Where have all the crazies gone?

I have been having trouble coming up with interesting posts lately. My life is kind of boring. The job is all right, our house is all right, we still have a condo, and we’re pretty poor. Not much to talk about there. You know what the big difference is, though? I don’t have any time on the reference desk at my job. This is largely because there is no reference desk. It’s just the circulation desk, and they pay me too much to let me do that. If you had told me last year that I would be at all sad about that, I’d have told you that you’re nuts. But I kind of am. A reference desk shift breaks up the day. It’s a good time to do busy work. It lets you talk to people, which, surprisingly, I usually enjoy. And best of all, it gives you good stories.

There are far fewer good stories at my small little library. This is a library where people eat the food that patrons bring in without any worry. At my old libraries, patron food was met with suspicion. “Mary brought this? Is that Friendly Grandma Mary or Crazy Talks-to-Herself Mary? Did we make her pay fines recently? Let’s have one of the pages try some first.” Here, they know the names of just about everyone, and certainly everyone who cares enough about us to bring food. And they know them because they like them, not because they felt obligated to learn them in order to file a better police report.

It makes life simpler and probably safer, but also a bit more boring. Nobody tells me not to worry if there are any disturbances because “I used to be a cop, and I always carry.” (We soon found out that in crazy-speak, “used to be a cop” means “used to be a parking attendant”, and “I always carry” means “this is why your desk has a panic button that calls the police for you”.) Nobody wearing a large dragon pendant asks me to help them set up an email account in the name of “KungFuPinkFloydLennon742” (not the real name, but close). Nobody even asks me for the book that they read once that was blue, or maybe red, and had a cat on the cover, but not in the story.

The hardest part of no desk time, blog-wise, is that I would do some of my best thinking on the reference desk. There were times, such as science fair season, when the desk was crazy busy and I wouldn’t have a second to pause. In general, though, the desk is just intermittently busy. And I find it nearly impossible to get any work done while sitting at a desk in the middle of the room, trying to look approachable. Sure, sometimes I’d be on the desk with someone and we’d talk the whole time, or sometimes I would actually get work done. But a lot of the time, I’d stare into space counting down the 20 minutes until my shift was over and I could go to lunch, and then I would have an idea, and by the time I got home, a post was sitting in my brain, waiting to be put to screen. Not so much now. I’ll have to find a new source of inspiration.