Since Twitter has been Absolutely Useless Lately:

In the Evening:

Four straight faxes.
The fountainhead on CD.
Copier advice.
Word has resume templates, sir.
"Can you tell me if Venus has a ring around it?"
I think the weird hippy guy is hitting on Librarian K.
Competing in analytics, by Davenport and Harris.
Sorry, we don't loan out Windows operating systems, sir.
Could you turn your IPod down, please? Thanks.
A whole bunch of Rochelle Alers books.
The girl telling the kid to shut us is louder than the kid.
Printer advice.
Phlebotomy exam guidebooks.
Books on cults leads to books by Cathy Burns which leads to books on Freemasonry.
I kick a kid off an internet machine.
Today's paper.
A kid turns a table of computers off and I deal with the consequences.
The autobiography of Malcolm X.
More computer reservation mixups. I hate this system.
Today's paper.
Travel books.
Statistical Abstract of the United States
He's going from employee to employee to try to get a library card, when the rules say he can't have one ...
... He finally gets a card, but we can't find any of the books he wants ...
Copier advice.
She drops her travel books and can't pick them up.
Printer advice.
We try to figure out if Herbert's Dune trilogy was originally intended to be a trilogy.
More computer reservation screwups.
And the print queue is strangely empty, annoying a patron.
ESL tapes.
Fax.
A patron has lost his keys.

In the Evening:

Twitter seems to be down.
"You got any history movies? ... You know, civil rights movement or slavery?"
Don't run!
I don't know why they transferred you here, sir. We don't renew items.
OCD
Yep, we have WIFI.
The so-called "stimulus" forms.
DVD loan policy.
I swear that patron looks just like Popeye's dad Pappy.
Encyclopedias are over there, kid.
A whole bunch of ILLs by Brenda Jackson.
Stuck paper in the printer.
It wants your email address, ma'am. "I don't have one."
Lots and lots of printer advice.
Don't run, dammit!
The catcher in the rye, by J. D. Salinger.
Transfer pricing.
A patron wants How to win friends and influence people but hangs up before Librarian P can get his name.
The hollow, by Nora Roberts.
Printer advice.
Men's tailoring.
Other stuff.

I come back from a vacation, refreshed, ready to tackle the new extraordinary challenges that have cropped up while I was gone.

And I find everything exactly the same. The same patrons, the same questions, coworkers and gripes. I am disappointed. I wanted a fresh start. I wanted something new. I wanted to find the kids section crawling with alligators. I wanted to learn that Bin Laden had been hiding in one of our study rooms. I wanted alien priestesses. The only difference around here is that they changed the parking garage rules again.

Library War (Toshokan Sensou)

The most important librarian anime since Read or Die has started its run in Japan!

Apparently in the story the government has begun to crack down on what the citizens can read, and the only the librarians can stop them! And they're serious. Look! Angry librarians with guns!

If they actually gave us guns, we librarians might choose to shoot other things besides censors. And I don't care much for the uniforms. But still ...

The Roughest Week at the Desk I Can Remember, Sorry if I Ramble and get a Little Pissed Off, but ...

It was spring break. This meant the kids didn't come pouring in after school, but all day. Usually this means the evenings are more quiet, but ...

The head techie was on vacation and things broke down.

The copier's debit card slot got something stuck in it. It still took coins, but that meant telling the patrons that, over and over ...

Then the public computer network stopped sending print jobs to the server. This meant that patrons had to save their documents onto floppies or thumb drives and bring them to us at the desk, where we happily printed them, no charge, sorry for the inconvenience. It was an added hassle, but workable, but ...

I learned again how many people do not know the meaning of "save." I guess they were used to typing their resume or school report and then simply pressed Print. They lost stuff they had spent a couple hours writing. We explained the concept of saving, but ...

They didn't have any way to save. We handed out floppies left by previous patrons, showed them how, but ...

Many of the floppy drives no longer work, or they also have things stuck in them. We're phasing them out and encouraging thumb drives (Yeah, tell a kid with no money who just wants his English paper printed out that he needs to buy a thumb drive). We have a generic one at the desk we use to save patrons' work in a pinch, but ...

Some of our computers' USB ports are recessed, so wide thumb drives (like, sigh, the generic one we use) don't have room to plug in, and a few of our computers have no spare USB ports at all.

When it comes to this I would tell them "Save it on the hard drive before your session runs out, and email it to yourself," but ...

Many patrons have no email accounts.

This week we at the desk learned how many there were.

It's late. Enough. It was rough.

For those forging ahead with the latest 2.0 innovations, singing hosannahs over this or that new widget that will allow the patrons better access the great User-Heaven Librarysphere, please remember that there are millions of library patrons who don't even know how to save a document.

And I'm not even going to start about how we help the ones who don't know how to use a mouse.

Big snowstorm today, but we thought it not big enough to close early.

At 3:45 I was taking a 15-minute powernap in my office when Librarian J phoned me. "You ARE aware that we're closing in ten minutes because of the snow?"

Uh, no, I wasn't. Thanks.

I imagined myself waking up in 15 minutes, coming out to the ref desk and finding the lights out and everyone gone ...