Come here! Look at this!

The Ref Desk was either silent, or I had 5 people in front of me. All day. Feast or famine. Most of it was the usual stuff: Where's the bathroom? The elevator's out, how do I get upstairs? Where's the copier? How can I get on the wifi? Why does this public internet computer want a password?

Then there was the woman who, with great excitement, came up to me at the desk and asked me to go back to her internet computer. "You have to look at this! Come see!" Expecting to see her computer on fire or porn on her neighbor's screen, I was stunned to see Facebook pictures...of puppies. Her niece's 4 hour old chihuahua puppies.

Did ya miss me?

Been on vacation the last couple weeks, which has been nice, but I was back to the grind today, back to Ye Olde Reference Deske.

And so glad I was, too. I got panhandled by one of the homeless guys. While sitting at the desk, no less!

Also, got into a 10 minute debate about whether listening to an unabridged book on tape counts as "reading" a book or not. I say it does, and that, if anything, it expands the listener's imagination. My sparring partner maintained that the only way to fully expand one's imagination was to read the story from the text. This was from a professional filmmaker.

And, I sheepishly confess that I had a stumper for a while. I ended up taking the caller's name and number, doing some research, and calling back with my findings. The entire time I was searching, I could hear my partner in the back of my mind saying, "What, you don't know this???" It took me far too long to determine if the US budget for fiscal year 2011 has been passed yet. (It hasn't, we're on a continuation through the 3rd, then it's anybody's guess.) The whole experience made me want to go find some high school Civics class and sit in on it. For about 20 years.

Had another one of those heartbreaking-but-this-is-why-I-do-this moments. Helped a young woman find her mother's death notice from the newspaper. She was 6 when her mother died in a car accident, and had never had any of the newspaper clippings. So, we found the death notice, the obituary, and a couple of articles about the hit-and-run drunk driving accident. She had tears in her eyes the whole time, but also a smile. She printed out copies to mail to her sister who just started college.

Busy, busy!

Too much going on just now for me to share everything, but trust me, I've been taking notes & I have some goodies to share. Including about 97 bajillion more flushes to add to the count.

There was one stand-out moment worth noting.

As I was sitting at the desk today, a man I've seen around the library a couple of times walked past the desk saying, "Wanna play footsie?" And he kept going. No eye contact, no pause in his stride, no cell phone tucked up to ear.

Still trying to decide if he was asking me or the desk.

Welcome, November!

Been a quiet week at the ol' ref desk. The weather has been wild--unusually warm followed by unusually windy. I figure people have been outside to enjoy it, followed by being outside to clean up from it.

On Saturday, my would-be hockey coach came back, and wanted my assistance in checking his email to see if he got the job. Except for one thing: He can't remember where his email is. Is it Yahoo? Is it Gmail? Is it Hotmail? We never did figure it out, trying his screen name and password on all three without success. He said he'd check with a friend who helped him set up his email in the first place.

Spent half an hour trying to find books that would help a high schooler do a paper about why countries sent out explorers and, more specifically, why some countries didn't. That's no small subject, and the student couldn't narrow it down to specific countries to be explored. It was also not about specific explorers, their journeys, or the lands 'discovered' or the empires that followed. Eventually, we found a few, then I went back to the desk to do some more searching. Found a gorgeous atlas (in the Reference collection) about the age of exploration, and took it back upstairs to where I'd left the student. And proceeded to startle the heck out of both of us when I put the book on the desk. Hadn't realized my approach was so stealthy, and I jumped at the student jumping!

Only other thing that's really standing out from the last few days: A tremendous surge in the ongoing counts:

~~~~~

Nose Picking: 3 (no change)

Boarding Passes: 5 (no change)

Toilet Clanks: +2, total of 7.

Toilet Flushes: +9, for a total of 10. Heard NINE flushes in 4 1/2 hours. That's impressive work!

So YOU'RE the one!

Absurdly busy first two hours at reference this morning, then two absurdly quiet hours. I'm still debating--would I rather have it like that or just a steady stream?

Saw the man who printed the huge document. Now 100% convinced he's not going to pay for it. Will put it in the recycling or turn it over to my industrious colleagues who make and use scratch paper.

The printer that spits out public internet computer reservations stopped working. This creates havoc as nobody remembers which computer they were assigned, and they all want to hop onto the most recently vacated one. Had to look up a dozen reservations by user's library card number to get things straightened out, once I got the printer working again. A good swift thunking helped.

Helped create an email account and facebook account for a woman today. The deeper into the process we went, the more certain I became that she's 95% illiterate. Need to figure out the local resources for adult literacy. We have all kinds of information about other programs, but I've missed the important one, apparently. Will have to talk to a colleague tomorrow.

Only other interesting one was someone who called to ask about the indexes for a huge reference book series we're thinking about withdrawing. He knew the span of dates for the entire series we've collected, and which volumes had individual indexes in their backs. He wanted to know about the dates of the overall indexes, and how they were formatted. When I mentioned the call to a colleague, she knew exactly who it was who had called. We pretty much agreed that the caller was the one and only person interested in this huge multi-volume set. I guess it's true that one man's treasure is a weeding reference librarian's trash.

Or something to that effect.

~~~~~

No ongoing counts noted in the busy-ness.

Short, quiet Saturday

A quiet day. It was gorgeous out, so I think most people were enjoying the weather. Only had four reference calls all day, and only a couple of questions for finding books. Spent half an hour talking with a regular about his current project, and somehow we got to discussing travel. Found out he's been to every county in the United States! Other than that, only really had two real standout moments during the day.

A regular caller in a nearby town (we all recognize her voice) called in a panic, "Help me identify these bugs in my kitchen! They're red, and they have...how many legs do they have, honey?" "Six!" "They have six legs! What are they?" I referred her to the local college's agriculture and entomology department.

The other was when a man with spiky hair and a freshly knocked out tooth wanted to use a computer. I got him started, and went back to the desk. After a while, I was aware that the printer tied to the public computers was printing...and printing...and printing...and printing. He came over and asked if it was his document. We figured out it was, and the printer stopped. Except it didn't stop, it was only pausing, regrouping before it spit out still more. 160 pages in total! We charge $0.10/per page, so that was $16.00...and, of course, he said he didn't have his wallet. He offered to give us his bank account number, so I explained that that wouldn't do us any good. He asked we'd accept a pre-paid phone card. Uh, no. So, he left his name, and I put the document in a folder. If he does come back on Monday like he said he will, he can pay then and take it home. I think he was surprised at how big the document was, but the whole thing was a little surreal. I give it less than 50/50 odds he'll be back.

~~~~~

Nose Picking: 3 (unchanged)

Boarding Passes: 5 (unchanged)

Toilet Clanks: +2, total of 5. And a full on flush!

Nothing major to report, Sir.

Have done a few short shifts on the reference desk since my last update. Only a couple of interesting bits.

Someone went out of her way to hand me a pencil with no point, and purple sticky looking stuff around the tip. It was so odd, she just walked up to me with it held out way in front of her, almost like approaching for fencing. I said, ever so brightly, "Oh, you're bringing me a pencil?" She replied, "I found it upstairs. It's broken. Someone needs to fix it," as she walked away.

OK, I'll get right on that.

~~~~

Nose Picking: 3

Boarding Passes: 5

Toilet seat clanking from a bathroom upstairs (requires that someone has bathroom door open as someone drops the seat down in order for the noise to reverberate): Estimating 3 as cumulative total since beginning of blog. Gender of bathroom as yet undetermined.