Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Miss Information is annoyed by Evil Grandma

Speaking of denial, as Miss Information was a couple of postings ago, library staff are not the only ones afflicted. Miss Information remembers this time....

It was a busy Saturday. Miss Information and one of her library buddies were in the staff room enjoying a lovely coffee break. One of their circulation desk colleagues came in, upset. One of the customers, she announced, was having a heart attack. Apparently the situation was under control. The guy in charge had taken over. All was well. Miss Information and her buddy behaved as they usually did in these situations...they made jokes, generally had a good laugh and horrified the circulation clerk in the process. You know, Miss Information used to be nice. This is what a life in public service does to a person.

Anyway, a few bad jokes later Miss Information realized that this heart attack dealie would mean that the reference desk was abandoned. Since it was a busy Saturday, Miss Information selflessly cut her break short and went to handle the great unwashed masses. The person waiting at the desk was a customer known as "Evil Grandma"--a short Eastern European woman with the habit of manhandling small children if they got in the way of her grandkids. Nasty piece of work.

Miss Information gritted her teeth and asked Evil Grandma if she needed help.

"Where's the other one?" asked EG. Miss Information explained that the "other one" was dealing with a medical emergency.

"Where'd she go?" EG repeated. Miss Information again explained that "she" would not be available as another customer was having a heart attack.

"Yes, but...she wasn't finished helping me!" EG insisted, huffily. "She shouldn't have started helping someone else. She was going to get me some yoga books!"

Miss Information carefully assured her that guys having heart attacks take precedence over yoga books.

See, as mean and nasty as Miss Information gets, she knows that she will never be completely truly awful. People like Evil Grandma have just set the bar too high. Damn Evil Grandma.

(Also, the heart attack guy? He made a full recovery but forever known as "Heart Attack Guy" by the reference desk staff.)

2 Comments:

At 2:43 PM, Blogger charlesm said...

Dear Miss Information,
Did you mean "never" in the sentence, "See, as mean and nasty as Miss Information gets, she knows that she will (?) be completely truly awful.?" you know, because evil granny has set the bar too high... (don't feel bad; I just made the elementary mistake of using 'there' for 'their' in an e-mail, earlier today; and that's a mistake that I highly criticize others for making. 2. I knew of a young guy, well thirty-something guy, who in college had a heart attack and then was know as "heart attack man" ...unfortunately, behind his back I suppose. 3. I look forward to your posts; they seem to be far and few between lately, I'm guessing because you're very busy with library school. It's too bad that Simmons has cornered the market on the library degree in New England, 'cause it costs like a ga-zillion dollars to go there now.

Yours truly, charlesm

 
At 9:27 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The heading of this post made me snort! It reminded me of a time when I was working at a botanical garden. While leading a class tour,one of the naturalists fell and broke her leg, causing quite a bit of chaos as we rushed around to help get her to an ambulance.

Right in the middle of this the teacher pulls my arm and DEMANDS to know who is going to finish this tour right now! Ah, such compassion...

 

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