Loop holes

Stickied Introduction:


In order to prepare for a two week trip with my lovely wife to Rome it is necessary for me to write 20 blog posts ahead of time. I don't have a lot of time to do this. I'm not sure I actually have any time to do this. But I have made a sacred charter, somewhere, I think, that says I must post a new blog post everyday. So I wanted to put a stickied explanation of the desperation of my plight at the top of each of my next twenty blog posts.

I am hoping this will explain why my comments might be (checked (X) as appropriate):


__ Brief

__ Incoherent

__ First drafts

__ Silly

__ Unfinished

__ Borderline plagiarized from someone else

__ Borderline plagiarized from myself

__ Petty about the Internet

__ Pandering to the reader

__ Technically illegal in the country of Turkey

__ Ending abruptly

__ Too frank by half

__ Pretty much just the lyrics of some song I like

xx Actually a lot like any of my regular blog posts



This particular post is:


12ish of 20


End of Stickied Introduction



I am very nice to people where I work at the library, usually. But when people ask me to do irksome things for them without the proper humility and obeisance I seek to impede them with the tools at my disposal. 

And so to today's case in point. A woman comes in with donations piled high in bags on an awkward little trolley. At first it is unclear these are all donations, but sadly they are. And she wants back all the cloth bags the books are packed in.


This is the first strike against her. I could bear this, though I don't like it. I have her wheel these bags of books back to our book donation shelves, and I start emptying her bags. And the donations are just pure junk; textbooks, binder books from expensive corporate seminars circa 1986, pamphlets. Just about then she explains how she'd like a receipt for the person she's donating these for.

This includes two strikes. One, I don't like when people do things for friends when they're pointless things like donating useless garbage to a library. This was the responsibility of the favor doer to stop. And two, I'm ethically opposed to donation receipts, though normally I can't do anything about them.

This was three strikes. My ship had come in!

"I'm sorry." I said. "We can't take textbooks." This, according to me, included all but four crappy books that are sitting over on our donation shelves even now as I write. I dutifully filled out a donation receipt that said "4 hardcover books" on it. I was real nice to the lady about it.

She was pretty nice about it too.