need help breaking your man out of the hoosegow~just ask your local librarian...

So, i'm in my usual spot, when a woman comes up asking for help with the computers because she's "totally stupid when it comes to the internet." (just the type of patron i love to get). So i follow her back to her computer, where she has a letter from her man telling her to get onto the internet to find out when he's being transferred from our local county jail facilities to a federal penitentiary. He's given her fairly good instructions on how to do this but she's having trouble following them. I look at the html address he's given her, type it in the address and get no page located. I begin to tell her i don't know what to do but then decide that maybe his punctuation is off and try putting the address in a couple of other ways and eventually we're in. I follow the directions to the place where we need to start putting his information in and notice that she's down to about 45 seconds left of computer time and there are people waiting so i tell her to just come up to the desk.

At the reference desk i have trouble remembering the hoops i jumped through to get to the page we were originally on but eventually i get back there. She gives me a couple of different ID#s (SO#, FBI#, Registration#, DCDC#, etc, etc,) but no luck on the transfer date, there's a whole bunch of info flashing by on the screen and some vague, nagging voice at the back of my head but i perservere (i think maybe i'm still suffering from that viral ignorance infection). We type in his name Incarcerated SpouseandorHusband and birthdate still NoGo. She tells me, "Incarcerated's fingers would just be flying on that keyboard and he'd be right in there." (if only he weren't in jail...)

Finally she calls the Federal Marshall (who i think she had on speed dial) to ask for their assistance, which they were Not inclined to give, in fact the woman was downright snarky about it. "That information is NOT publicly available."

um, yeah, maybe it's not such a good idea to let people know exactly when and where they are being transfered...

"We'll I'll just have to tell Incarcerated when i talk to him tonight," she said, thanking me as she left.

"Sorry, i couldn't help you," i apologized.

I looked up Incarcerated SpouseandorHusband to see what he was in prison for. Identity Theft. Ring Leader. Yeah, i'm sure his fingers would have been flying on that keyboard...