Tales from the "LiberryCAST"

Everybody has a secret these days. If nothing else, they have at least one computer password. We went through several at the "liberry" for our patron computers, mostly because our patrons kept hacking them. And, sure, we didn't always make this as difficult as we should, but people having the patron computer password wasn't exactly the end of the world. It was just irritating. And who among our patrons tended to be the ones who tried to hack us most frequently? Why the Rogue Patrons, of course.

(Featuring appearances by Parka, The Evil Fed Ex Guy and the Devil Twins Auxiliary League of Neighborhood Kids)

On this Thanksgiving holiday, I am thankful for family and friends willing to travel great distances to my home only to have to sleep on inflatabeds. I'm also thankful that I once wrote a handful of Tales from the "Liberry" entries in which Thanksgiving played a part. That's cause they were readily available for me to adapt for this week's podcast.

Hope you and yours are having a festive turkey season.

(And that you don't live in Missouri or Kentucky, cause I shit on those states pretty heavily in this episode.)

(This podcast features the first podcast appearance of Birthday Lady)

There are many irritating patron archetypes, but among the most irritating of them are the Geneal0gy People. Yes, those patrons who are so fervid about their own ancestry that they simply must spend at least six hours a day diligently researching the shit out of it. And, really, if you're gonna put that kind of time and labor into something you're so passionate about, are you gonna keep your discoveries to yourself? Hell no, you're going to tell simply EVERYONE about it all. And who better to start with than the library staff? We had a handful of amateur geneal0gists under foot, but the one we actually avoided at all costs was the man who became known as Gene Gene the Geneal0gy Machine

While not the stinkiest patron we ever had to deal with, the man who became known as Crusty the Patron was still counted among the worst of the stinky patron lot due to his tenacity in inflicting his stench on us for hours at a time. Crusty suffered from a number of other hygienic ailments that made working at my "liberry" downright unappetizing. And while I was not allowed to kick him out directly, I was able to find at least a temporary solution to the basic problems he caused for us without a direct confrontation. (Don't eat any pastries while listening to this episode.)

This ep also features appearances and references to Parka and the worlds second stinkiest patron, Mr. Stanky.

There were only a handful of patrons I truly hated, most with good reason. However, one who pressed all my hatred buttons within seconds of meeting him was a guy I called Billy the Brainchild--well, him and a remarkably similar patron called The Expert). Billy was a guy out to make a name for himself in a variety of half-assed media business ventures of a pornographic nature. His ultimate goal was to become Appalachia's version of Larry Flynt, minus the wheel chair and, presumably, the inflatable wang. And that wasn't even why I hated him. No, my ire was because his first step toward his goal (besides putting his bong down for one whole hour) was to come pester us for ways to achieve that goal. But, naturally, a guy as smart as Billy saw himself didn't really need our help. He already knew everything there was to know about the business world; he just needed us to confirm it for him. And therein lay the basic conflict.

The major problem with patron access computers are the patrons. They don't have computers at home, so they have to come use ours.

And that's great, until it's not.

Such was the case with a Rogue Patron I came to call The Dufus. He was a guy from the area who'd gone out into the world for, to hear him tell it, a storied career as a minor deity on the West Coast, where he hobnobbed with rich and powerful celebrities all of whom adored him. Again, to hear him tell it. And tell it he was more than willing to do. Somehow he got it into his head that such minor matters as time limits on the patron computers didn't apply to him and no matter how many people we had waiting to use his, there he sat, pissing all of us off. Ironic and moronic, because he was using our computer to try and get a job working for the library in the first place.

In the past, we've chronicled small tales of Mr. B-Natural and Mr. Smiley, the first and second grumpiest old men in all the world respectively. However, the third grumpiest old man in all the world actually proved to be one of the more active antagonists in the history of the Tales from the "Liberry" blog. As I said last week, he's an honorary old white lady and for good reason; not only is he on par with the O.W.L.s in mere surliness, but he could go up against the worst of them in the Forgetting Your Library Card and Getting All Worked up About it to the Point of Leveling Threats Against the Staff 400 meter dash. One for the record books, people.

Customer service people, back me up here. When it comes to the ability of customers/patrons to deliver huge consignments of shit during the course of a basic transaction, the group of human beings most likely to be making that delivery are Old White Ladies. Yessir. More than any other group on the planet, they are the least easy to please. Maybe it's a southern thing. I dunno. But that has been my experience over the course of 20 years of dealing with the public, and four such tales are presented in this week's podcast. (Featuring an appearance by Delva Poopoohead, of the New England Poopooheads

Children are not angels. Sometimes they break bad and have to be sent away for a while to a place where they can be broken of the badness, or simply be removed from a bad situation. (I know, I know, that's a huge over simplification, but that's how it seems.) We had a couple of homes for troubled youth in Tri-Metro and they were frequent visitors to the "liberry" along with their usual hulking, pro-wrestler style Troubled Youth Wranglers. Getting materials back from them was often a problem. Getting them to stop asking if we had The Anarchist Cookbook, an impossibility.

Libraries are supposed to be places of quiet study. Mine, not so much. Our patrons were very loud. Sometimes they suffered from no-inside-voice syndrome, a sad condition in which their parents never taught them proper indoor voice technique. Other times they used blood curdling screams as their only form of communication. And, on the rare occasions when they were quiet, they were excessively quiet and were in danger of having their voices drowned out by the sounds of typing. Presented for your modulated listening, three tales spanning the history of the original blog.

Notable appearances by Kanji the Kid, the Screamer.