Didn’t Read The Signals

| WA, USA | Books & Reading, Family & Kids, Technology, Theme Of The Month

(I overhear a library patron talking to his small daughter.)

Patron: “You’re turning five today; do you know what that means?”

Daughter: “Uh…”

Patron: “Do you know what you finally get today? It’s so exciting!”

Daughter: “A pink Nintendo DS?!”

Patron: “What? Uh, no. We’re getting you a library card.”

Me: “…weeee! Happy birthday!”

Doesn’t Make A Lycan Sense

| USA | Books & Reading, Geeks Rule, Pets & Animals

(We get a lot of kids at the library where I work. One of our regular customers, who’s about eight years old, walks up to me.)

Customer: “[My name], I have an important question.”

Me: “Yes?”

Customer: “Are werewolves real?”

Me: “Nope, werewolves are made up.”

(He looks taken aback, like that wasn’t the response he was expecting.)

Customer: “What?! But, but wolves are real!”

Me: “Right. But wolves are wolves, and people are people.

Customer: “Huh?”

Me: “If you’re born a wolf, you’re a wolf for the rest of your life. If you’re born a person, you’ll stay a person. So since you were born a person, you’ll never turn into a wolf.”

(The customer thinks about this for a minute.)

Customer: “That doesn’t make any sense!”

(The customer walks away, slowly shaking his head.)

The Mother Should Be Booked

| Edmonton, AB, Canada | Books & Reading, Family & Kids, Top

(I am in high school, and earn money by paging in a library in a low-income area. Pages do the ‘grunt work’ of a library—mostly putting away books and cleaning up after people. I spend a lot of time in the children’s section, and talk a lot with the kids.)

Seven-Year-Old Girl: *showing me a picture book* “This book is really cool!”

Me: “Is it? What’s it about?”

Seven-Year-Old Girl: “It has dragons, and horses, and a bad guy, and fighting!”

Me: “Wow, that sounds like a pretty good book. Are you going to check it out and take it home to read?”

Seven-Year-Old Girl: “No, I can’t.”

Me: “Why not?”

Seven-Year-Old Girl: “My mommy can’t read, and she says that she doesn’t want us to read. She says that books are dumb!”

Life Is Stranger Than The Fiction Section

| SC, USA | Books & Reading, Theme Of The Month, Top, Wild & Unruly

Me: “Sorry, you can’t check this out.”

Patron: “Why not?”

Me: “You have three overdue books.”

Patron: “Is there anyway you can let this slide?”

Me: “Nope.”

(The patron proceeds to take off her shirt.)

Patron: “How about now?”

Me: “No. Please put on your shirt before I call the police.”

(The patron then takes off her pants, pulls aside her underwear, and soaks the floor. It is carpet, so there is a lot of damage. My coworker calls the police.)

Patron: “Now will you let it slide?”

Me: “No.”

Patron: “F*** you!”

(She goes over to a shelf, puts her back against it, and pees all over. It splashes up and ruins several books. She also defecates, picks up one of the books, tears out several pages, and uses it to wipe. The police arrive, and she calls her boyfriend, who is apparently in another section. He pleads with the police to let her free, but they don’t let her. He then adds to the mess that his girlfriend has already made. The police take him too. Later, we find another section that is completely ruined. That must have been where the boyfriend was.)

He’s Not Fine With It

| Zion, IL, USA | Books & Reading, Money

(A few weeks earlier, we had a massive power outage in the area. Even after we got power back, the system was down for a time, and patron accounts were not accessible. Because of this, if anybody wanted to use the public computers, we had to print out a guest pass. The system is now working again.)

Patron: “I’d like a guest pass to use the computer, please.”

Me: “Actually, the system is back up. You should be able to sign in with your card.”

Patron: “The fines on my card are too high; it won’t let me on.”

Me: “Oh. I’m sorry. In that case, you can’t use the computer.”

Patron: “I don’t understand. Somebody printed a guest pass for me last week.”

Me: “That’s because the system was down. Nobody was able to use their cards then. But now that they’re back up, we have to go by the rules.”

Patron: “Tell me something: if somebody came in from a different library district and had to use the computer, what would you do?”

Me: “I’d give them a guest pass.”

Patron: “So how is this any different?”

Me: “If a patron came in from a different library district, then they wouldn’t owe us money.”

Page 16/41First...1415161718...Last
https://notalwaysright.com/tag/library/page/16
notalwaysright.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-44
115572
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:Z63ARCCWHKO6QRQWUXVVFGMBNKEILNRR
<urn:uuid:e091955d-b5ba-4aa2-9688-e57671d3f1e2>
2016-10-27T03:04:26Z
104.24.14.119
sha1:27FO7LFMUQ4NICFVIJS6NGATBXX7BFEB
<urn:uuid:66ab0430-7073-4349-be75-9658fa2ca67e>
https://notalwaysright.com/tag/library/page/16
length
response
<urn:uuid:99cbe370-dada-497b-9477-a72a9ba463e4>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-44
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf