I don’t know, maybe it’s me. I go to the Central Midtown library the other July morning to the 4th floor where there are the computers and the internet connections and tables and there is a particular issue I am having with my Word program and I want some answers so I figure I will ask the computer person there as to when a computer class is given figuring I can go to the class and ask the instructor my question.
He is a nice young Spanish fellow and he quickly responds to my request looking for a piece of paper, I can sense – he tells me - it will be a give away sheet of paper, an 8” x 10” flyer really (I’m imagining) with all the classes and options and all of the types of classes and times offered he tells me but then he realizes there are none left! So he shows me a plastic placard in which one of the sheets has been mounted in and there are so many classes in July and in such small type they fill up the entire page and the back of the sheet too. I consider for a moment sitting down right there on the 4th floor and copying all the offerings on a sheet I know I have folded in my pocket my two fingers fingering a pen I know I have in my right hand pocket looking at the sheet mounted in plastic sheet and reviewing all the options later but I am really not in the mood and perhaps he realizes this because he offers there are more flyers on the 1st floor of the library and I should go there to get one.
What an excellent idea as I am on my way out of the building and I have to cross the 1st floor; clearly on my way. I take the elevator well push the button the lower button first and in this library when the door opens you are never sure you going up or down but it is a library so may be that is ok (up is down down is up (it is books after all); I enter the opening steel doors on a dare and I go down (what a surprise!) the four flights and when I arrive on the 1st floor I go directly to the check out desk where I am returning a book anyway and I ask the fellow there about getting a computer class flyer and he points me in the direction to another desk which is across the library floor where the librarians are most often (always) stationed and off I go and thankfully, I can see ahead through the stacks, there is a librarian there (waiting to serve me(?)!).
You have to understand on a weekday early morning there is practically no one in the library, it can be it is so quiet and calm and personal – so I walk up to the desk – really more a large circular station and the librarian is sitting there; she seems a nice enough middle aged black woman. She is sitting down hunching over a lower shelf, a type of desk really built into the station facing me; she is busy color marking lines on a piece of paper, it looks like library business and I am waiting patiently (it wasn’t as if I have somewhere pressing to go; if I was someone else perhaps tapping his foot who could have been waiting there busy on the way into a work-a-day morning world running late and all – it could have been possible certainly that morning, it could have been me – there were all sorts of people rushing about on the side walk and the street and you can see them, you can see them right out the large clear glass window rushing about and bumping into each other (almost!); but that wasn’t me, at least not this morning, so I am waiting patiently I mean what else do I have to do?).
Finally she looks up, formally recognizing me and asks what I need and I say the computer guy from upstairs said I could get a computer class flyer down here and she tells me I am not supposed to come here to her station asking for computer class flyers and why did he tell you that? and I tell her the guy upstairs wasn’t exactly specific as to where on the first floor I would find a flyer down here and the guy over there (pointing in the direction of the circulation desk) had told me – “- and why wasn’t that computer guy doing his job?” She asks me; “He sent you down here?” She says. “He shouldn’t send you down here; that’s his job!” - and I say to her he was out of flyers upstairs and she huffs and she looks on her desk through some papers apparently looking for one of the computer class flyers and then finding none she gets off her ass, err her seat rather, and heads out through the stacks and shelves motioning me to follow her which I do and we go through the shelves and carefully around a large pillar and arrive at the central elevators coming from the 4th floor and other floors and she authoritatively goes over to a free standing plastic literature/flyer stand right next to the steel clad elevator doors the same doors from which I had just recently emerged and she fingers through the flyers in upright clear plastic slots and I can see she realizes (and I am too realizing) there are no computer class flyers there on the stand (out of flyers on the 1st floor too!) and abruptly she turns and returns through the maze of shelves and carefully avoiding again that large pillar (something must have happened there) and I dutifully follow her back to her librarian station where I get the distinct sense she finds a sort of security at that librarian station, a safe out post in this maze of library shelves and books (who knows what can happen (or has happened) in that warren (I have read once a…-), and she says almost dismissively (perhaps it is only me, maybe she didn’t say it dismissively) that July is almost over (in fact there are only a few days left) and “to take a class you have to sign up a week ahead of time; you can’t just walk into a class, so the time has run out”; she was implying then, with that fact, that I do not need a July flyer, (maybe I am just getting this all wrong) and I had run out of time to take a July computer class; essentially taking my request, my short term life goal and dismissing it as either stupid, ludicrous or worse yet: not relevant (past its shelf life so to speak (at least it was relevant once (to me)!), but since I really do not want, necessarily need, to take a computer class in July and only want to get ‘the hang of things’, to see what the general schedule and offerings are I say I would take an August computer class list.
She seems to look at me with that ‘what do you want that for?’ type of face as she turns away and begins to adjust a large silver pin on her blue dress.
“I am pretty sure the August list of computer classes would be pretty close to the July list”
I says,
“so at least I can get an idea of what is being offered and the approximate schedule; this is the first time I am taking a computer class.”
I offer.
And she backs off and looks at me, eyeing me really up and down now from her more diminutive position (I am taller than she is) and then she says to me in what I can only describe as an accusatory tone, she says to me,
“I’ve seen you before – you took one of my computer classes before; didn’t you?”
And I am thinking – I couldn’t help but think – is she calling me a liar?
Now you know there are a lot of crazy people that go to the library (maybe you don’t know; I know – it seems a magnet for crazy people – because it’s the air conditioning? No it’s heated in the winter…) and I always (or most often) thinking they are crazy before they get here to the library – now I am thinking, wondering really: do they get crazy here? Is this what is happening? They were maybe OK before they walk into this place but once inside…- maybe it’s the books, there is something coming out of them –burn them?!
“I assure you madam I have never taken, never ever taken a computer class in my entire life.” I say to her.
She looks at me skeptically (what – she calling me – thinking me - a liar again?!).
OK I did take one at RPI my college alma mater I’m thinking but Christ that was a hell of a long time ago and it wasn’t even called a computer class then – it was part of a math course - or physics maybe– and anyway it was software writing, we never got anywhere near the computer which in those days was as big as a small building – anyways I’m thinking is she really calling me a liar?
Come on, she coming at me like this at 8:30 in the morning. Insulting?! Maybe if I had less self confidence (but I am not like these other crazy people in the library; getting crazier every minute?), eyeing my prey now, waiting for an opening that I know will inevitably appear – I know it – sure of it; ahh the bounty of the Lord.
“Ok” I say, “since you don’t have July’s computer class list how about August’s list? Huh?”
She flips through some of the papers on her desk haphazardly,
“August’s list isn’t out yet” she says.
I pause for a moment;
“Well as August is just a day and a week away and as you insisting I must sign up a week ahead of time, - and you have no August list - how do I sign up for August’s classes?”
I am sure I see the muscle in her right cheek twitching;
Ahh the bounty of the Lord.
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