Miss Information

Miss Information meets Crazy Underwear Guy

Miss Information just knows that this blog is going to generate a lot of ad-spam directing people to their underwear blogs. She apologizes in advance.

It was a beautiful Saturday. Miss Information was drinking coffee, visiting with her co-workers, answering her e-mail and generally enjoying life. Then some do-gooder had to go and open the damn library. Bastard.

Admittedly things were not making a lot of sense the entire day. Everyone was strangely intense. One woman snarled that she couldn’t look up her own books because she had a sore foot. Hmmm. This may explain how those keyboards get so grotty.

All in all, it was a pretty typical Saturday. And then, he appeared. An odd little man with a cup of water approached the Reference Desk. Miss Information asked if she could help him with something.

“The police have hassled me my entire life—all because I have a medical condition,” the man replied.

Miss Information assumes that’s a “no” then. How she loves her rewarding work with the mentally ill. She waited for the man to continue. He didn’t. She decided to pretend that he was making sense. After all, the police are apparently too busy to take care of the charming young people who deal drugs quite openly in the library parking lot. Perhaps all their crime fighting time is spent bothering this lovely man. She suggested he make an appointment with the legal aid lawyer who works out of the library. He was delighted with this suggestion and promised he would.

Eventually the man got to the point. “I need information about my dental plan in a manila envelope,” he said.

Ok. Here’s something Miss Information can actually do. She began searching the Internet for his insurance company, all the while wondering if the man would become violent when told there were no manila envelopes. But not to worry, the man suddenly got all chatty. Oh, good.

“I’m allergic to people you know,” he said.

Miss Information wonders whether she may suffer from this condition also.

“Oh,” she replied. “Must be awkward.”

“Yeah, well, I’m mostly allergic to Turks and Iraqis.”

Miss Information’s heart sank. She hoped that none of the large number of Middle Eastern customers in the nearby area had overheard. She did not reply, but instead turned the monitor on her computer to show the man what she had found.

“I have this bad reaction to computers,” he said. “So don’t delete anything. Bad things happen to me when people press the delete button.”

Miss Information was briefly tempted, but assured the man she would not delete anything. Maybe never again. The man went on to discuss at length his theory that every keystroke on a computer has a negative impact on the universe or people or something. Miss Information wasn’t listening. She was too distracted by the man’s underwear. She suddenly noticed that although the waistband on the man’s jeans was up really high, for some reason it didn’t quite intersect with his shirt, exposing several inches of underwear to the world. Grey underwear. Now this is depressing. Miss Information had, up to this point, found grey underwear to be rather appealing. Black underwear means you’re trying too hard. White underwear means you aren’t trying hard enough. Other colours are just too weird. Thanks a lot, Crazy Underwear Guy, you have destroyed men’s underwear for Miss Information—FOREVER.

She printed off reams of potentially useless information for the guy but included the phone number of the insurance company which she urged him to use, gave him a paperclip, miraculously found a manila envelope and waved bye-bye to the crazy person.

She later discovered the man had indeed made an appointment with the lawyer and then left in a huff because Circulation Desk staff had refused to arrange a wake-up call for him on Monday at 9 am.

posted by Miss Information @ 10:39 PM