I have a radar this week.......

For the mentally unstable that is. Today, a man who has approached me every morning this week made a bee line for me at the desk. He has these long obscure search request. He will get angry when everything he is looking for is on a different floor. Lucky for me, he went to a different floor first. They in turn, sent him to my floor. His quest today was for books with God-like planets as the subject. First he wanted non-fiction, then he wanted science fiction.

He returned to the desk after browsing the science fiction isles. He decided that he wanted non-fiction books once again. I got tired of him real quick. I set him up at the online catalog and proceeded to show him how to do the search himself. He tried that line, " I don't know how to do this." I wasn't buying it today. I told him, "That is why I am showing you. You can sit here and play with your search terms for as long as you'd like." Once he settled on the call number section that he wanted, my shift was up. My boss was relieving me and agreed to take over where I had left off.

The other patron who decided that I was her friend for the day, marched up to the reference desk as soon as I sat down. Now we all know that there are "golf" pencils and note paper at the reference desk. That wasn't good enough for her. She told me that she wanted a pen. I shocked her because there weren't any pens at the desk. I told her that she would have to make do with a pencil. She told me that she was going to draw.

30 minutes later, she returned to the desk. She was polite this time. "Excuse me, can I have a rubber band please. I want to put my hair in a ponytail." Once I began looking for a rubber band, she decided that she needed four. When I pulled out a hand full, she exclaimed, "That will do." I subtracted four from what I had and gave them to her. I was her new friend then. She skipped away while telling me to, "Have a nice day."

I am hoping that the special people will be gone when I return to the desk later this afternoon. Something tells me that it will just be a new batch ready for the night shift.