Sharks in the library

I may have mentioned that I work in a very popular library. I'm not going to go much into my theories as to why we are so popular, but I am certain it is not due to our marketing, which is laughable, or the Internet, or our cleverness. 

We just put stuff out and people take it.

All the rest is commentary.

After 20 years or so of not offering a fax machine to the public we got sick of people asking us if we had a fax machine. So we enabled our scanning copier to send faxes. We did not advertise this. It is not in our informational materials. It's just a big copier where you can fax stuff. One day you couldn't fax. The next day you could. Why anyone asks anyone to fax anything at this point is beyond me. Does it need to be mimeographed before being faxed as well, or would they prefer it be scrawled into bark? Nevertheless people do ask other people to fax things. And when those people fax things they come to our library. Every single one of them. People come here from other cities to fax things, they come from other states. They might even come from other countries just to fax things. They fax in the morning and they fax in the night. They fax single, crumpled, illegible scraps of paper, and they fax 80 page documents that take 45 minutes to fax. They line up to fax. They love to fax, but only if they can do it here. Otherwise it's not worth it.

And how did they find out about our fax?

Blood in the water, man, blood in the water.

How about this:

If we got a hundred candy canes, and we put them in the darkest, most obscure corner of the library, enclosed them all in an unremarkable box, with a tiny sign on it that said "free, take one", someone, a thousand miles from here would suddenly look up and say "I smell peppermint."