Saturday, August 23, 2008

Where is the bathroom?

Today I caught myself pointing someone in the direction of the bathroom with two fingers and I thought, "Okay, I have now reached full flight-attendant mode."

They warned me that this would happen when I started at the library. A lot of the questions we get at the desk are directional. Where is the bathroom? Where is nonfiction? What does J mean and where is it? (J is for Juvenile, or children's).

But I do get some zingers. Like the other day I got this question:

"Do you have any novels?"

I am so sorry, my response was not good customer service, but I said a little incredulously, "Do we have any novels?"

She laughed and explained that she meant do we have any novels that I would recommend? Oh yes, I had a few encyclopedias that I could recommend, especially ones that cover what the function of a library is, but after a bit of investigation we settled on Ender's Game for her.

That isn't the worst one I've had. The cake-taker would have to be:

"Where are your books?"

Ok, I'm sorry, but we're surrounded by them. The correct answer would be, "Uh, everywhere. Close your eyes and hold out your hand and walk forward and I'm sure you will hit some."

But I answered his question with another question, "Do you know what type of books you are looking for?"
He was looking for non-fiction. That's upstairs. Two-fingers will point you to the staircase on the left.

3 comments:

Hugs from mom said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Breanne said...

Whoops, Lauren, sorry about deleting your comment. Did you know that one of the Blogger bugs is: There is currently no way to undelete deleted comments. My bad.

Jacque said...

That was so funny, I can't stop laughing about it.