Today I was trying to answer a reference question on the effects of vitamin water on plants, and I ran across the funniest description of a science experiment I have ever read. It can be found at this URL:
http://www.youth.net/nsrc/sci/sci039.html#anchor1019498
…under the title “Should You Feed Your Plants Juice Instead Of Water?”
The other week, I got a phone call from someone who immediately expressed her intention to offer unsolicited input, then proceeded to beat around the bush talking about how libraries are underfunded and such. She described an illuminated map that we used to sell in the gift shop and advised that we start selling them again and require every school building in the state to purchase one and display it prominently for the edification of young minds. However, she continued to tell me, this was not her primary suggestion, which she did not begin to unveil until much more pounding in the vicinity of shrubs. Her unsolicited input was kindly offered, free to the library, with no expectation of monetary compensation. “Do you know of [incredibly famous historical local writer, one of whose characters is the namesake for our city football team]?” she asked me.
MPOW has a system that assigns people to use computers. The other day, I was summoned by a frustrated-looking woman to assist her with it. She pointed to a user number assigned to a particular computer and told me “That’s me, but it won’t let me on!” I looked at her user number, which was a different string of digits from the one at which she was pointing as well as from every other number on the waiting list. “That must be someone else’s number, which is why that computer won’t allow you to log on” I informed her. “I don’t see your number anywhere on this list. I’m not sure if you signed up earlier and got timed out, or what happened. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to sign up again to get on a computer.”
“This crazy message keeps coming up when I try to enter my number, see!” she complained.
It was the message asking if the person really wants to sign up for the computer waiting list. “Oh, that always comes up” I told her.
“NO it doesn’t. YOU PEOPLE are full of BULLSHIT!” she hissed at me and started to mutter angrily.
As a public reference librarian, I am privy to the information desires and delusional ramblings of innumerable citizens. Following are several slices of library life from my workday today. Ideally this can be an ongoing post topic.
{slice 1}
I received this question while staffing our chat reference service:
“What about the top 10 murders in the U.S”
{/slice 1}
{slice 2}
Later, one of our regular patrons was standing by the reference desk, plying me mercilessly with his incessant jibber-jabber. Asking me about how to get free space for a web page, he told me “I’ve never asked someone about this before. I think I should have a web page because I’m writing a book. I have five words I want to use so far. One of them is ‘goatmeat.’”
Addendum: Later, after talking to a librarian from another department, I learned that this fellow is currently intent on writing some sort of dictionary, in which light his comment made slightly more sense.
{/slice 2}
