Murder in the Stacks

I actually once worked in a library with gargoyles.

On my very first day of employment in this sprawling, seven-level gothic building, I was given an orientation by my boss that stressed the particular importance of one special bit of instruction. "Make sure," she insisted, "you do the 'Murder in the Stacks' training as soon as possible." As I toured the facilities, I was pretty sure I knew exactly why she felt this was so critical.

Like many of your creepier libraries, this building featured long, lonely stacks of books on quiet, isolated floors, not at all unlike The Overlook Hotel. Since a significant part of my job involved hunting through rarely-traversed corners for mis-cataloged books that had been lost to mankind for decades, I quickly became familiar with many of its cranniest nooks.

For whatever reason, the zombified human resources department was dragging its feet when it came to the critical culmination of my training. "You haven't done 'Murder in the Stacks' yet?" several of my co-workers anxiously asked. No, not yet, and I was out there every day in those murderous stacks trying my best to not do an impersonation of a scantily clad cheerleader in a slasher movie.

Aside from the general creepiness of the echoing stacks full of dusty volumes, I began to imagine the dangers lurking around every corner of the library. "If I were a crazed serial murderer," I thought, "what better venue could I find for nubile young victims than a massive, quiet library full of sleepy students and not a conscious security guard in sight?" Each day that passed without the invaluable, potentially life-saving training made me want to solidify the contents of my last will and testament and wrap up all my unfinished business on this mortal coil.

I then began to consider the building's own potential for creating homicidal madness. I had gotten myself lost in this labrynth of books plenty of times already, and I could well imagine a young college student's psychotic break under the awful pressures of undergraduate academia. What better place to stow away a body for several months than the Chinese-Japanese-Korean archives whose catalog I maintained and whose stacks were never, ever, ever visited?

Then there were the potential horrors of the space-saver stacks. Plenty of the books for which I hunted zealously were quite possibly hidden within these mechanically shifting shelves, perfect for trapping and smashing a human victim in a sadistic replay of the Star Wars garbage compactor scene. Without the "Murder in the Stacks" training, I was clearly living on borrowed time.

When the appointed day finally came, I was shuffled into a spare broom closet of the humble human resources headquarters. I inserted an ancient VHS tape with a yellowed label on which the faded legend "Murder in the Stacks" was faintly visible. I thought admiringly of my many brave co-workers for whom this vital piece of almost-martial arts training must have proved invaluable on their own forays into the harrowing stacks of horror.

As the videotape crackled to life, I began to ask myself why such a critical vessel of life-saving information was being narrated by poorly-outfitted second-year drama school geeks? One was dressed in a moth-eaten approximation of a Sherlock Holmes costume while the other's thrift store polyester suit was apparently meant to portray the dear Mr. Watson. Through the appallingly amateurish British accents of these literal sophomores, I puzzled out the true meaning of "Murder in the Stacks." What they illustrated for me, in excrutiatingly repetitive detail, was the proper method for handling the many old and fragile volumes the gargoyle-ridden library held. What it all boiled down to, in a crystal of information I could have absorbed in an eight-second demonstration, was, "Don't pull the books off the shelves by the top of their spines! Handle them very, very carefully! Don't commit book murder in the stacks!"

Oh.

I still never liked the looks of those college students.

Halloween Comes Early

Our library employs a part-time computer expert who arrives at 4.00 p.m. each day ostensibly to assist our patrons with their computer difficulties. Generally this involves ill-tempered tutorials on the use of the "Print" function or finding the space bar on the keyboard. This gentleman is not entirely unlike Jimmy Fallon's recurring SNL character, "Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy," in his technological condescesion and general misanthropy toward any human life forms who lack 2048 MBs of RAM on their Dell XPS M1710 Intel Core 2 Duos. He is Nick Burns if Nick Burns were the unholy love child of Ted Nugent and Ayn Rand, as portrayed by John Goodman at his most corpulent.

Perhaps the most salient personal characteristic of our computer guy, though, is his daily uniform. In my 24 months of interaction with this fellow, I have never, ever seen him wear anything other than black pants and a white button-down shirt. Ever.

For the first few weeks of my employment here I found this situation "quirky" and "amusing." By the end of the first month I was stricken with daily fits of teeth-grinding rage when he would walk through the door in the same brutally inevitable ensemble. After calming down, I grew to appreciate the utility of this situation: When someone would approach me with a computer issue during the Computer Guy's work hours, I could simply say, "You can ask the big guy in the white shirt." It's a foolproof method. You really can't miss him.

Immediately upon his entry into the building yesterday, I could sense the fabric of the known universe beginning to violently tear apart. The windows rattled as if buffeted by hurricane-force winds. The lights flickered on and off in a manner not unlike a poltergeist attack. Small animals in the neighborhood could sense something deeply amiss, and herds of mice ran shrieking from underneath the surrounding buildings.

The Computer Guy was wearing a black shirt.

I wouldn't have been more dumbfounded if he'd walked through the door wearing a pink Speedo and matching hoop nipple rings with a rainbow flag tattoo across his belly.

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and an electric current of fear and panic filled the room. Had his soul been taken hostage by a demonic doppelganger? Was he mourning the crash death of his home mainframe, about which he's lectured me at great academic length? Had he suffered a severe head injury?

The truth was both far more prosaic and reliably delivered in the manner I've come to expect and avoid whenever presenting the Computer Guy with anything ending in a question mark. He described for me in great detail the strange and unpredictable events of his day that had led him to this place in this shirt. Short answer: he forgot.

Fifteen minutes later, when he was done explaining that apparently insanely bizarre situation, I reflected on the events of the past few days. Our clock at the front counter has been unaccountably switching forward and backward, sometimes an hour fast and sometimes an hour slow. We've had a series of police reports of phantom 911 calls from our phones. The bathroom doors that used to push open and closed now strangely require the turn of a handle. (My inability to insert this fact into my muscle memory has resulted in me nearly dislocating my shoulder trying to push them open for the past week.) Our witchcraft books are disappearing from the shelves at an alarming rate. (Actually, strike that--this happens all the time at every public library.) The Democrats are leading in many pre-election polls.

Either this library is haunted by nefarious spirits or my daily intake of recreational Excedrin is reaching crisis levels.

Retail Is for Suckers

The other day one of my co-workers was remarking on the unholy freak show that is our fabulous State Fair. Actually, he was sort of sadly noting that the excellent people-watching spectacle that it used to provide has been totally surpassed in his experience by simply working at our public library for eight hours a day. Toothless midway barkers, endomorphic bumpkins with a turkey leg in one hand and eight kids on a rope leash on the other, seven-year-old kids smoking menthol cigarettes behind the pig race grandstand--they'd all be lucky to catch my sideways glance after my many months manning the library front desk.

I was similarly let down after throwing a garage sale this weekend. It used to be that about three-fourths of the thrill of opening one's driveway to the retail-beaters and junk-gawkers was simply watching the parade of weird humanity and saving up anecdotes to share when the foolishly ambitious neighbors are planning their own Yard Mart. Nowadays I can barely work up the enthusiasm to look up from my book. I've seen superior bizareness on a daily basis, like the dude checking out witchcraft spell books, for example, to "fight fire with fire" after having been levelled for too long by his next-door neighbor's premium voodoo.

(Another witchcraft practitioner attempted to curse our own security guard a while back by thrusting his arms elbow deep in his pants and then flicking his fingers out at her while simultaneously performing a deep knee bend. No such thrills and chills at the garage sale, I'm afraid.)

No, it was a mostly mundane mix of bargain-hunting hagglers and neighbors curious if our garage was packed with more useless crap than their own. The lady who successfully bartered us down to 75 cents on a one dollar pillow was boringly typical. I hope she at least felt like she'd accomplished something worthwhile as she walked away like the big bargain winner on this triumphant day. One happy customer did warn us, loudly and in an ethnically superior tone left over from her school days in the 1890s, that "Those Mexicans steal more than they buy!!!!" I'm sure the pair of friendly Hispanic families checking out our wares just then in the same echoing garage appreciated her security concerns as much as I did, but after meeting my library's local Ku Klux Klan representative recently, I have a hard time being very surprised.

The Triumphant Return of D.o.O.L.!

October is "Customer Appreciation Month" in the library. How, one may reasonably ask, can D.o.O.L. possibly give any more than the 110% he gives every other day of every other month of the year toward ensuring maximum "Customer" ecstasy short of stimulating them to orgasm? A fair question indeed.

Putting aside the somewhat offensive and likely true implication that during the other 11 months we merely engage in "Customer Toleration," I'm left with my default attitude of barely suppressed resentment-turning-to-rage when considering the metaphysical complexities of this month's celebration of "Appreciation." Luckily, for the second year in a row I was personally selected to whip up a little something special for our "Customers" this October.

God, how I despise that word and all its implications.

Anyway, as I was still reeling from an overheated summer of library thrills and heatstroke-induced chills when confronted with this task, I merely aped the half-assed presentation I had designed the year before. Last October I really believed I'd stumbled on a brilliant scheme of turning "Customer Appreciation Month" around on those self-same customers, jujitsu-style. While plying them with a dish of candy and a hand-decorated sign that insisted, "We appreciate you!" I shanghaied them into writing a brief comment on a paper-covered display table to tell us something they appreciated about the library.

Attempting to pull off this sophisticated trick two years running may have proved too clever by half. While last year's unwitting customers were roped in by the promise of a refreshing starlight mint in exchange for a brief scrawl of how much they heart-ed the library, this year's crop of comments turned rancid within a few days. Aside from the occasional gang symbol, which is to be expected, I've had to witness a seemingly never-ending procession of young hooligans explaining how the library "sux" in between jotting pledges of sweet love to their girlfriends or inking Spanish curse words they don't think I know.

Oh, I know. By now, I do know.

If my lobbying campaign succeeds by next October and this travesty of an "Appreciation Month" is overturned, we can all look forward to "Library Appreciation Decade." Highlights will include a dramatically loosened disciplinary policy wherein a team of North Korean riot police will have trained our staff in advanced techniques of squashing dissent and silencing protest. How I look forward to those golden fall days.