It's Hard Out Here for a Circ. Clerk

This is about the point where I imagined I would hit the blogging wall, where I would run out of anything to say about this library or anything else, where I would lose what D-Jay the philosophical pimp in the totally great movie "Hustle and Flow" refers to as his "mode." I mean it's been like three straight days of blog-gasmic posting already! How much more weird stuff can happen in a small public library?

And then there's this. One of our fairly regular patrons came up to check out some books, and he seemed to be having a little trouble finding his library card in his over-stuffed wallet. This dude is your standard, friendly-enough, middle-aged redneck who checks out a few western novels at a time and cordially goes on his way. He was really rooting around in that beat-up wallet when I glanced down at its contents. On the very top of his clear plastic inner sleeve of pictures was another well-worn card with an unmistakeable three-letter logo I could even easily read upside down. While he was still prospecting a deeper layer of the wallet for his library card, I sort of turned my head so I could more easily read the rest of the message on the card I saw.

It said the following, in prominent red letters:

"JOIN THE KKK AND FIGHT THE RACE WAR FOR YOUR NATION"

Seriously? In 2006? At first I really thought he might have picked it up as an incredibly idiotic joke at Spencer's Gifts or something, but I had enough time to take a nice long look at it. I just read the fascinating alternative economics book Freakonomics a couple of weeks ago, and probably my favorite part was about the truly heroic muckraker Stetson Kennedy who infiltrated the KKK in the 1940s and publicized their moronic secret codes and rituals through the early "Superman" radio and TV series. I imagine these probably aired right around this time my troglodyte redneck friend here was a little kid, but he must have somehow missed those episodes, or the second half of the 20th century in its entirety. Or, hell, the 19th century.

I just want to let it be known that I did provide this gentleman, and the friendly fellow with the message "Proud to be White" stitched over a Confederate flag patch on the back of his denim jacket who brings his several kids into the library a few times a week, the utterly absolute minimum corporately acceptable level of "customer service."

Three-Dimensional Blasphemy

I'm considering publishing a glossy coffee table book filled with sumptuous pictures of all the weird crap that our patrons leave in their returned library books. In my short time here in the business, I've found an $800 IRS tax return check, a $20 bill, and a Green Card. Right now I'm building a personal collection of inspirational bookmarks with religious themes like the Beatitudes or pictures of various saints.

The real jewel of my collection, though, is a 3-D image of Pope John Paul II from the Vatican's "Psychedelic Pontiffs!" merchandising line. Another personal favorite is a bookmark apparently created and marketed by the ultra-hip Elks Club to appeal to today's impressionable youth. The message on the bookmark, which is a sentiment I'm hearing from all the cool kids nowadays, is "I'd rather eat bugs than do drugs!!!"

I don't know, maybe the cool kids aren't hanging out in libraries anymore like we did when I was a kid.

Treason! Slander! Pornographic Leather Miniskirts!

Perhaps my favorite repeat library customer, I mean patron, is a pretty friendly, rather shabby older dude who drives a Joad-family-truckster-looking, at least 35-year-old heap that dies about once a month, forcing him to call in and have me renew his couple of dozen books over the phone. He's probably the most avid user of our Interlibrary Loan system, to where I've made him his own file for the many dozens of titles he's seeking. He dresses almost exclusively in a wardrobe of medical scrubs, possibly for the comfort factor but more likely for the cheapness. On this stormy morning when I just saw him, he mentioned that the tornado siren in his neighborhood hasn't been functioning for months, but no one has come to fix it--apparently a government funding problem.

What kinds of materials does this gentleman check out from our library? Well, I'm pretty sure he's gone through the collected works of Ann Coulter at least three times. He's also a reliably dedicated patron of our growing "Fear and Deport All Latinos" paranoiac department. Anything that smells of hatred and distrust of all governments, we can't keep it on the shelves with this guy around.

He's so damn friendly, though. Unfortunately, I know that, unlike myself, he's not just looking at this stuff (or listening to, say, Sean Hannity or Michael Savage, or watching FoxNews) for sick vicarious thrills or to see what the enemy is thinking. I'm fairly certain this fellow is a genuine black-helicopter-watching true believer.

I'm just always compelled to ask him, "So how's Bush-onomics working out for you then?" but I'm usually too busy filling out his latest Inter-Library Loan paperwork or chatting about how hot and run-down our poorly funded little library is.

John Wilkes Booth on a Unicorn

Later Saturday afternoon I turned and looked out the front window of the library to see Nearly-Senseless Nick the "Security Guard" wandering aimlessly out into the street "on patrol" and I thought for a minute I was going to have to rush into traffic to save him from being run over by the ice cream pushcart man.

Later still on that sweltering, endlessly annoying, long-as-hell Saturday afternoon in the library, I eavesdropped from the Circulation Desk on our Computer Nazi's extended, totally serious conversation with the aforementioned really stinky, rather insane homeless guy who reads dozens of foreign language websites (Russian, Swedish, Swahili, I'm not kidding) for an hour and a half a day. Computer Nazi lectured this poor bastard on how the Democratic party is a front for Communist sympathizers, and how Communism is just lying dormant right now but is a few short steps away from world domination nevertheless. I just picked up snippets of this conversation, but a sick part of me would have loved to listen in more closely, even though both participants in this back-and-forth are, in their respective ways, absolutely howl-at-the-moon loony . CompNazi goes on to say how he has a "nineteenth century attitude" about how everyone should pretty much take care of himself and his own family and to hell with everybody else. He is specifically going off on how much he "despises" DHS for interfering with families. This went on for like five minutes, leading me to suspect that our friendly computer technologist might have had more than a theoretical relationship with the aforementioned government organization. I will lecture at length on this topic later, but aren't we library workers all in a very real sense participating in the largest and possibly most successful socialist entity in America today? I mean, especially now that Social Security is allegedly on its last legs? Should I alert CompNazi to this so he can start having his paychecks directly deposited to the John Birch Society's Oklahoma Chapter for Liquidating All Government Programs Including Stop Signs and Air Traffic Controllers (the shadowy but frightening J.B.S./O.C.L.A.G.P.I.S.S.A.T.C., to whom I may refer at some length in future postings)???

Well, according to CompNazi, "People called it 'voodoo economics,' but it worked, it continues to work, and it's worked for the last 200 years!!!" Stinky Homeless Guy nods in tacit agreement, or else he just spotted a winged unicorn circling the Reference Desk being ridden by John Wilkes Booth. It's hard to tell.

!Viva la Revolucion!

When my communist takeover of the library system is complete and library pages throughout the county spray-paint templates of my image on their book trucks a la Che Guevara, here's the first change I'm going to make. No longer will we refer to the folks who come through our doors as "customers." They're patrons, dammit.

I don't know when this insidious sub-Orwellian decree was handed down from whatever administration, but I can guess what inspired it. Just like other institutions like schools and churches, somebody thought we should start running libraries on the "business model." Well, just like public schools, for example, I don't believe the public library is a place where money is to be exchanged for goods and services, with the possible exception of those folks who run up outrageous fines, many of which I secretly clear from their records if the offenders are nice enough to me or if they look like their meager funds could better be spent elsewhere.

In any case, I don't want to degrade these people by calling them mere "customers." The library is about the only place I can think of where a CEO, a smelly homeless guy, the President of the United States, and my mom can all go and basically be treated the same way. Not in the justice system, not in a church, and not in a hell of a lot of retail outlets either. And I'm not retailing anything to these people, either, so any administrators who talk about "customer service" in here can save the misplaced corporate jargon.

When an 80-something-year-old woman who lives on food stamps and Social Insecurity donates her once-read paperbacks to the library like the old woman in the Biblical parable who gives a far greater percentage of her meager possessions as compared to any rich old bastard, that old woman isn't a "customer." She's a patron.

Nearly-Hearingless Nick

As I walked into the library building an hour before we opened for business last Saturday morning I noticed a car in our handicapped parking space out back. A closer look showed me it was our deaf, dumb, possibly blind and now apparently handicapped backup security guard, Nick. With an armful of books and my lunch and other crap, I was attempting to punch in the security code and enter the side door when our fearless protector wobbled out of his car and took a few steps before hollering, "I got a question for ya!!!" Knowing there was no way in hell he was going to hear me from approximately 20 feet away, I was forced to give the (hopefully) universal signal for, "Just hold on one g.d. minute while I go inside and put down all my crap before I answer your most likely inane question!"

As an aside, it seems like this is a common problem in the security guard community. I can't tell you how many times I've come in the door with armfuls of stuff at like 8.01 a.m. or 11.03 a.m. just trying to get my crap together for work when I'm immediately ambushed by our guard at the security desk with some amazingly trivial concern before I can even take two steps toward my desk. It's a thousand times worse for the library manager. She jumps him like she's a pajama-wearing Vietcong guerrilla about two-thirds of a second after he sneaks in the door in the morning, and I can tell he's post-traumatically stress-disorder rattled for like the next five hours.

Anyway, I soon learned that Nearly Hearing-less Nick was petrified that we might get a big FedEx or UPS delivery sometime Saturday because he had no idea how to open the garage door, nor is he in any condition to help unload anything larger than a shoebox full of styrofoam pebbles. I assured him that there would be no delivery on Saturday, and he looked as relieved as he would have if I'd granted him the gift of auditory competence.

By a quarter to eleven it had already been one hell of a morning for Nick and the Nearly-Security-Guard-less Library. I don't actually know what he'd been up to that exhausted him so, but when I glanced over at the Security Desk he was so deeply asleep that you'd think he'd been chasing rapscallions around the building for two and a half straight hours instead of just gazing cherubically at his shoes. He just looked like a little baby in a cradle over there sleeping away without a care in the world with those massive cheeks of his. When the regular US mail delivery came through the front door as I assured Nick it would, not even the rather loud *thud* of the big white box of mail rustled him from his quiet slumber. I was getting a little embarassed at the whole scene, so I attempted to rouse him by unloading the smaller packages and dropping them on the counter. Nope. He was out.

I was just going to wait until the tornado siren at noon kicked in, but something else shook him loose from the tender arms of sleep. I was carrying the big box of US mail to our back room when he cheerfully slurred to me, still halfway in a hypnogogic state, "I told you we'd get a delivery today!"

I could have stabbed him right there, but I'd just heard from our other security guard that it is time for security companies to make new bids on our library system's contract and that there are a couple of companies that will probably under-bid our current provider. Under-bid these Barney Fifes? The mind boggles at the majesty of the free enterprise capitalist system.

Fighting the Stink

Literally seconds after pushing the "Create My Blog" button, the Security Guard at the public library where I work as a Circulation Clerk accosted me with urgent news regarding one of our particularly bizarre customers. This one is apparently starting a one-woman campaign to eject especially stinky people from our library--a move that is specifically directed toward another of our batshit insane patrons who, truth be told, could use an occasional dash of Old Spice. The anti-stink activist is the same woman who once claimed she'd gotten a huge sliver in her finger from one of our wooden chairs, and when I brought over our first aid kit she begged me to remove this three-week-old-looking festering plank from her finger myself. Not being trained as an EMT, I respectfully declined. When she broke into tears when recounting how she'd been fired two days after starting her new job at Target (I had, in fact, previously noted the familiarity of her red-polo/khaki-slacks ensemble), I slowly backed away and resolved never again to make direct eye contact.

When first contemplating writing my own blog, I wondered if I'd ever have enough material to make it worthwhile. Now that I've spent a few minutes looking around my relatively small, relatively modest library which is packed with lunatic patrons, frustrated employees, and an armed security guard who is frantically hanging on to her last strands of mental competence, I'm a little less concerned.