Is it any Wonder I Married a Librarian?
Our Heroine -
Champion of Her Own Downtrodden Self.
Over on Making Light, they are swapping
horror stories of the "I Was a Bookstore Clerk" variety. I spent one summer
working in a bookstore, but I don't really have any good stories about it. What
I do have is a priceless story from when I was a work-study clerk in the Law
Library.
Libraries are where
work-study grants go to die, especially at a public university. It seemed that
every other student was eligible for a work-study grant at my school, and when
you can't get a job as a research assistant for a professor (or, as in my case,
the professor you have your research job with doesn't have a whole lot of
projects for you), you take advantage of your grant working at the library.
It's a pretty good gig - you can drop in for as little as an hour at a time, the
work is fairly undemanding, and you can read the papers while you're attaching
them to those long sticks.
The
unfortunate thing about the library - at least at Maine - was that random,
strange calls tended to land at the circulation desk. Since the circulation
desk was generally manned by the shifting mass of students on work-study who
were working a 2-hour shift (at the longest), it was a poor choice for those
members of the public who might be seeking anyone resembling a clue. On the
other hand, since the circ desk students were constantly confounded by the
old-fashioned phone (the kind with a row of buttons on the bottom that went
"ker-CHUNK" when you pressed them to select a line, put someone on hold, or
transfer them to oblivion), it was probably a good way for a harried switchboard
operator to get rid of annoying
callers.
I was whiling away my
time at the circ desk late in my career at U. Maine one spring afternoon when
the telephone rang. I answered it, and was greeted by a slow, stentorian voice
obviously belonging to an elderly gentleman who was most likely hard of hearing.
"I would like to speak to the Law Librarian," he
boomed.
Hmm. There was nobody
with that title at the library, to the best of my knowledge, and I had worked
there for two years. "Er - sir, do you have a reference question, or would you
like to speak to the director of the library? There is nobody with the title of
'Law Librarian.'"
"I would
like to speak to the Law Librarian," he repeated - as one would with a
particularly dim child.
"Sir,
as I told you, there is nobody here with that title
--"
"I
would like to speak to the Law
Librarian."
Fine.
It seemed my best choices were a.) the reference librarian, or b.) the director.
As I had no more information than that, I selected the director by a semi-random
selection method: I liked the reference librarian. He was a very decent chap.
The director was a bit of a pill, and moreover he had a secretary who was
probably better-equipped to handle this than either I or the reference
librarian. So I said, "One moment, sir," and put him into transfer mode, got
the secretary on the line, put him through, and went back to replacing
pocket-parts or whatever other gripping task the circ desk had for me that
day.
About a minute later, the
phone rang again and I had a sense of doom. Sure enough, when I answered it, I
got, "I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK TO
THE LAW LIBRARIAN." Either my
ancient telephone-fu was weak, or he had gotten confused when he was put on hold
and had hung up.
"One
moment, sir," I put him on hold again and called up to the director's
secretary's office. Now she was not there.
Hell.
I took a deep breath and
got back on the line with my elderly friend. "Sir, nobody is there at the
moment. I would be happy to take a message for you --"
That was when he exploded.
He began to yell, ranting about how he needed to speak to the fictitious "law
librarian" and how he was retired Maine Supreme Court Justice Hoo-Ha, and on and
on. The serials librarian, who had been shelving journals in the open shelves
behind the circ desk looked at me as I held the phone's receiver away from my
ear. I felt like one of those cartoons where the noise from the phone actually
blows your hair back. Finally, his tirade wound down and he ended by
sarcastically asking, "So what do you suggest I
do?"
I
had a split-second conversation with the angel on one shoulder and the devil on
the other and said, "Well sir - the way I see it you have two choices. You can
leave a message as I suggested at the outset or you can continue to be rude to
me. Which will it be?"
The
serials librarian in the stacks behind me inhaled audibly and I waited.
"Um. I guess I'll leave a
message then."
Score one for
the work-study student.
Posted: Friday - April 15, 2005 at 07:04 AM
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