Me and Mrs. Jones

My exhaustive research has revealed that among America's most hazardous jobs in 2006 are Timber Cutter, Structural Metal Worker, Assistant Crack Ho, and Library Circulation Clerk. Allow me to speak from personal experience regarding at least the last of these perilous gigs.

Let's put aside for a moment the obvious. I endure a daily lashing of paper cuts that would make St. Sebastian wince. The constant use of rubber bands renders my hands drier than Waco, Texas, and when they break and snap across my hands I feel like a naughty Catholic schoolboy disciplined by sadistic ruler-wielding nuns. Also, thanks to our tragically un-ergonomic front counter, I may never be able to perpetuate the species.

Perhaps the most hazardous job function of all, however, involves dealing with the patron who will be the Babe Ruth of our Library All Star Hall of Fame (once I gather all the proper materials for my spectacular Customer Appreciation Month front window display later this fall). Due to various health ailments, the legendary Mrs. Jones only shows up in person on rare occasions. Otherwise a diverse and mysterious parade of her minions is dispatched in her stead to pick up and deliver the dozens of romance novels and books-on-tape that are her constant sustenance.

I believe Mrs. Jones was the first patron to gain entrance to the elite "Box Club" behind our Circulation Desk. This highly exclusive designation is awarded to those few ambitious patrons whose incoming reserve materials from other libraries overflow our humble set of holding shelves. Since Mrs. Jones typically has from 20 to 30 items waiting at any time to be picked up, we pack them all away in stacks of boxes while we await her or her couriers' next visit.

Just the simple act of checking in her massive stack of old materials and checking out her new ones is enough to render a less physically fit Circ. Clerk a workman's comp casualty. Beyond the sheer amount of her materials, though, lies the most dire hazard of all. As each sealed plastic bag must be opened and inspected to make sure every last book-on-tape has made it back to the library safely, this usually involves digging through 25 to 30 bags, each of which might have a dozen or more tapes inside.

When one of these bags of Mrs' Jones's is opened, the most noxious cloud of evil fumes since the last time Bill O'Reilly opened his mouth is released. Thanks to Mrs. Jones's 18-pack-a-day cigs habit, her library materials are inundated with a cloud of toxicity more foul than the Chernobyl disaster, a stench that lasts for weeks in and around the bags and their contents and usually my clothes.

For this and other reasons, I sincerely look forward to the day when our increasingly helpfully totalitarian government bans smoking not just in restaurants and public areas, but also inside people's dwellings or anywhere else they may come into contact with library materials. To paraphrase Derek Zoolander, "I think I'm getting the black lung, Papa . . ."

Pomp, Circumstance, Ringtones

Last night I attended the high school graduation ceremony of our library's awesome and brilliant evening page. Looking around the auditorium I also spotted lots of families who visit and bring their kids to our library. It was a nice reminder of the library's role in this really diverse, interesting community.

Of course, they bring not only their kids to the library, but they also bring their cell phones. Plenty of folks in this audience didn't forget to bring their cell phones along for this proud, once-in-a-lifetime occasion either.

While the school's principal was making some introductory remarks, the woman behind me was chatting away on her cell phone like she was just sitting in her kitchen. It wasn't an emergency, she wasn't describing the ceremony to a long-distance family member or friend, and she wasn't lonely at the ceremony by herself. There she sat in the middle of her family's row, just yammering away. I gritted my teeth and turned around just far enough to verify that she wasn't, in fact, carrying on an amazingly one-sided conversation with her mute second cousin. Nope, she was just chatting on the phone.

While I was waiting proudly for my friend to deliver her valedictory address and a song she had written for the occasion, I noticed a guy in the row in front of me messing with his cell phone. Another speaker was describing the hard work and sacrifice the graduates and their families had made to get to this ceremony, but this guy couldn't sacrifice a few minutes away from checking his messages and fooling with his ring tone menu.

After my friend's speech and her really beautiful song, the graduates walked across the stage to receive their diplomas. The school encouraged small groups of family members to come on stage to walk with their graduates and have their pictures taken. For audience members so inclined, this was a fascinating opportunity to people-watch. It was a hundred times more interesting than an evening of television to observe these families in their proud moment, make note of their unique family resemblances, and check out their unusual fashion choices. I also tried to keep myself from counting the number of cell phones strapped to the waistbands of the family celebrants.

Thanks to a rare instance of karmic justice in the universe, somehow nobody's phone actually went off on stage, and nobody made or answered a call while escorting a daughter or sister or grandson to the diploma table. Once they exited stage right and walked back down the aisles to their seats it was, unfortunately, a different story. I know there was a Detroit-Miami basketball game to check the score of, and it's critical to coordinate post-graduation party plans or decide who's driving who to church tomorrow. I just hope, for the sake of this country's future, that fewer people are using their cell phones during their actual high school classes than during the high school graduation ceremonies.

The Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Conclusion

One of the excellent benefits of my former job as a "University Library Catalog Maintenance Unit Technical Processor" was the absolute freedom to choose exactly which 40 hours of the week I wanted to work. Thus, if I felt like celebrating a four-day-weekend just for the hell of it, I could rip off three consecutive 13 1/3 hour days of frenzied cataloging and call it a week. Legend had it that one of our co-workers in the dungeon-like bowels of the department only worked from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. due to either crippling social anxiety disorder or vampirism, but I never did meet her.

Thanks to this fantastically flexible scheduling, I found myself all alone in the office in the early evening of my very last day on the job. I was pulling out of town in a Ryder truck early the next morning, but to satisfy the particular demands of that week's timesheet I was waiting to clock out at 7.00 p.m. on this Friday night.

As everyone else was long gone, I had time to roam the office and take one last pre-nostalgic look around. I also needed to come up with a final art project to leave for my longtime co-conspirator, the legendary Keef. We had wallpapered each other's cubicles for the better part of a year with horrific juxtapositions of our faces plastered on classic album covers, legendary photographs, and timeless masterpieces of art, but the inspiration for an ultimate summation, my magnum opus, had so far eluded me. Another of my co-workers had recently honored me at a going-away party with a reproduction of a tryptich featuring her face as the Virgin Mary, mine over the Baby Jesus, and several of our fellow employees's ID badge faces pasted over the surrounding angels and wise men. I had a lot to live up to for my farewell piece.

Perhaps it was the devotional nature of my friend's going-away gift that sparked my creativity. Maybe it was just having stared up at our 18-foot high ceiling searching for inspiration from above. Whatever, my artistic destiny was sealed when I spotted an improbably tall ladder left behind in the next room by the maintenance guys who had been replacing light bulbs all afternoon. A furious internet search ensued for the exact image I knew I had to have.

After much trial and error with the often-abused "Reduce/Enlarge" function of the office copier and some careful cutting and glueing, I finally completed the masterwork. I made a quick surveillance mission around the whole floor before arranging the unwieldy 16-foot ladder directly over Keef's desk. Several times I nearly tumbled to certain impalement on the sharp corner of the cubicle, maniacally laughing to myself for the dangerous minutes it took to affix Michaelangelo's image of God creating Adam from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to the ceiling over Keef's desk. In my doctored version, our own humble employee ID photo-ed faces took the place of The Lord and His creation. I admired the whole scene from floor level for a little while, and then I took my last walk out the doors of our office into an uncertain future.

I'd been in my new residence 1,500 miles and a time zone away for at least week when Keef finally contacted me. Apparently he'd been leaning back in his chair after a hard day of catalog "Recon" and noticed the 11" X 17" image underneath which he'd been laboring for a good five days. I'm not sure, but I'd like to think his ribcage-shattering laughter brought admirers from cubicles far and wide to take in this breathtaking masterpiece. I understand that, after six years and one nearly disastrous ceiling tile repair job, there it still resides.

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"When you are growing up, there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully--the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equalizer."

--Keith Richards

The Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Part 2

My first real post-college job was in a giant university library's "Technical Services" department. As the only non-AARP member in the office, I got to perform some truly interesting job functions in addition to the daily drudgery of cataloging chores. The best part of my job involved hunting for hours among the seven stories of stacks for books that had been miscataloged and long-lost since the 1930s or earlier. Since most of my co-workers were born before that decade, they apparently didn't feel up to this stair-climbing, stack-hawkeyeing detective gig. For me, it was an awesome opportunity to get the hell out of my cubicle and roam whenever the wanderlust struck.

Across from my own department's gray grid of cubicles lay the impressively named "Recon" office. While I later learned to my great disappointment that their awesome title simply meant "Reconciliation" (of the old card catalog with the new online catalog), my initial fear of these library badasses was heightened about a thousand-fold by the most intimidating of their troops.

The gentleman I came to know as "Keef" looked to have just dismounted a war charger on the Mongolian plains after riding with Genghis Khan's hordes and pillaging the Central Asian steppes. His Sebastian Bach-like locks hung all the way down his back, and his already hateful appearance was accentuated by a long, devilish goatee seemingly not unlike that of the dark prince Satan himself. I caught glimpses of Keef's frightening scowl from between the walls of my cubicle as he stalked in and out of the office in between running small children and elderly women off the streets with his giant Harley, and I shivered quietly to myself.

After a few weeks in the office, I realized that my original impressions were almost the complete opposite of the real Keef. His intimidating manner was only a reflection of deep hatred of his current job, and as two of the only employees there not already eligible to draw Social Security we became good friends.

As it turned out, in addition to being a multi-media artist of the highest caliber--acting, singing, playing guitar, stand-up comedian-ing--Keef was also a hugely talented graphic designer. I learned this one day when returning to my humble cubicle after an hours-long reconnaisance mission through the stacks to find an 8" X 11" image of my head on David Lee Roth's body. Apparently Keef had absconded with my employee ID badge and, after some trial-and-error experiments with the office copy machine, perfectly matched my melon's dimensions to Diamond Dave's hard-rock-posing body.

Thus began the most artistically inspired few months of my life. After retaliating by affixing Keef's head and my own to an Indigo Girls album cover and hanging it on his desk after hours, the battle was joined. Whenever our respective supervisors were away from their desks, we would rush to the copy machine trying to match our employee ID photos to images of the Beastie Boys, Fleetwood Mac, and most horrifyingly in Keef's case a full-size Rolling Stone magazine cover photo of Shania Twain's body with his own leering mug attached. Before long both our cubicles' walls were papered with disturbingly doctored images of our own faces that our co-workers regarded with fear and suspicion. Keef even branched out to "borrow" other employees' IDs for incredibly ambitious projects that began to resemble the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Far too soon the day came when I had to leave my beloved library job and move on to a new gig. I knew I had to leave Keef and the office with a final masterpiece to remember me by, but that spectacular tale can only be told in "The Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Part 3"!

The Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Part 1

Putting aside all false modesty, I believe I may have created my ultimate masterpiece.

After having erected a series of sad, uninspired, some would say utterly incompetent front window displays for the last few months at the bidding of my supervisor, I was finally struck with genuine inspiration. I considered several factors: the demographics of our library's neighborhood (mostly young Hispanic folks), the approaching once-every-four-years mania of the world's largest sporting event (La Copa Mundial!), and my desire to create something that could last at least a few months in the front window before I'd have to make another one (this task is slowly killing me). The finished product will stand for generations as a shining example of the lost folk art of library-front-window-display-making.

First, I delved deep into my personal collection of useless T-shirts for a couple of international soccer-themed items for the background. Then I bummed a couple of sweet England jerseys from a generous friend who didn't seem to mind the fact that they'd be sun-faded into a pale pink hue by the time I get around to changing this front window display again. I dipped into my own hard-earned funds for a World Cup preview magazine with lots of cool, glossy pictures of international soccer superstars which I then cut out and matted in what I hope appears to be an endearingly amateur fashion throughout the display. This was particularly tricky business as I had to take into account both the local rooting interests of our clientele and my conscience's larger concern of actually representing the best players in the world. Anyway, that's how the Mexican national team became ridiculously over-represented at the expense of the Dutch, the English, and even the brilliant Brazilians. Again, it's all about making the "customer" happy here.

The piece de resistance, of course, since this is a freaking library, was a collection of the coolest soccer books our library system could provide. That's right, it's not actually about making the "customer" happy after all--it's about tricking people into reading good stuff. My display has been so well received with rave reviews that even our resident Computer Technician Nazi, who sincerely believes soccer is an international communist conspiracy, praised it for its "symmetry."

Finally the front window is grabbing eyeballs, but herein lies a dilemma. Lately kids have actually been looking at the display, whose actual purpose is to attract attention to a standup billboard which advertises upcoming events at the library. As excited as I am when someone comes up and asks if they can actually check out a book from the window, it tears out a little bit of my heart to break up the lovely perfection of my design. Also, since I've pretty much tapped out our collection of interesting soccer books, all I have left to fill in the holes created by check-outs are some dusty vintage 1970s children's books with images of a young Pele on the cover.

I sort of feel like a frustrated Michaelangelo if he had to watch art collectors remove ceiling panels from the Sistine Chapel, but I suppose getting kids to read is a somewhat acceptable trade-off. It also reminds me of another art masterpiece created in a library in my recent past, a gripping tale that will have to wait until "The Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Part 2!"

I'm Well Known for My Discretion

There's attorney/client privelege. You've got your doctor/patient confidentiality. Secrets told in the confessional are shared only with the priest and, presumably, God.

My job's like that too.

Some say people's innermost truths are revealed by unconscious non-verbal cues or the friends they choose or the clothes they wear. A far more revealing and fascinating barometer is their choice of library materials, a private matter shared only with a discreet Circulation Clerk (and, of course, God, and whoever else is in position to apply the Patriot Act to one's library records).

One of our regular patrons is a friendly old fellow with a taste for car repair manuals and World War II aviation history. Inevitably mixed in with those obvious totems of manhood, however, have been a steady stream of titles along the lines of Reclaim Your Virility and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Erectile Dysfunction. One might begin to suspect his interest in war stories and spark plugs is more of a decoy or overcompensation if one were dabbling in Freudian psychoanalysis, as I assuredly am not.

Another interesting case is the meek, demure, slightly overweight young Hispanic woman who for the last several months has been renewing her copy of The Kama Sutra along with reserving the complete works of Sue Johanson. The fact that she also cultivates an abiding curiosity for all materials related to the Virgin Mary is a matter perhaps best resolved between her and her priest, but I too am there to serve her informational needs.

I'm most fascinated by a middle-aged gentleman who for at least a year and a half has been reserving every possible How to Write and Publish Your Novel-type book in our library system, not to mention loading up on dozens of interlibrary loans on that topic. The interesting thing, though, is seeing what other types of materials he checks out. Judging by the detailed manuals on explosives, the psychological treatises on criminal minds, and other lurid titles, I assume he's working on a gritty, realistic crime novel. However, there will be other weeks when he'll have dozens of books on medieval Persian love poetry or a pile of anatomy/physiology textbooks. So far I've beaten down my insanely curious compulsion to just blurt out, "What the hell are you writing about, man?! I have to know!"

This brings up another concern with which I often struggle. Namely, when is it appropriate for me to comment on the materials that a patron is looking for or having me check out? About 98% of the time I just keep things quick, professional, and comment-free. I often try to obviously avoid even looking at a patron's materials, particularly if they're along the lines of Herpes and You or A Girl's Guide to Menstruation or anything by Ann Coulter. Sometimes, though, I just can't help it. If anybody ever checks out "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" or a novel by T.C. Boyle or a Lucinda Williams CD, I try to give them my most sincere expression and a mostly discreet comment along the lines of, "Oh man, this totally rules." I've haven't yet had anybody say, "Hey, get your damn prying eyes off my books, nosy man!" I'd like to think they might even appreciate a cool guy like me ratifying their good taste.

On the other hand, there is something sacred about the quiet discretion of an anonymous, comment-free transaction of this sort, especially if the above T.C.Boyle fan is going to have to come back next week to pick up How to Deal with 1001 Embarassing Itches. With that in mind, I really have to finish that master's degree before the automated checkout machines put me out of a job.

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"Libraries are brothels for the mind. Which means that librarians are the madams, greeting punters, understanding their strange tastes and needs, and pimping their books."

--Guy Browning

Someday this entry may be referred to as "State's Evidence, Exhibit A"

Often in a dreaded, loathsome, job interview-type situation, one is asked something along the lines of, "Where do you see yourself in five or ten years? What are your long term goals?" Finally, I have devised a sincere, heartfelt, clear-eyed response:

"My long term goal? Well, my long term goal is to be the last man in Western Civilization not to own a cell phone."

My disdain for these awful, soul-killing devices has deep roots, at least to their late-1980s/early 90s prehistoric forebears that were the size of shoeboxes with lightning rod-like antennae. Not until I started working in a public library, however, did my disgust curdle into outright genocidal hatred.

The cell phone situation is really just part of a larger, more mysterious phenomenon of which I've been trying to get to the bottom for a few years now. Due to excellent parenting, I spent a great deal of my 1970s/80s childhood within libraries where the slightest verbal outburst would earn a decisive "shussshhh!!!" Due to dramatically less-impressive study skills, I rarely stepped into a library during my 1990s high school and college years. Somewhere in that long-forgotten decade, a time when flannel shirts ruled the fashion runways and the federal budget surplus grew as steadily and inexorably as the Smashing Pumpkins' career, the rules changed. Sadly, I did not receive notification of said rules.

Apparently, memory-altering radio waves were transmitted througout North America via CIA spy satellites during the first President Bush's last few days in office in order to negate the citizenry's antiquated notion that the library is a place where one quietly whispers, if one has to open one's fool mouth at all. That's the best explanation I can come up with. Now it's often noisier in the damn library than it is in our shuddering, steaming, screaming basement boiler room. The worst offenders, predictably, are the impudent cell phone users.

I mean, it's awful enough when a cell phone goes off in a movie theater, or a classroom, or a church, or a funeral. And it's a thousand times more horrible when the person actually answers and launches into a conversation, trying to negotiate a grocery list with a hard-of-hearing husband or relaying instructions as to how to tape the season finale of "Desperate Housewives." More teeth-grindingly vile still are the friendly folks who are just chatting, just yammering a play-by-play of their day or their random thoughts and hopes and dreams. When they're wandering around a library while shooting the cellular breeze on any of the above topics, they most likely don't realize I'm behind the front counter fashioning a shank out of the small metal bookend I smuggled out of the Juvenile Fiction section.

One jaunty little fellow in a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt strolled into the library a few weeks ago in the middle of a roaring cell phone conversation which I was rude enough to interrupt. Using my finely honed non-verbal communications skills, I gestured toward the four or five signs he had somehow overlooked instructing visitors to "Please take cell phone calls out to the lobby." These subtle signs are even emblazoned with a Ghostbusters-style circle and slash through a caricatured cell phone for those of our patrons who aren't really big readers. This gentleman, however, turned to me with mouth and eyes agape and an expression that couldn't have been more scandalized had I pooped in his cereal.

"Hold on," he yelled into his tiny telephone, "I'm getting thrown out of the library!"

When he returned a few minutes later, he marched straight up to me and demanded, "I really want to know what I was doing that offended you so much!" By this time I was already seething with a simmering rage, just the regular kind I carry around on a day-to-day basis on principle. Trying to be as cheerful as possible (and remembering that the "customer" is always right), I insisted, "You didn't offend me at all. It's just our policy for all cell phone calls to be taken to the lobby." Helpfully, I gestured toward the three signs within my immediate vicinity that explained this in friendly cartoon form.

After arguing with me for a few minutes and maintaining the incredulous look of a coach quarelling with a referee, the yellow-shirt man finally exclaimed, "Well I think that rule is ridiculous, and I think you're ridiculous!!!" My brain immediately fired six or seven provisional responses out of its language center and toward my voice box. Most were deleted due to my cerebral cortex's "Mortgate Payment Reminder" filter which convinced me of several reasons not to get fired that particular day. I do sincerely wish, however, that our library system had an automated 1-800 complaint line number I could have given to this customer. Then I could have politely asked him to take that call out to the lobby too. Instead, I just returned to my desk, pulled back the disguised false door inside my bottom drawer, and removed my primitive prison-style shank.

Sharpening, sharpening . . . always sharpening . . .

Jiminy Christ!

The man with what I believed to be mild head wounds approached the front desk like an injured animal warily seeking human assistance. In a quiet, deeply skeptical tone, he whispered, "Your downtown branch was to fax me some microfilm printouts this morning."

This was all very mysterious. More than the head wounds, the use of our fax machine, which normally only transmits the security guards' complaints to their home office and a stream of odd fax spam advertising I didn't even know existed, for this purpose seemed rather odd. Also, to my knowledge, the last time anyone used microfilm was the late summer of 1963. Nobody else knew anything about this transmission, and he was the type of visitor who inspires other library employees to scatter in search of tasks that look as un-interruptable as possible. I had no such luxury. I was caught in his crosshairs like a helpless deer cornered in a shady glen.

"They assured me it would be here this morning."

Throughout our exchange I attempted numerous exhausting zen techniques to focus solely on his eyes and not the bizarre pattern of red, scabby scratch marks across his balding forehead. Whenever he glanced away for a second, I tried to reconnoiter the ravaged pate, but no ready explanation seemed apparent. He either went through a windshield a few weeks back and had just removed the bandages to let his wounds breathe or else his hair plug transplants were being violently rejected by his scalp.

I always despair of telling people like this that I just can't find the information they're looking for. It never ends there. These sorts of exchanges inevitably drag on for 30 to 45 minutes while my neck becomes sore from nodding along in agreement with whatever mad hypotheses they cook up for how this library could somehow lack the most recent Buenos Aires phone directory or the complete transcripts of Elvis's interviews with the ambassador from Alpha Centauri.

Out of desperation to finish this transaction as soon as possible before this gentleman's forehead exploded, I fished around my desk area, mainly just to satisfy him that I was ever vigilant in the search. Incidentally, each morning when I arrive and peruse my desk behind the front counter, I inevitably find odd archaeological remnants of the primitive beings who inhabited it before me. By that I mean, the crap that other employees carelessly left behind after I left the night before. Just this week in addition to the usual half-finished water bottles and computer repair tools, I discovered, in all seriousness, a used syringe. For the rest of the week I've been stealthily monitoring my co-workers for the unmistakeable signs of intravenous drug use or adult onset diabetes to no avail.

By some miracle, in a generic yellow inter-office envelope buried under somebody else's mis-routed mail I found the unmistakeable microfilm printouts this visitor had described. I didn't have time to completely peruse their contents before passing them along to our suddenly gleeful patron. In one of the oddest lingustic constructions I've ever heard, he exclaimed, "Jiminy Christ!" Then he quickly returned to his original stoic, secret-agent-in-an-ill-fitting-thrift-store- sport-coat demeanor. But "Jiminy Christ"? That's the gosh-damn weirdest combination of faux-obscenity and full-on curse I've ever heard!

The mysterious gentleman left me with one last utterance to ponder for the many hours until I was able to record it here for posterity. Before wandering off into the hazy morning clutching his precious informative cargo, he locked eyes with me and grimly pronounced, "This completes my collection."

You Want to Go Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Sometimes working the front desk of the library is not unlike tending bar. Today, for instance, I hung out with another one of my favorite Library All-Stars, a guy who is in some sense the Norm Peterson of this "Cheers"-like establishment if I were the Woody Boyd pulling the taps.

This patron fits many if not most of the stereotypes one might associate with the Aging Hippie. He's kind of a scraggly dude who wears flip-flops ten months of the year, and he cultivates an intense interest in music (and possibly other products) best described as "psychedelic." He also employs an impressive, if dated, array of descriptive terms when explaining the qualities he appreciates about music, art, TV shows, movies, or humans. Some favorites include the aforementioned and extremely versatile "psychedelic." "Smokin'" usually refers to a guitar solo or a woman. "Blow-away" works for songs or books. "Cold-blooded" is useful for guitar solos, women, 1960s rock concert posters, or hot surfing videos.

The Aging Hippie spends most of his time in the library at our front counter chatting with one of my co-workers or me about any of the subjects mentioned above, with occasional forays into politics, religion or philosophy. (That is, until he discovered www.youtube.com. For the past couple of weeks he's been increasingly drawn to our relatively powerful internet computers to peruse those vast archives for obscure psychedelic rock performances and big-wave surfing videos.)

In his mellow, peace-loving, drug-addled drawl, the Aging Hippie espouses the virtues of obscure bands or fascinating Japanese movies in lengthy detail. When he really gets going, these monologues segue into rambling harangues about the state of the nation or humanity during which my friend will often bring himself to the verge of tears. While he may start out describing the beauty of a psychedelic guitar solo, within five to ten minutes he could easily be emotionally lashing the Bush administration for, among other things, making those smokin' guitar solos far less possible in this cruel world.

A couple of months ago, two of our employees violently took issue with another patron's political views during an originally friendly, bartender-like chat at the counter. When the conversation turned to the war in Iraq, our patron humbly suggested that he could still be a patriotic American while disagreeing with this President's war policies. In a dramatically un-library-like display, one of our librarians and our Computer Nazi literally shouted this patron out of the building in their spittle-fueled rage. While they were both forced to later apologize to this guy who repeatedly insisted to me, "I'm a moderate! All I said was I disagreed with Bush," a definite chilling effect on discourse at the counter was felt.

Luckily the Aging Hippie is immune (or otherwise oblivious) to such threats. When I quietly mentioned that I attended an anti-Bush protest at a nearby college last weekend, he was almost immediately brought to tears of righteous joy. He praised me and my protesting friends for doing our small part to save the country, and when he found out we drove up there in a hybrid vehicle I thought his sincere weeping might even rouse the security guard. The whole story prompted such an excoriating diatribe by the A.H. that I thought it would peel the formica off the desk of my fellow employee who shouted our other patron right out the door not so long ago. Instead, she had to sit there quietly about six feet away while my hippie friend unloaded the detritus of lord knows how many bad acid trips on his way to repeatedly and creatively cursing the Bush family name.

While my protester friends and I had to stand tightly packed within a proscribed "Free Speech Zone" in order to demonstrate against the President last weekend, I definitely felt the cool, slightly cannabis-scented wind of freedom in the library on this day. My hippie friend let loose a stream of raging invective that was interrupted periodically by small children trying to check out their books; meanwhile, "This Land Is Your Land" played on the jukebox in my mind.

Damage Noted

"I need to return this book. I think it's overdue . . . and it was just like this when I checked it out."

It was like this? The cover was torn off and replaced upside down and backwards and scotch-taped by a fine-motor-skill-lacking, thumb-less three-year-old? It was like this when I ordered it from another branch and held it on our special reserve shelf for a week and checked it out to you? The pages were pulled away from the glue and webbing, creating more traumatic spinal damage than a free-fall skydiving accident from 10,000 feet? It was like this? Was it my coffee cup back here behind the counter that was unwittingly planted on page 68 with a brown ring bleeding all the way through to page 84? For real?

"Yeah, it was just like this, seriously."

And this other book you're returning, this paperback sci-fi novel with the front cover torn most of the way off and the pages dog-eared through about page 45 where it's obvious you gave up reading? You found it on our shelf like this and you didn't say anything about it and neither did I when I checked it out to you two months ago? Really?

"Yup."

What about this Celine Dion CD that was tied to the rear bumper of your brother-in law's car after his wedding reception and dragged sixteen miles to the airport parking lot where it sat in the sun and rain for three weeks until the disc resembles a distant, asteroid-scarred lunar surface? And is that cat vomit?

"It was like that when I checked it out, sir."

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Luckily, I can't imagine any of our patrons--or that many employees, for that matter--are fully aware of an obscure notation in the library policy manual regarding our belief or non-belief of "customers." Basically, the policy is as follows: "believe them." I really thought I read this wrong when I went through new-employee orientation, so I asked the trainer two or three times for confirmation. Surprisingly, it is indeed the case.

Beyond being relieved at not having to challenge my mostly conflict-averse personality by daily calling people out on their lies, I thought about how much I liked working for a place that officially basically takes people's word for things. Sure, occasionally some cheating bastard will take advantage of this and lie his way out of having to pay for a brutally bludgeoned book, but most of the time it just makes for a humane, decent environment. Not having to challenge people on their relatively minor transgressions and basically believing that everyone has good intentions seems to make for a better world all around.

This is not to deny that we have a bookshelf so full of undeniably damaged materials that it swells like John Daly's gut. We're definitely going to charge people for their wanton destruction of public property. I'm just glad that in minor cases I don't have to jump over the front counter and wrestle elderly ladies to get them to pay for the damage incurred when their cat threw up on the corner of a Rita Mae Brown mystery that can probably be repaired.

In fact, one of the small pleasures of my job involves marking these repaired items with the "DAMAGE NOTED" stamp so the next friendly patron won't get blamed for the faint whiff of cat vomit accompanying their returned book. I usually write a little explanatory note along with the stamp to describe whatever mishap has befallen the item, and I desperately look forward to the day when anybody else will notice my descriptive efforts. I especially enjoy when kids scrawl something like, "Awesome!" somewhere deep in the text of a book they loved. Along with my initials and the date, I like to note something like, "Exuberant editorial comment" under the official-looking "DAMAGE NOTED" mark.

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On a vaguely related note, just this morning I took the graduate school examination that is the first step toward my becoming one of the employees who sits down in the library versus one that stands up and runs around most of the time. Lately I've been especially bitter about mentally cataloging how much of the sitting-down people's job I actually do in my far-lower-paid, less prestigious, often menial standing-up capacity.

Clearly this sort of class warfare is absurd and hilarious in a profession where even the most lavish benefits involve not having to pay for one's own library fines. Still, I can't help but feel a little bit like I'm selling out my brothers and sisters who stand and move around all day as I move toward sitting-down status. Whether or not I eventually live up to archaic librarian stereotypes one day, I resolve to not forget my homies on the front lines dealing with the serial book-abusers, the reluctant fine-paying complainers, and the terroristic mothers who check out 30 items on their own card and 30 more on each of their seven kids' cards and then betray the slightest hint of impatience with the speed of the process. I hope my damn chair will be a comfortable one.

Those Were the Days

I may have already mentioned the advanced age of the library building in which I labor. Built at the height of the Korean War to withstand a near-direct nuclear blast, there's no doubt this structure will survive any petty abuses that could be inflicted by neighborhood kids, wandering homeless dudes, or the occasional biker gang. (Yeah, we've got a few intricately tattooed, ZZ Top-bearded fellows who roar up to check out some romance paperbacks from time to time).

Another interesting indication of the age of this building is the employee restroom situation. I'm operating strictly on rumor here, but I understand that the upstairs women's employee restroom is a veritable luxury den featuring a plush couch, roomy lockers, and multiple strategically placed mirrors in which to check one's lovely reflection while strolling through a relaxed, salon-type environment. By contrast, the gentleman employee's restroom appears to have been included strictly to satisfy a building code. It seems to have been carved out of a third of a small auxiliary janitor's closet, and its architectural layout more closely resembles that of a primitive phone booth in an all-midget maximum security prison. Good luck changing into a superhero costume in this veritable matchbox, however, because I barely have room to bend over the sink without concussing myself on the towel dispenser. When I write a PhD. dissertation on changing gender roles in the library work force over the past century, exhibit A will be our contrasting 1950s-era restrooms.

Even more frightening than the lavatorial situation is the so-called "boiler room," a term I imagined had been retired along with the era of steam transportation. Our library's basement is a living museum of those days of coal-burning engines and mule-drawn canal barges. Just approaching the door takes a certain amount of steeled-up courage in the face of what sounds like an angry prehistoric beast trapped within the bowels of our Jurassic air conditioning unit. Once inside, a visitor requires little imagination to pretend he is actually viewing the engine room of a World War I German submarine trolling the Atlantic for Allied shipping. The wheezing and spitting sounds of whatever mechanism is pumping away down there would have sent Upton Sinclair reaching for his notebook to record the inevitably gruesome industrial accident that threatens at any moment. For all that sound and fury, the amount of cool air I feel it producing on a daily basis wouldn't blow out the candles on a two-year-old's birthday cake.

Luckily for everyone, our computer technician has installed a combination clock/indoor-outdoor thermometer for monitoring the daily temperature fluctuations within this ancient structure. As I watch the inside temperature climb to the low 80s on a bright spring morn, marvelling at this first-hand demonstration of a greenhouse effect science project in my own workplace and sweating through my clothes at the slightest physical exertion, I also make a mental note to research the long-term effects of asbestos inhalation on worker productivity.