The doorbell coincidence

One thing I have always loved about library work is the coincidences. I understand that when the vast number of names, famous stories and people, songs, books, and movies all come up together as they do in library work, they are statistically bound to appear magical when they weirdly synchronize. You know the story: Monkeys on typewriters writing Hamlet. But the story that says enough monkeys typing long enough on enough typewriters will produce Hamlet by sheer volume of randomness is a bit extreme. It would take surely billions of monkeys billions of hours with billions of people scanning the endless random pages.

But what if your job was monitoring the work of a hundred monkeys randomly typing all day on a hundred typewriters. There would be nothing but gobbledygook for days, maybe a few coincidental short words from out of nowhere. Maybe rarely there would even be one longer word, or half a sentence. And then one afternoon you suddenly see among the long readouts of nonsense:

"GOto the pond at 2oclock!!."

Weird.

Sure, it was bound to happen.

But there just happens to be a pond near where you work.

Don't you think you'd better go there, at two?

And what if those monkeys typed "There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

I mean, that's hardly any of Hamlet. But it's still not the worst time to believe in magic and little gods.

As Shakespeare said:

Don't waste your time believing in the big gods and impossible things,
The little gods are easier, demand less, and take your breath away with more sweetness and danger.

Well he would've said it if he typed randomly on a typewriter for long enough!

Which is all to say I had my tiny burst of coincidence magic today at the library. Actually I had a few coincidences, and this was my favorite one:

Our curbside pickup doorbell, that non phone owning patrons use to alert us to their arrival, got turned off or reset so I needed to fix it. Not finding the Scarborough Fair doorbell song we were using I programmed in something else, not at the time sure what song it was. Then someone rang the doorbell. It was a Christmas song: We Wish You a Merry Christmas. My co-worker, who hates out of season Christmas music, was nearby, so I said "Oops. I didn't realize it was a Christmas song. I'll change it as soon as I come back."

And then I went out into the July heat to help the patron who rang our doorbell.

It was Santa.

Hunter's den

Like Paul Mccartney waking up with the tune to "Yesterday" in his head, I awoke in the middle of the night with this scene in my head:


A mighty old hunter is showing a visitor his hunting trophies. They are arranged on the dark wood walls of his study, looming over the men as they walk around. A giraffe head sticks out of a great plaque, a tiger, a moose, some sort of strange ibex, and also, oddly, the branch from a large tree. A big branch, mounted on hunter's display plaque.

"What's that one?" The visitor asks, pointing at the tree branch.

"Took that one down in '94." The old hunter says wistfully, reliving past glories. "Huge thing, a hundred feet tall if it was an inch. I shot him with an elephant gun and barely slowed him at all. Thought I was a goner."

"What happened?" The visitor asked, fascinated.

"Took out my axe." The hunter said sadly. "It wasn't pretty."



Oddly enough I felt no compulsion to jot this down, and I fell peacefully asleep as soon as I thought it.

Who I work with

I am pretty sure I just saw one of my co-workers jot down the time of day on a post-it note so that she would have it readily available, for later, in case she needed to know what time it is.

Stuck in library elevator

It has long been a dream of mine to be stuck in the library elevator, preferably alone, with a cart of interesting books, and a coffee, after having had a pee. If I may be so blunt.

I think I may be so blunt.

Today at my library someone got stuck in the elevator. So unfair. Today would have been a great day for me to get stuck in the elevator. But what day wouldn't? I was talking with a co-worker who mentioned how the last person who got stuck in our elevator was stuck in the elevator with a bat. I vaguely remember this. Did the bat crawling into the elevator cause it to jam? Did the bat set off an alarm? Why aren't there several dozen blog posts in my vast blog history about this incident?

I wouldn't like to be stuck in the elevator with a bat. Oh sure, you're picturing a cute, Halloween, cartoon bat, but my wife and I had a bat get in our apartment one night long ago and it was very...

real.

And I suppose that's just the way it would go for me, with my luck; I finally get to be stuck at work in the elevator and it's with a bat! Or maybe a large spider, shiver. Or perhaps a terrifying apparition.

I wouldn't like it, but I'd take it. 

Beggars can't be choosers, and, when motivated, I'm pretty good at making friends.

Arachnophobe

Because we are selling our house, each morning we go through a process of getting it all neat and clean for all the day's showings. One of the many tasks is to sweep out the vast and voluminous spiderwebs that form thickly around our back door and around the exterior light attached there.

Now if you are like me and do not like spiders so much, and don't like big, leggy, quick, scuttling, grey brown spiders so much, you might want to take this small piece of advice I have to offer you:

When using a broom to clear out thick, massive overhead spiderwebs, that amazingly were able to be constructed overnight, do not, I repeat, do not stand underneath.

 I'll be fine in a few months. Thank you.

Voting

For a week preceding election day at my library we hosted early voting. It was the first time this has ever happened here, and so, like most things new at my library, it caused a fair bit of confusion among the populace: where to go? what did they need? when can they do it? We met most of the repeat problems with a flurry of hastily put together signs. Like all signs these met with mixed results. For instance at the front service desk we hung full signs on the backs of our computers that said:

Voting today from 9 to 3

And many times a patron would read this and say "So, voting today from 9 to 3?"

And we would say "Yes, there was. But it is four now, so voting is over for the day."

And they would ask "So can I vote now?"

I'm just saying there's a limit to what one can make a sign for.

On actual election day early voting was, of course, over, and voting happened at people's regular polling places, of which we were not one. We were pretty sure this would cause some confusion, so we had big signs saying:

No Voting Here Today

An elderly wiseacre read one of our conspicuous signs this afternoon and asked us at the front desk, with a twinkle, "So can I vote here today?"

I got my big laugh of the day by answering "Sure, go ahead, but I don't think it will count for much."

And then, just to prove we were all wags hanging around the service desk, a nearby woman quipped "I'm not sure it does anyway."

"Don't give into despair!" I begged the woman.

No. I'm just kidding. I didn't beg the woman anything. We've all given in to despair, I accept that. 

But let's all vote anyway. 

They'll never expect it.

Dead

There was a waived library fine listed on a waive sheet we use at the front desk. The amount listed as being waived was modestly large for us, $65 or so. Next to the amount, in parenthesis, was written the word "Deceased".

I recognized the handwriting of the person who waived this fine and went back to talk to them. "I see you waived $65 for a person who died." I said.

"Yes." They replied with a hint of trepidation.

"How do we know they didn't just die to get out of paying their library fine?"

Magnificent vermin of Rome

Let us begin near the start.

After the usual accelerated (by disappearing hours) two days of air travel to Europe, this time on three flights, my wife and I got into the city, sleepless, in the afternoon. We checked into our apartment and did what we could to stay awake, making a first bleary reconnoiter of our neighborhood. Then we went to sleep.

But it didn't work so well.

And so at four in the morning we looked at each other and said "Let's go out."

Because Central Rome is crammed with people, urgent, partying, touring, eating, drinking, piled high, one might think it never sleeps. I thought maybe it didn't sleep. But Rome sleeps!

We sauntered its moody, abandoned streets alone. It was quiet in the strange way of great cities; punctuated by outsize, mysterious crashes and distant sirens and clatters. Our apartment cozied up to the Pantheon (and it still delights me even to say that), so we weaved our walk around it as the first stirrings of morning activity and light readied themselves to trickle in. We were coming up the west side of the great ancient monument, from the back, holding it all for ourselves.  As we got up to the porch (monumental yes, but still a porch) I looked over a little wall there and down. There was a big, fat rat. Dirty, lumbering, bloated, and the size of a small raccoon.

There is always more to Rome than meets the eye. Warrens, underbellies, the rich droppings of a million ever feasting tourists, a labyrinth of ancient lost cities under the city of my eyes. I thrilled to the story that rat hinted at, and we waited for more.

Another missing post

So I went out for another Thursday morning walk. I had some blog ideas to come up with. And nothing gets the blog ideas rolling like a bit of incandescent rage. Nothing quite stokes the old genius like the agony of human existence, the pain of being, the sweet burn of injustice. I just had to get that hate train rolling for some raw material, then pound it till it's stretchy and malleable, then shape it into something funny, put a hat on it, and gut it.

So it was just a matter of getting started when I was distracted. I can't remember what exactly it was; a cat walking across the street? The blueness of the sky? A recognition that it was a lovely day to have off? Something sweet my wife said to me, still ringing in my ears, before she went to work? Spring?

And I lost the string.

I had nothing. It was beautiful.

My first blog post with this title

Someone donated a little lunch box set of games to my library here. It's sitting in our always fascinating, half trash heap of recent donations. It's called My First Scandinavian Games.

I thought that even though this old set looks designed for small children, I'm in my fifties and these would still be my first Scandinavian games.

Then, reflecting further I thought, yes, sure, and if someone brought us a book of poems written by lizards they would be my first book of poems by lizards too! And I put my hands on my hips.

Then, reflecting even further, I raced over to the computer to look up poems by lizards on the Internet.

I didn't find any poems by lizards, just one by Federico Garcia Lorca. It had this in it near the end:

You will have time

to look at the stars

when the worms are eating you

at their leisure.

No lizard would write that!

But then, I wondered, maybe there is no poetry by lizards.

Surely that can't be right.

And then it came to me. Of course there's poetry by lizards. Lizards just don't use the Internet.

The library cure

One of my colleagues made an announcement. He may or may not have misspoken when he said "Good afternoon library patients..." meaning our commonly used term "patrons" for "patients", but a library regular came up to me after the announcement and, with a wry glint, asked "Did he just call us "Patients"?

Easy answer. Come to us America. "Ignorance is the illness. Knowledge is the cure".

A library with commitment

We had a huge snowstorm earlier this week. At least a foot of snow fell throughout the afternoon and evening. A foot of snow is a lot. It's 12 inches, even more in centimeters! Chaos gripped the city. Small children were trapped on buses without bathrooms for hours, or stranded at their schools until late in the evening. Cars littered the road shoulders. No one plowed our library parking lot. It was ugly.

But at my library we still stayed open until our regular nine o'clock closing. Libraries all across the twin cities shuttered their doors early. Ha! Quitters. Not us. We soldiered on for the full duration. There wasn't a ton to do so we staff gathered in little groups to complain about the county and how they failed to plow the parking lot. Then a librarian reported that a man harangued her about the county and their failure to plow our parking lot. We were all outraged; only we were allowed to complain about the county!

A little later, downstairs, we were at one point down to a single patron.

I ambled over to offer a rare personal touch because I had nothing else to do. 

"I bet you're wondering why it's so busy in here tonight." I said.

He raised an eyebrow.

"It's because all the other libraries are closed."

Streets paved with gold

I was walking through the city thinking something about money when all of the sudden I came upon a dollar bill sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. I laughed. "What are the odds," I thought "That I would be thinking something related to money at the moment I found some!"

And then my ever American brain answered sadly "About fifty-fifty."

Bob Dylan finally says what it means

They served strong drinks at the cocktail bar Bob and I talked our way into at 15 minutes before they opened (It wasn't hard and involved people telling Bob Dylan that he's Bob Dylan, which he's already strikingly clear on). Perhaps we miscalculated in ordering a third variety each of their interesting cocktails. They made an infusion with pine tips and morel mushrooms that was confusing and dazzling. But we were way past that stuff and we were laughing too much at god knows what. 

But I remember the tingle in my spine when an increasingly loquacious Bob leaned in and said: 

"This is it. I'm going to tell you alone the secret truth all hidden in my lyrics." 

Then we both laughed as he waggled one hand like Marlon Brando. He does an amusing Godfather. You had to be there.

Then he said: 

"Here is the answer in all my songs and the thing I have been pressed for but not given." He laughed, but collected himself. "This is what I was trying to tell everyone..."

"Oh my god!" I exclaimed giggling. "I knew it!"

"The truth, the truth I have been trying to say, the secret truth..." He said before laughing. "The truth..."  And then he laughed so much it was infectious, and we burst into a hysterics it was hard to emerge from. My ribs ached. We did not actually fall off our seats from laughing but we did knock some strange table decoration flower onto the floor. It did not break, it bounced. Even this, stupidly, was hilarious. I still feel sore from it. Multiple times we both tried to talk, but could not for laughing. And, helpless, silent only to save our lives, and only after many minutes of recurring fits of laughter and some amusing hiccups were we finally able to calm down and dry our eyes. 


We paid. He got into his airport limo. And I walked home.

Library fun!

 
Ohhh. Fun! 

It's not all work work work around here at the library. Sometimes there's fun!

A man came to the front desk of the library. "I'm looking to see if you have a movie." He said.

"Sure. What is it?"

"Embrace of the Serpent" He said.

So I noodled about on my keyboard and like magic came up with the essential information that indeed we did have such a movie checked in. "Yes." I said. "We have a copy checked in."

"I looked and I didn't see it."

I got up from my chair. "Well, I'll go take a look." I said.

"That's it." He cried. "You're just going to look where I already looked?"

"Yep."

"But it's not there. Couldn't it be in the back?" He asked.

"No." I explained, not breaking stride. "It would be on a different status if it were back there, one for recent returns."

"But I thought you'd be able to do something different than what I already did." He complained.

"Well, I have all kinds of secret tricks, so we'll see. Did you look down below here?" I asked as we arrived, gesturing at the two underneath shelves people sometimes miss that are below the flip through bins.

"Yes." He replied. "I already looked through all of those twice."

The words were hardly out of his mouth when I pulled the DVD off the shelf. "Here you go." I said cheerily, handing it to him.

"Oh." He said.

Fun!

Third time lucky

I come today to report on books. No, these are not recommendations, but merely three random encounters I had while shelving in our non-fiction area. While these are all me making wild snap judgements, I present these judgements without judgement. If you think that's all too cushy for me then you're welcome to go ahead and judge me yourself. Good luck with that.

The first book I came upon was called When Children and Teens Pray. And what I thought of was "When children and teens pray something is extremely fishy."

The second book was called Confessions of a Reluctant Ghost Hunter. At that one I thought "There is no way that there is any ghost hunter in the world who came by it against their inclinations, reluctantly. There is no one out there saying to someone "Why would you, with your special and natural skills at spotting spectral phenomenon, throw that all away to become a Dentist!""

The third book was a Ripley's Believe it or Not. I had no thoughts on it so I opened it to a random page. There was a story about a person on a long car trip who hit a coyote but kept driving, assuming he had killed it. After 500 miles of cross country travel he realized there was a coyote trapped in the front grill-work of his car. There was even a photo in the book of this coyote, still trapped in the grill after 500 miles of high speed travel. He looked very tired and very sunburned. When they pried him out though, he just ran away.

I am still thinking about that one.

Well, excuse me

The other day I told you the story of a long time, elderly, part-time co-worker who engaged me in 19 minutes of unwanted and largely inescapable chatting, only to make the point that she's a worker who just comes in and works and that's all. I called her Mo because it's very close to her name but has an element of plausible deniability on the off chance I might need it. Today I have one other story about Mo. It's from at least ten years ago, but I've always treasured it.

Mo was working sorting magazines on a counter with a narrow passage behind her. Needing to make that passage I gingerly sidled behind her. She suddenly backed up into me.

"Excuse me." I said in that polite, no harm done, no liability way.

"Well you should watch where you're going." Mo said.

I may have laughed slightly, half thinking she was joking.

"No, seriously." She said, grimly. "You have to watch out for other people. Be careful."

Did I say something clever to that? Oh, no, no. What I have done is for ten years, whenever the subject of Mo comes up with a co-worker, I tell that story. It's my way of watching out for people.

Distracted

I had finished shelving a cart of books. So I wheeled my empty cart to the elevator and got in. My mind was racing, thinking of some blog post, or possibly re-working my upcoming liqueur budget with such a feverish intensity that it was a long while before I realized that I was just standing in an elevator, with the door closed, going absolutely nowhere.

"Hmph." I thought. And then I started to reach towards the buttons, and then I stopped.

And then I stood there some more.






 

Responsibilities

A new Fed Ex man comes to one of my colleagues at the front service desk of the library. He sets down three large boxes. He then takes a long walk through our entry hall and out to the curb in the snow to retrieve three more boxes from his truck and trek them in. As he piles this second set up at the service desk my colleague tells him that he needs to deliver these boxes to the back entrance of the library.

Indeed, that is where we normally take our deliveries. But we have quite a few wheeled conveyances at our library, and it is a mere twenty feet of easy travel behind my colleague to get the boxes where they need to go. She nevertheless has him take the six boxes, in two trips, 150 feet out to his truck, where he has to load them up again, drive the truck in a circuitous route around to the north side of the library, where he unloads them once more, and brings them in to me, in the back room, working not far behind where he just was with my colleague.

He is not happy.

I apologize. "I'm sorry about that. There is really no excuse for her. She's honestly just... crazy. I don't know. I'm sorry."

And I am. Later I tell the story of her appalling deed several times to various of my other co-workers. But oddly none of my co-workers seem particularly horrified. She's been around here a long time, doing baffling things like this, seemingly without rancor, but frequently to great inconvenience to a wide assortment of people, unimpeded for years. At this point it is hard to even know how much of the fault even lies with her anymore. I'm not sure she's all that responsible for herself anymore. The blame now must almost entirely lie with my managers, locked into bizarre ideas about equality and industriousness, who obtusely continue to put her at the front desk of our library, all done with a shrug of their shoulders, a look the other way, and another day at the office.

Judges book by cover

As I have proved in a conclusive test, right here on this blog, it is possible to judge a book by its cover. I even showed that one can do it with an almost meticulous, fine toothed accuracy. This all was a few years ago now, but I'm sure you could find the account of this engaging test. I dare you to look for it. It's somewhere out there in my 1,450 posts, nearly all of whom live on the island of lost blogposts, sunbathing, drinking coconut waters, and idly dreaming that maybe someday someone will wander along and read them just one more time. 

I try and get around to visit every lost post occasionally, but there are so many, and I'm only one person!

But despite the fact that it is clearly possible to accurately judge a book by its cover, one can become over confident. One can be rash and filled with hubris and make a horrible, embarrassing misjudgement. This very thing happened to me today!

I was emptying a bin of books that were in transit from my library to another of our branches when I came upon a slender picture book entitled Cinderella Babysits. There, on the cover of this little book, Princess Cinderella is outside in a meadow in front of her castle, on her own, taking care of a little girl.

"This is ridiculous!" I cried out to whoever happened to be within a hundred feet of me at the time. "Cinderella is a major Princess. She's not going to be left with menial jobs like babysitting! Who would write such a patently absurd book as this?"

As a co-worker gathered round I opened the book. It quickly became apparent that the child in question was related to Cinderella's Fairy Godmother. Clearly the Fairy Godmother had asked Cinderella to watch her niece or something. I don't know exactly as I was simply trying to get the gist of things. All I know is that if her Fairy Godmother wanted a favor there was no way Cinderella was going to farm that job out. She'd be crazy to mess with her Fairy Godmother. It all made perfect sense, and clearly, in my rashness, I had gravely misjudged this book by its cover. My co-worker had to agree.

Maybe one day, when I have a spare 48 seconds, I should read the whole tale of Cinderella Babysits. It actually looked pretty good.