… but not annoyed at me. :)
I have six children. Five of them are readers. All six watch movies. Four of them like to listen to audiobooks at bedtime… Since the post title mentions a librarian, you can probably guess where this is leading: I am an enthusiastic patron of the public library system, and it’s a rare day that I don’t have twenty or more items checked out on my account.
My house is not immaculate. My children are noted for their intelligence and creativity, not their neatness and organization skills. We frequently bring back items late, and every few months we lose one. But amount this costs me in late fines and replacement fees is negligible compared to what it would cost to buy enough stuff to keep them all in reading/listening/watching material. So I don’t really fret much when I get emails from the library saying I have overdue books, I just call their computer up, and hit the ‘renew all’ button, and then make a mental note to remind the kids to check their bedrooms and the area around the CD-player for library materials the next time we head off to the library.
But when four of the books I checked out to feed my own reading habit appear on the overdue list, and I cannot find them in my room, or on the shelf in the livingroom that is the designated drop point for library books, I start to wonder. And when a month and a couple renewals later there are still several items missing, all of which had been checked out at roughly the same time, I start to think the problem isn’t us, for once.
So today when I went to the library with a couple of my kids, I stopped at the front desk, had them print out a list of the stuff still out on my card, and started circling the ones that I recognized as items that should have been brought back at least a month before, and made a request for a shelf-check. Then with librarian-in-tow I headed out into the stacks.
“Well look at this! This dvd…on the list. It isn’t one of ours, it belongs to Beavercreek [one of the other branches in the county system].” “Oh, right, we had to request it.” ”We’ll have to phone them up and ask them to do the check. What about this one, Mary Poppins… is this a cd then?” “Um, yeah, it would be on cd. I don’t like the kids to check out the other kinds.” ”Well it isn’t here.” ”Um, okay. That was one of the ones I really wasn’t sure about.” ”What’s next… the Scarlet Pimpernel?” ”That’s general fiction.” ”We’ll have to go back to the desk and look it up, this doesn’t say who it’s by.” ”Oh, I know who it’s by. Baroness Orczy.” ”What’s the last name?” ”Orczy? Starts with an O.” I led the way through the stacks to the right spot, and sure enough there were the two Scarlet Pimpernel books on our list. ”Well, what do you know!” she exclaims, soundling slightly disgusted, and looks the next book on the list. ”The Lieber Chronicles?” ”In Science Fiction.” ”Do you know who it’s by?” ”Lieber.” She starts checking the shelves and I spot a familiar looking book and pulling it off the shelf I hand it to her so she can check the barcode. She frowns. Once again the barcode matches. ”Mother of Kings is by Anderson.” I tell her, leading the way to the start of the Science Fiction section. Here I again locate the book before she does. ”This one.” ”That’s misshelved!” ”Well, yeah, they had it under Kevin J. instead of of Poul. Tsk!”
“I can’t believe this!” she mutters as we head back to the front desk. ”When you brought them back did you put them in the slot?” ”Sometimes I stack them on top of the desk, if someone is there, and they ask me to.” ”How could they possibly have missed all these? The scanner is right THERE!” ”Well, yeah, but you only missed once, you know. It was just a very big once.” ”We’d better call Beavercreek and tell them to look for that dvd.” While she is on the phone waiting for Beavercreek to check their shelves, my daughter Lissa wanders up with her selections, and I inform her that we have found a bunch of the things they said we hadn’t brought back, but not the Mary Poppins. ”That must still be in one of you girls’ bedrooms.” Lissa nods. ”I remember, it’s a book on cd.” The library looks up from her phone call. ”It’s a BOOK on cd?” ”Uh, yeah,” I answer. ”I thought it was just a cd. I didn’t know it was a book.” ”Let me guess… we looked for it in the wrong place.” ”Yes we did.” She hands me her phone. ”You hold this, I’m going to go check again.” Off she goes. Meanwhile the librarian at Beavercreek picks up the line and tells me they don’t have that dvd on their shelves. I thank her and hang up, and a few minutes later my own librarian comes back. “You found it?” ”Yes, and on a hunch I stopped by the dvd shelves…” she holds up the missing dvd, and says in outraged tones. ”It says right on it that it belongs to Beavercreek!!”
A double check of my account allowed me to spot yet another long overdue book, and so back we went to the stacks, and sure enough, that one was there too. ”How long ago did you bring these back?” she asked as she removed late fees from my account. ”It must have been over a month ago.” ”Unbelievable.”
Another librarian standing next to her at the desk smiled cheerfully and said, “You know what? The next time someone comes in saying ‘I know I brought that back!’…
…we might just have to believe them.”
Crossposted to my
website
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