He would come in, and even if you didn’t see him, you’d hear him. He has one of those disgusting smoker coughs, but it was always especially loud and forceful. And sometimes it would just come out as a strange “AAGHGHH” instead of a real cough. He would always smile strangely at me and say “Hello!” and sometimes ask me if a movie was good or not. I was always very polite to him. One time, he came and found me where I was putting books away and told me about this commercial for a car, with all these little woodland animals singing, and then a wolf shows up and frightens the other animals. I’m not sure what the point of him telling me about it was, but he went off cackling like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, followed by several of his signature coughs/weird noises. One of the circ librarians, who is my supervisor, asked me if I had ever heard his penguin joke. I said no. She said that every time he comes up to the counter, if it’s remotely cold out, he makes the same penguin joke. I finally heard him tell it to her one day.
“Hey! You know it’s so cold out there, I saw penguins ice skating in the parking lot!!”
The dirty joke incident happened one day when I was walking towards the front of the library, just going past the children’s section, when he intercepted me.
“You want to hear a really funny joke?”
He looked so eager and excited to tell me, I figured, why not? “Ok.”
Now, what made the joke so inappropriate was the fact that we were in a library, in front of the children’s section, and I’m an employee. It’s not like I haven’t ever heard anything like that before, but when this guy is known for finding a car commercial funny and his big joke is about ice skating penguins, how could I have expected his really funny joke to be about a parrot fucking chickens? Yes, he said the word “fucking.” Twice. In front of children. Did I mention he’s a little hard of hearing, and talks quite loudly? Yeah. It was extremely awkward. He walked off laughing and wheezing, and I stood there, not entirely sure what to do. It was not one of my prouder moments. I felt like everyone was watching me, and another patron went up and complained about his language, but by the time another librarian came over to me, he had already walked away and there was nothing anyone could do.
I avoided him for a long time after that, always finding work to do in the meeting room or in the work room so he couldn’t talk to me. The other librarians were very understanding and are still always on the lookout to protect me from the creepy people like him. After a while, I started to feel bad about it though, because he obviously had no idea how tasteless the joke was, and was probably just trying to make me laugh. I stopped avoiding him but he stopped coming in as often anyway, which is just as well.
If you're curious, here is the joke, without the swearing. But when it says he "annoys" the neighbors' chickens, well, you know what it really means.
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