Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Miss Information leaves a patron high and dry

The high school student approached the desk.

"Yo," he said, "Can I borrow your vaseline?"

"Huh?" Miss Information responded.

"Your vaseline?" he repeated.

"Um...we don't have any vaseline," Miss Information replied.

"Ok. What about Chapstick?" He asked.

So, basically this guy thinks the library has a communal tube of Chapstick that customers share? She can't hide her disgust.

"Ew," she says.

The student gets hostile. "Why don't you have vaseline? You have hand sanitizer."

Curses. Miss Information has been meaning to hide the hand sanitizer. Not so much from the patrons, some of whom could use some sanitizing (or is that sanity?), but from the reference staff, who view the little bottle as a religious relic and touch it as often as possible. It's nice to be hygenic, but Miss Information hates the smell of the stuff. She notices that her friendliness to her co-workers is directly proportional to the number of times they douse themselves with it.

She can't do anything about the librarians' cleanliness fetish, but she was able to help the young man with his chapped lips.

She directed him to a nearby drugstore.

3 Comments:

At 4:32 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Given the nature of Miss Information's previous post, let us be glad that the young man only wanted the Vaseline for his chapped lips. It might have been worse.

 
At 10:55 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I had a friend in high school who maintained a chapstick that was only used to lend out. I can't tell you how many people used that thing. It was gross, yet funny.

I bet if you had one, that young man would use it and not think twice.

 
At 2:47 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Have you ever noticed that the generic brand hand santizer favoured by most public library systems smells like alcohol, and cheap LBCO brand alcohol at that? No wonder the reference desk seems so attractive to a certain subset of our users.

 

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