy through the process. I do this all the time with a minimum of fuss. All goes well until we get to the part where he needs to enter in his pin. I can only find so many ways to tell him that his pin is the LAST FOUR DIGITS of his freakin' phone number before I begin hyperventilating. I finally ask him if the last part of his library card is the same as his phone number. He looks at me like I'm nuts and says why no of course not. Then I had to ask him why he was using the last four digits of his library card number instead of the last four digits of his phone number. His reply was because I didn't tell him his pin was the last for digits of his phone number. Arghhh. This ended up happening more times than I care to admit during the course of this last month. I've come to the conclusion that many of our patrons don't know the complete definition of the word "digits". It was a bit unsettling.