ponderables and/or irritants of the day

1. no matter what time of day i come into the library there is always at least one person sitting in their car doing nothing, it always makes me rather curious to say the least…

2. as part of our summer reading program we have something called an “i-spy-bottle” sitting at our reference desk: basically a big soda bottle filled with bird seed and twenty small items (things like a stamp, a screw, a game piece, a golf tee, etc…) and people have to find the items and list them on a form to enter for a prize. It is rather difficult to find all the items (i know what they all are and there is still one i have been completely unable to “spy”…) Anyway, what ends up happening, is that all day long we/i have to listen to the very annoying sound of the bottle full of bird seed being shaken and shaken and shaken as people look for tiny items inside. It is enough to give you a raging migraine even if you are not prone to them (and if you have them constantly, well, its enough to drive you into a raving, maniacal, rampaging, homicidal rage…)~if we Ever do this again i'm strongly suggesting sand instead of birdseed (in fact i think i remember making that very suggestion but...oh well...)

3. i keep getting email saying “Now’s a great time to join AARP…” excuse me, but i’m not THERE yet, or at least i don't think i am...perhaps i've slipped into some kind of early senility, or forty is the new sixty now?)

4. speaking of email, why do i get so much spam at my work email and pretty much none at my hotmail address~can’t the I.T. guys work something better out???

5. Mr. NeedsRapToDownload is back and asks me if i have somehow tagged all those cds he asked me about in our system so that now we (don't we just love the use of the plural pronoun here?) can place holds on them. Of course i haven't as there is no way to do that... Damn, and him without his ipod too. Damn! Damn! Damn!

6. there is a woman who always makes a big pile of our newspapers to sit on when she uses our computers which i find a bit distasteful (would you want to read a newspaper a stranger had been sitting on for a couple of hours, or what if someone was looking for one of those newspapers at the time she was using them~she piles up pretty much all the papers she can find.) I can relate to shortness~i am short myself (and i don’t think i have more than an inch on Her) but our computer chairs are adjustable, i’ve showed her how to adjust them every time i tell her to please not use our newspapers as a booster chair, and she’s always SOOO apologetic like it’s the first time she’s ever heard it from me…

7. this guy wants me to locate the dvds he turned in from another library system because "the librarian" told him he could turn them in to "any library" (yes any library in their system) and they haven't shown up yet. "I'm sorry sir, but i have no way to do that," He looks incredulous, "You mean you don't just slap a barcode on them?" yes, because that's what we do with all items that we don't own, that's how we make all of our acquisitions...

8. i'm watching a discussion (is that an oxymoron in this Web 2.0 age?) on one of my bulletin boards about subject limits on books (i.e. an individual can only check out a maximum of three items on one particular subject~it seems a number of libraries do this so that people can not wipe out their entire collection in one fell swoop~call me naive, but i had never heard of such a thing). The discussion was initiated by someone questioning whether or not she should begin this process at her library because people check out over ninety items on one subject at a time~though we don't limit by subject we do limit to 30 items per check out which does seem reasonable to me. I do wonder a few things:

   1. how exactly do they determine subject (do they break it down by Dewey 10s, 1s, 0s, what?)

   2. do they also limit fiction and genres in this way?

   3. does this seem odd to anyone else (or is my system too limiting~I mean there was the recent book thief (not to be confused with the book by the same title) to consider~he wouldn’t have been able to get away with QUITE so much in my system)?