My Day at the Library

I'm on the job hunt*, and a thing I keep hearing is, “Oh, that's all handled online. You have to apply online.” I find this frustrating. I feel that a personal meeting, being able to shake someone's hand and actually give them my resume and talk to them about it on the spot, is a much better way for them to get to know me and see that I'd be the perfect fit for whatever the job is. It's how I got a job at J. Matheson Gifts, and that was a fruitful, two-year-long relationship.

Anyhow, I'm ranting, and this is meant to be a post about my day at the library. Let's get to it. I went to the library on Tuesday with our laptop so I could spend the day applying online to a bunch of places. Brendan had background work, so I went solo. I took over a small, round table in a back room at our local branch and got to work. This room is where the teen books live, as well as a row of computers which people can sign up to use in one-hour time slots. It's usually pretty quiet.

I got to the library when it opened at 12:30pm. Later in the afternoon, just when I was needing a break from writing cover letters and answering stupid questions like, “When at work, are you seen as more a) interesting, or b) motivated,” I got to witness quite a show.

A woman had arrived in the room a few minutes earlier to use one of the computers. She had a small child with her in a stroller that she had pulled up next to her and sort of behind her, to her right. The child was whimpering and she turned to it and said, “SHHHHHH!!! You stop that!!” then went back to the computer. The child whimpered some more, and she said, “SHHHHHH!!!” some more. The child whimpered. She turned around and looked at the child and said, “Do you see my face? I am serious. You better quit that or you are gonna get a spanking.” A whimper. “I'm not joking. Look at my face. Do I look like I'm joking?” She did look kind of scary.

The child stopped whimpering and I stopped noticing what was happening with the woman. But the show was not over. A man stood behind another man who was using a computer next to the woman and her child. Allow me to illustrate:



So Indignant Man says to Unmoving Man, “I booked this computer, could you please move?”

Unmoving Man: "It doesn't say you booked this computer."

Indignant Man: “If you try to log in, you'll see that you can't because I booked this computer. Could you please move?”

Unmoving Man: “It doesn't say you booked this computer.”

Indignant Man: “I wouldn't say I booked this computer if I hadn't just booked this computer. You're wasting my minutes. Could you please move?”

Unmoving Man's friend comes over and joins in the chorus: “It doesn't say you booked this computer.”

Indignant Man: “I booked this computer. Now would you please move so I can log on. You're wasting my minutes!”

Unmoving Man doesn't move.

Indignant Man then pushes his way past the stroller so he can reach the keyboard and input his information to log on. That's when the woman stands up.

“Excuse me! Get your ass out of my baby's face!” (Indignant Man was showing some major ass-crackage.)

Indignant Man mutters something about wasting his minutes and continues doing what he's doing. Unmoving Man is starting to move, backing his chair out of the space Indignant Man is now occupying.

The woman says again, “Nobody cares about your stupid minutes! You don't put your ass all up in my baby's face! You say excuse me, you say something to me, you don't just push my baby!”
Unmoving Man is standing now, and Indignant Man is sitting.

The woman says, “I'm serious! You wanna take this outside right now? I'm not from L.A.!” She then says to Unmoving Man, “Would you go and tell a librarian this man is getting his ass all up in my baby's face?” Unmoving Man doesn't move.

The woman sits back down, still muttering about ass in her baby's face, then she gets up and says to Unmoving Man, “Would you watch my computer?” He nods, and she gets up and pushes her baby out of the room.

She comes back with a librarian and says to the librarian, “That's him. He pushed my baby and was rude.”

Indignant Man says, “I was just trying to log into the computer I had booked.”

Unmoving Man and his friend say something about Indignant Man being rude.

The librarian looks around at all of them and sees that they all are on their own computers. She says, “You're all on your own computers now. Just try to stay out of each others' way.”

The woman says, “Okay, thank you.”

The librarian leaves and Indignant Man starts laughing uproariously, like he's just won the battle.

The woman sits back down and says, “If my brother were here, you wouldn't be laughing. He would take care of you.” She mutters something else in Spanish and continues working on her computer.

There was one other thing that happened, where a man was prosthelytizing to some teenagers about the Muslim religion and really pissing me off in his talk about women being made after men and therefore being meant to follow man, but there's wasn't much of a show in that. I told the librarian, and she was going to tell him to keep his conversation down, but he was done by the time we went back.

I'm at the library again now. What else might happen? Stay tuned.

*Since writing this Tuesday night, it seems I've found a job as a medical marijuana promoter! More on that to come.