Saturday, February 15, 2020

Adventure in a city library







On my day off I went to the library. It was not the library I work at. It was the library a long way down the street where some items were on hold for my wife who was home with the flu. It's a pretty library with a lot of glass, located in a pocket of Minneapolis full of mild street crime and homelessness. It has one of the worst parking lots in the world, always full, and all tight, inadequate, one way, and awkward. I know one of the people who works at this library because she used to substitute at my library as one of her three jobs. America, man. She always described working at our large, near urban library as like a vacation. I guess that's because we don't have patrons smuggling our dvd's out the door to sell across the street at the pawn shop to raise drug money. By all accounts she's doing pretty well professionally in the Minneapolis system now, so she doesn't have to take working vacations. Maybe she's down to two jobs even. I stopped over to say hello.

We caught up, having a nice sarcastic conversation about how excited we were about Oligarch Bloomberg's Presidential run. We were soon interrupted by a nervous woman who wondered if they had some of the white tape instead of this scotch tape. She couldn't remember the name of the white tape. My former colleague and the guy who was also working the desk there looked vaguely around in case some white tape showed up, but no, it didn't. What was that white tape?

I took a stab at it. "Do you mean masking tape?"

I got it in one.

They didn't have any masking tape. The woman took it pretty well and had to get back to her baby which she had abandoned somewhere in the library. That's what she said, although to be fair she didn't use the specific word "abandoned".

Another person came up to urgently talk to my colleague so I went off to get my wife's holds. I checked them out on the self check out machines, experimenting with all the few features of the fancy kiosk out of professional interest. It had two font settings. I switched back and forth between them. Hmm, two font settings. 

My colleague was still busy so I went up to the other guy working at their main desk there. "I'd like to complain bitterly that there are only two font options on your self check out!"

He took it pretty well. My colleague was freed up and turned her attention to us. "Tell him about your blog." She said, probably reminded of it by overhearing my mercurial sense of humor (hint for beginners: I think two font sizes are plenty). She's a pretty nice advocate for my blog even if I'm not sure if she ever reads it.

"Oh, I don't tell people about it anymore. It never goes the way I think it should go." I replied.

She said, no, she'd told him about it before and he's a fan, or something like that.

I was secretly pleased and suspicious about how true it was all at the same time.

"Great then." I said, turning my attention back to him. "You'll be reading all about this font issue any day now!"

And maybe he is.








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