Big, hairy, half-naked man walks in to the library.
"Oops, sir, you need a shirt on," I say.
"I just have a few questions," says man, walking closer. He has beads of sweat glistening in the black hair on the tops of his shoulders.
"Okay, but you just need to put a shirt on."
"I'm not staying long, I just want to know -"
"Sir. You need to put a shirt on."
At this point the guy decides it is important to him to force a librarian to interact with a half-naked man despite three requests to put clothes on. "I'm not staying long," he says slowly, "I just have some questions and then I will go put a shirt on."
I fold my arms and stare at him, trying to ignite his chest hair with my brain. It probably would have worked if he hadn't been so damp. He realized he needed to say something, so he pretended to look at a takeout menu he was holding and said, "I understand there is a craft sale here."
"No."
"No?"
"No."
"And... ummm.. if I used... a computer! There are computers over there. If I used one, someone could help me download things?"
"Yes. That would be me."
Silence.
"I'll go put a shirt on then."
"You do that."
And that was the worst patron of the week*. Well, him and the homeless couple who teamed up to steal all the used DVDs in the sale bin by splitting up and then claiming the other person had put money in the payment box when I had been looking the other way. Whatever, that is how we rotate inventory.
*AMENDED: Spoke too soon. That is what I get for writing my blog entries on lunch break. Mind you, I love my job and most of our adventures with weirdos, but this one wins the award for Worst Patron of the Week (warning: gross): lady who had explosive blood-laced diarrhea, tried to wipe up with an entire roll of toilet paper, realized it wouldn't flush, then ran for it and locked the key in the bathroom. The janitor had already left for the day, so I got to be the one who busted into the bathroom, discovered the gruesome scene, found the plunger, and fished a big dripping wad of used tissue out of the toilet with an extendable grabber.
IN OTHER NEWS
Watching: The Get Down, on Netflix. Really good. Funny, smart, moving, almost makes me love Disco.
Reading: I have a 50-branch, multi-million-dollar library system at my fingertips, and I pick my books by getting annoyed when I don't have something to read at bedtime and arbitrarily uploading anything that's sitting in Google Drive onto my kindle. Last night it was In the Woods, by Tana French. It's an artfully written, grim-yet-wryly-funny Irish mystery about a detective who, at 12 years old, went missing with his friends and was found gripping a tree so hard his nails broke off, standing in sneakers filled with blood that wasn't his, with no memory of what happened or where his two best friends disappeared to. I'm one chapter in and hooked. So... who was it who recommended I read this? Thanks, friend/relative/patron - and sorry I can't remember who you were or why we were talking about it.
Drawing: I'm still working on the comic. Blocking out page 31 now. Something terrible has happened to the chicken.
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