Poetry lady wanted to see work of contemporary poets…”someone who’s not dead yet!” I thought of a friend of mine who writes poetry and wished she was near. She’d be able to list off several “not dead yet” poets. Me? Not so much. So I found the lady the poetry section of our library and together we spent some fun minutes looking for authors we recognized, asking each other if we thought they were still living. We shared some smiles, a few (hushed, after all it IS the library!) laughs, and she left with a stack of books almost too big for her to handle.
Resume guy was updating his resume and couldn’t get the bullet points to line up. He had messed around so much his resume looked like a connect the dots picture in a coloring book. He came looking for help wondering if we knew anything about Word. Maybe. A couple of clicks and I had it looking worse. He said maybe it was OK the way he had it, and I said, in my most librarianish voice..”Certainly not, this is your RESUME! It has to be perfect!” And a couple more clicks and it was. He was grateful. So was I. I had no idea what I had done to correct his bullet points. I told him to hurry up and save it before we messed it up again. More hushed laughter.
Communist Manifesto girl needed a copy of it, the manifesto, for a paper. Of course our copy was checked out. Aren’t they all? When is the paper due? Oh not till “sometime this summer”, so I had time to pull another copy in from a neighboring branch. “Don’t think I’m weird” she said. “The prof just wants a paper on someone’s thought process, so I chose this.” I don’t think she’s weird, I think she’s more interesting than the average student.
A mother calls, wants a book whose title she’s unsure of. Doesn’t know the author. Might be a picture book. Maybe not. Probably about trains. Thomas the train? No, she doesn’t think so. But maybe. Daughter needs it for a presentation at a local college tomorrow. But we don’t know what the title is. Daughter apparently is too busy to make this call herself. Unsatisfied patron. Sigh. Might need some more hushed laughter now.
Do we have the local paper on microfilm? Yes we do. Can I get a copy of the February 23rd paper from 1918? Well, no. We only go back to 1931. Sigh.
Lots of new patrons signing up for cards this morning. Everyone wants a card to use the internet. Mostly to print resumes, look for work. Scary. I’m thinking we need some loud belly laughs now. All of us. Even if we ARE in a library.
Seems most Saturdays find me working at the library. Not that you can really consider it work, at least not compared to my previous life. Though sometimes I wish I didn’t have to go to work, most of the time I enjoy the people watching that comes with the job. For instance here’s a small smattering of things I noticed while working today:
I spent today at a small rural library. I was the lone staff person there for most of the day, and in some respects I had been nervous about that. But I remembered the first time I worked the reference desk during grad school alone. I found out then that the world did not come to an end if I couldn’t answer something right then. (Check out my blog entries June 1 and June 2, 2007 where I talk about my first solo reference desk experience.) So today I figured that I’d be OK, and I was. In fact it was rather nice spending time in a building built in the 1800’s, with sun shining through the big dusty windows. Between patrons I had the opportunity to read a bit of my own book, something pretty much unheard of in the library world. We are always surrounded by books, but we never have time to read!
Change Is Hard 