King Kong

We used to have this really great children's librarian.  She was in charge of me when I first started working there, and she made my job so much better (working at a library ROCKS but it's no fun when you have mean people telling you what to do, trust me).  She was fun and easygoing and really understanding.  And one day, she had scheduled an event for kids / teenagers with a guy who either wrote or illustrated, I can't remember which, a comic book about King Kong.  Or something like that.  This was years ago.  Unfortunately, sometimes these things don't really draw a crowd, so there were two geeky (and I mean that in the most loving way possible, as a fellow geek / nerd / what have you) boys in the meeting room.  So she asked me to stop what I was doing and please come in and sit there, too, to beef up the crowd a bit.  I'm actually laughing as I type this because I hardly thought this one tiny weird looking chick was going to make it into a "crowd" but I wasn't arguing.  I was getting paid to sit there.  It was just as well no one showed up because neither did the guy.  How lame is that?  He blew off a library!  Anyway, when we were still waiting, she was flitting around, looking to see if maybe he came in and didn't find the meeting room, and at one point she got so flustered, right before she walked out of the room to check again, she said, "I don't know where he is.  Who knows.  Maybe King Kong got him."

The Importance of Nametags

A long time ago (but not in a galaxy far away), my nametag ripped at the top.  I took it to my supervisor at the time, who just happens to be my favorite supervisor / library employee ever.  Seriously, she is an amazing lady.  I miss working with her since she got moved to another library within the county.  Anyway, she said she would send it away to get fixed, which struck me as very funny because it's just a plastic nametag.  All it said was "Agatha" and underneath that: "Shelver."  No one seemed to notice it anyway because I always get people asking me "do you work here?"  No.  No, I'm just walking around with my library nametag and this giant stack of books for fun.  I'm sitting down here straightening out these books on the bottom shelf, among the dust bunnies and dead beetles, because I'm a crazy person who hangs out on the floor.  So I said something like "Oh well, who cares if I don't have a nametag?  No one reads it anyway."  And she said to me, "It's really important.  Without your nametag, you just become an anonymous shelver girl.  No one writes songs about anonymous shelver girls."

Touche.  She had a point.  However, no one wrote songs about me after I got it fixed, either.  So either I'm just not interesting enough to have songs written about me, or I need to figure out another system of measuring my worth.

The Crazy Old Lady

One thing about libraries is that they definitely attract weirdos.  Nobody believes this at first.  But trust me, hang around a library long enough, and you will see them.  My favorite nutty, senile old lady is "Betty."

Betty has been a patron of this library at least since I started working there, and I'm assuming she has been coming in for long before then.  I don't want to sound like I'm making fun of her here, because she definitely has some brain meltage resulting in crazy behavior.  This is simply to prove my point that the library isn't full of people sitting quietly at tables reading and whispering to each other.  In case I haven't already proved that with some of these stories about other people...

Anyway, here is one of the first things I remember about Betty.

She asked me, in her non-library voice (ie, VERY LOUDLY- this is her only volume), "WHERE ARE YOUR BOOKS ON MENOPAUSE?" 

I'm not trying to be rude, but I'm pretty sure Betty went through menopause a long time ago.  I obliged and showed her the menopause books, which she proceeded to stare at without taking any off the shelf and then tried to hold a conversation with me.  This can be a very tricky procedure, because typically, she'll start a sentence and trail off without finishing it, and then look at you like she wants you to respond, but you have no idea what to say because all she said was "Well, my cousin, he's really good at....."

I have witnessed other librarians ignoring her when she talks to them, which made me feel bad for her, so I always do my best to hold a conversation with her when she starts one with me.  Here is the best one we've ever had, and this is years ago.  She managed mostly complete sentences throughout the whole thing!

"I was at the grocery store and there's a girl who works at the checkout station and she was hitting on my husband!"
[willing suspension of disbelief, here, people...her husband is a short stocky old man that I'm sure no young woman would ever even think of hitting on]
"Oh wow, Betty.  That's crazy!"
"I know.  She was trying to steal my husband!  So I called her a bitch!"
"No way!"
"Well, I was flirting with the guy who works at the deli there.  You know.  He's married though.  And then he was talking to someone else and I heard them say they have to get rid of me.  Do you think that means they're going to kill me?"
"Oh, no, I'm sure that's not what they meant."
"They said they were going to get rid of me!"
"They probably were just going to ask you to leave."
"Well, you know, you can't trust men.  There's too many women out there!"

And on that note, she walked away.  That may be the last sane thing she ever said.

Will You Marry Me?

I think I'm ready  to tell the story of my two marriage proposals.  This is actually very weird for me to talk about, especially since I consider the guy a friend of mine.  Ever since this whole thing went down, I've tried to keep some distance between us, so hopefully he won't try for a third time.
I first started talking to him years ago.  He would ask me about movies or what websites to visit or whatever.  He seemed nice enough.  Then he asked me to hang out sometime, so I said maybe some day after my shift, we could sit and talk in the library.  It seemed harmless enough.  I mentioned it to one of my co-workers.

"So I'm gonna hang out with that guy, you know the one who comes in here all the time, with the backpack, and he's always really red?"

She knew exactly who I meant and proceeded to tell me that he is not only schizophrenic, but bipolar as well.  Yikes.  She told me more about him and some of the specific issues he deals with.  I decided that I would still hang out with him and just see how it went because he seemed to be a pretty lonely dude, and that made me kind of sad.  It went well, he was definitely a strange guy, but really nice and also very apologetic if he ever said anything he considered to be out of line.  One time, he wrote me an apology letter because he thought he was being too flirtatious with me.  I don't even remember what he said to me, so it wasn't even a big deal, but to him it was.

I have all kinds of stuff he's given me over the years, mostly artwork and poetry, with the occasional letter or CD of stuff he decided to burn for me.  So eventually he invited me over to his apartment, and anytime that happened I wouldn't stay long and always had a reason to leave early if I needed to.  So one time, I was there, and we were talking and watching Youtube videos because we're cool like that, and, out of nowhere, he asked if he could kiss me.  I turned about thirty shades of red and managed to say "Uh...no.  No, I don't think that would be a good idea.  At all."  I left not too long after that.  It just got worse from there.  When I saw him at the library again, we had this really weird conversation.

He said "So, I bought some bling earlier today."
"Oh yeah?"  This struck me as weird because he's not the kind of person who wears "bling," or even says things like "bling," for that matter.
"Yeah.  I bought a diamond engagement ring.  I was hoping you would come over tomorrow, so I can ask you to marry me.  What do you think?"
Naturally, I thought he was joking, so I laughed and just said "Yeah sure whatever."

He wasn't joking.

I didn't go over to his apartment, obviously, but he called me the next day and left me these really long messages.  The first one was about us getting married and spending our lives together.  The second one was more along the lines of NEVER MIND, NEVER MIND, IT WAS A BAD IDEA, I'M RETURNING THE RING, SORRY.  So weird.  Then I checked my email and found this ridiculous, overblown message from him (from before he changed his mind, of course).  It was really uncomfortable to read.  He kept going on about our "relationship" and how he couldn't wait for me to be his wife and all this weird religious stuff.  I still get the chills when I think about it...

So that was that.  I never actually said anything to him, but I guess ignoring a person gets the message through.  He stopped coming in on the days that I worked for a really long time.  Months later though, he came in and talked to me but it was excruciatingly awkward, at least for me.  But we started talking more, and eventually things got back to normal. 

About a year later from the first proposal, he came in one day and was acting strange around me, which for him is kind of the usual.  But he was being really short with me and not smiling so I knew something was up.  Then he asked me for help finding a book in the back, and at that point I knew something bad was going to happen, just from the way he was talking to me and acting.  We walked over and he started looking at books, but then turned to me and said "I need to know this right now, so that I can move on with my life, either way, but I just want to know if you will take my hand in marriage.  Will you marry me?" 
Talk about being caught off guard.  I mean, I knew something was up, but really?  A SECOND TIME?  I looked at him and said "no."  And he just said "Ok.  Thank you.  Ok."  And walked away.  And that was that.  I didn't see him for a long time after that, too.  Just recently he came in on a day that I was covering for someone else, so it wasn't my usual day to be there and he started talking to me, I think mostly out of nervousness.  But it was alright.  Pretty soon things got back to how they used to be.  We're cool right now, he likes it when I recommend books for him to read and he tries to give me advice on how to take better care of myself because I pretty much never sleep.  He's always offering to bring me coffee, too, which is nice.

After that second time he asked me though, I have to tell you, I was 99% ready to just quit my job and get the hell out of the library.  It just wasn't worth it to me anymore.  I'm glad I hung in there though.

How I Had the Potential to Become a Homewrecker, But Refrained

I'm pretty sure everyone who reads this knows how much I love reading, and I love it when other people read, and I really love it when parents read to their kids.  This is why I became smitten with this one fellow who came into the library almost every day with his son.  He sat on the floor with his kid and read to him, was very patient when he was interrupted with questions of "What's that?" and such, and was really the only parent I saw interacting with his child that way.  It's pretty sad, if you think about it, that there is one dad in my town who really cares about his kid that much, but that's not really the point of this story.

Oh, and besides being a really awesome dad, he is ridiculously handsome.

Can you blame me for always making a point of putting away children's books while they were in that room?  Don't think of it as me being creepy.  Just think of it as me making my job more enjoyable; remember how boring libraries can be?  Anyway, he started talking to me, just small talk really.  So it got to the point where he always said hi and asked how I was doing and such.  You know, made comments on how quickly I put things away (even though I usually made sure I took my time in there...ahem...) and other equally exciting things. 

So you can imagine my surprise when one day, he came over to me and asked what my plans were for the following evening and would I want to come over and have pizza with him and his son.  What what??  I couldn't believe it.  I told him I would be working at my other job until kind of late, but if that was ok, then I could come over after, and he said ok, and gave me a piece of paper with his number on it.

Score one for me!  But I knew there had to be some kind of catch.

I called him from work the next day.  We confirmed plans, he said by the time I got there his son would probably be asleep, but that was ok.  Then I bit the bullet.

"Ok, that sounds good.  But um...well...I don't want to be weird or anything...but...aren't you married?"
"Oh.  Yeah.  Yeah, I am.  You know what, you're right, maybe we shouldn't do this.  You seem really nice.  I'm sorry."

And then he hung up on me.  I was disappointed times about a million.

I mean, I'm glad I didn't go over and do anything and find out later, because that would have been awful, too.  But this was certainly unpleasant. 

One more reason working at the library is a dangerous job.

Little Kids Can Be Jerks

The shirt I wore to work yesterday was kinda loosey goosey, which was a bad idea, as you will see from the following story.

The first thing I did was put away children's books, so I was in that room with my cart, and I leaned forward to grab some books without thinking about what my shirt was doing.  When I stood up, there was this kid, maybe 7 or 8 years old, staring with these big bug eyes.  Then he looked up, right at me, got this really smug look on his face, and then trotted away, occasionally looking back at me with that dumb smug look.  Little perv dude was totally looking down my shirt!!

I felt so besmirched.

These are a few of my favorite things....

...or, you know, things that make my job less annoying, or just bearable on certain days.

1. Carrying a clipboard; it makes me feel approximately ten times smarter, for whatever reason.  That is just the magic of clipboards.
2. I am given a list of books that are 60 days overdue and it is my job to check the shelves to see if they got put away without getting checked in.  The chances of actually finding one on the shelf?  Slim.  So how do you think it makes me feel when I find one on the shelf?  Awesome!
3. I have just reorganized/shifted/shelf-read an entire section.  Now I get to stand there and admire my handiwork before it gets ruined. 
4. Someone comes in looking for something and they looked kind of stressed out.  "I need books on child support.  Like legal guidance for child support."  I love being able to say "Right over here!" and see the look of relief on their face.  This happens even with less important things, like "Where are the Junie B. Jones books?" and they get crazy excited when I point them out.
5. Sometimes, all it takes is a baby making goo goo eyes at me and smiling.  I realize this could happen anywhere, it doesn't have to be at the library, but getting those looks while I'm working makes them even better.
6. At the end of the day, shutting down the computers... It means I get to go home soon and there is something very satisfying about hitting ctrl-alt-delete over and over again.  Who knows why.  This also reminds me of Kris every single time I do it, which makes me sad but happy.
7. Sneaking in reading while I'm working.  You have no idea how often I actually do this.  Once, I even read the entire first chapter of Dracula that was deleted from the final copy of the book, but is in several collections of horror stories.  I love Dracula, and I didn't know there was a deleted chapter until I saw it in one of those books as I was shelf reading, and I couldn't help myself!  No one saw me and told me to stop, which made the whole thing even better.
8. Watching parents read to their kids.  This is surprisingly rare.  Even more rare is a parent reading to their kid, and the kid is paying attention.  I've seen them give up partway through a book because the kid can't sit still and just wants to play the computer games (shudder...).  So when I see a parent, sitting with their child, reading out loud, and the kid is interested, following along, laughing, etc, it's one of the best things in the world.
9. There is this one old lady who comes in frequently, and she compliments me on what a good job I'm doing, and always tells me to have a nice day.  She's always pleasant.  Always smiling.  I wish there were more people like her out there.
10. Book smell.  You know how new books have a good smell?  I like that.  I don't like the semi-old books that have that weird, old person, did-someone-pee-on-this kind of smell.  I LOVE old old book smell.  Those really old, musty books...sigh.  There is one in particular in the library, printed sometime in the 20s, it's Florence Nightingale's notes or something like that, and it smells AMAZING.  I guess it's kind of gross to sniff old books, but hey, I never said I was classy like that.