• “What do you mean by ‘librarian’?”
• “You don’t look like a librarian.”
• “It must be nice to just sit there and read all day.”
• “Library school? I never heard of library school. You gotta go to library school?”
• “I guess it’s really quiet where you work.”
• “Can you tutor my child?”
• “So do you use one of those card catalogs?…What do you mean it’s online?”
• “Where are your glasses?”

And my absolute favorite:

“Do you get paid for this or are you volunteering?”

Yes, I can think of nothing better than answering your idiotic question for free…In the meantime, may I recommend that you watch Party Girl.

Creepy Teacher had come up to my friend and said, “So I hear that Ron Russo and the librarian are getting married”.  My friend couldn’t hide the shock from his face to which Creepy Teacher replied, “Your look just told me what I needed to know.”  He started to walk away but then turned back and said, “Let me ask you one more thing.  Is she expecting?”.  At this point my friend was ready to fall over because only he and two other people knew about it, and none of them would have told anyone.  Creepy Teacher then said that we seemed like a nice couple, etc., and that he wasn’t going to tell anyone.  Which probably means that he told everyone.

I was in complete shock after hearing this.  I couldn’t figure out how he would have known unless somebody had overheard something.  Some of the guys in Ron Russo’s department have a theory that one of the teachers has a hidden tape recorder, but I don’t quite buys that.  (Yeah, there are some wackadoos at work.)

About fifteen minutes later as I was leaving the school for the day, my friend had more info for me.  He’d managed to compose himself and when he saw Creepy Teacher in the hallway again he said to him, “That’s pretty clever of you to have figured it out.”  Creepy Teacher replied that he hadn’t figured anything out but that someone else had told him.  My friend tried to play it cool and said, “But it’s not like you’ll tell me who that person was”, to which Creepy Teacher replied that it was one of the female teachers in Creepy Teacher’s department.

Hearing this person’s name totally blew me away because even though it’s someone that I like and am on friendly terms with, she and I never talk about our personal lives.  So I guess there are three possible explanations: 1. Creepy Teacher is lying, 2. Creepy Teacher’s colleague overheard it, 3. Creepy Teacher’s colleague heard it from someone else.

I was upset about this on Friday although Ron Russo told me not to worry about it and that it really wasn’t a big deal, especially considering the school year is basically over.  After having the weekend to think everything over, I realized I overreacted.  I mean, it’s not like we’re teenagers and we have something to hide,  and soon enough everyone would know anyway.  I guess one of my main concerns was that I wanted my principal to hear it from me and not through the grapevine.  I had been planning to tell him on Monday morning all along and so that’s exactly what I did.  I could tell by looking at his expression that he honestly did not know.  He was very happy for me and congratulated me but there was genuine surprise on his face.  There was an even bigger shock on his face when I told him I was four and a half months along; he thought maybe I was about two.  Then he wouldn’t let me move the chair back in case it was too heavy.  Aaaw.

So perhaps Creepy Teacher has an ounce of self-restraint after all.

Imagine you actually started crying in front of the IT guy after calculating in your head that it would probably take you at least six years to re-create it from scratch (an optimistic estimate).

Imagine you are later told that there actually is a backup, but it is from just over 2 1/2 years ago which means it is from about 2 months before you started working at your job.

Imagine that in the 2 1/2 years that you worked at your job you had weeded out about 10,000 items from your collection that had been redundant, outdated, in bad condition, or otherwise no longer needed and had added about 2,000 brand-new items.

Imagine that this backup, which is the best IT can do for you, now reflects the the items that were in the database before the major overhaul that you did (working your butt off and practically cloning yourself because you wanted to have the best library ever), so that there is now a 12,000 item discrepancy in your database.

Imagine that the students in your database are now students from 2007 so that the kids who actually are seniors now are freshmen in your database and the rest of the kids don’t exist, while the bulk of your database is students who have long since left the building.

Imagine that your database shows the books that were checked out in 2007 as being checked out now (and all obviously very overdue) while all the books that are currently checked out are either marked as being in or do not even yet exist in your database.

Imagine that the best you can do now is do a full-scale inventory of every single item (did I mention there are 32,000 of them), run reports to see which items come up as not inventoried, and then hand-delete those items out of the database.

imagine you are going through the five stages of grief but acceptance is still a ways off and you’re sort of stuck at the phase where you just bang your head against the desk.

Welcome to my world.

And then there was this lovely exchange last week:

Do you have…a little…umm…pen?

You want a little pen? (What?)

No, not a pen.  It’s kind of something like this. (Points to a paperclip.)

You want a paperclip?

No, something like a paperclip.  You squeeze it and a needle comes out.

… (What?)

You know, you squeeze it and a sharp end comes out.

You want a safety pin?

Yes! (Big smile.) A safety pin.  I ripped my pants.

Then again maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised about the students considering that just the other day two teachers thought it would be funny to lock me in the AV closet.

In case you’re wondering, it wasn’t all that funny.

At work the end of May is always hectic because the seniors are finishing up and I have to track them down to get my library books.  And, yes, the idea is that they should be courteous enough to return the books themselves but it never quite works that way.  There’s one girl who keeps telling me that the book is on her desk at home (since June of last year when it was due) and that she keeps forgetting to put it in her bag.  Because you know how hard it is to lift an object off a flat surface and deposit it into a backpack.  Although, considering she seems stoned every time she talks to me, perhaps that is a difficult task to accomplish.

But I’ve got a break coming up, and not a moment too soon.  Tonight I am having dinner with the fabulous Dingo, and we will be joined (all the way from Texas) by The Coconut Diaries, who I am so psyched to meet in person.  Between the two of them I just might literally die laughing.

Hopefully the girls don’t kill me because Wednesday morning I am heading to Newport, RI for three days.  Three days of cliff walking, bike riding, lobster eating, and not having to buy Sheetrock.  WOOT!

What will you do?

Everything, just not in the butt.

Though I’ve accepted that I’m unlikely to come across anything so scandelous, I still glance at the discarded homeworks and math equations and games of hangman.  And once in a while I do find something odd or quirky, like this loose leaf with the numbers 1 - 10 written as if for a list.  It’s a very short list as only the first number has been filled in:

1) Steal something from back yard.

Uumm…yeah.  I think this kid needs a hobby.

I’ll have to rely more on the students to entertain me, I suppose.  And they certainly do entertain me, though by entertain I often mean aggravate.  I had a girl come in the other day with her overdue notice and tell me that she returned the book about two weeks earlier.  I checked the shelf and the book was not there so I asked her whether she had returned it to me or some other faculty member.  “No,” she said.  “I was in a hurry so I just put the book on the shelf.”  I was really hoping she was kidding because, seriously, why would anyone do that?  Would she return a pair of jeans to the store and just leave it on the counter, hoping that her money was sent to her by magical elves?

She took me over to some shelves on the complete opposite side of the library from where this particular book should be and said, “I think I put it somewhere here.”  I checked those shelves, as well as the shelves on the right and left, but it was nowhere to be found.  Maybe one day, quite by accident, it will appear like a needle out of the proverbial haystack.  Or maybe, in another 10 years when I have a scanner embedded in my retina, I’ll glance at the spines with lightning speed and see exactly where it is.  Hey, a girl can dream.

Last school year, when I was diving head-first into a messy and neglected library, I didn’t have the time to make real connections.  This year was so different.  I came up from under an avalanche of dusty books to discover that some of my co-workers were amazing human beings.  A group of us got really tight, starting hanging out, being more than just pleasantry-exchanging colleagues .  It was a rare Friday when the bunch of us didn’t go out for drinks the moment that last bell rang.  And now three of my closest friends from the crew just got guillotined.

When my personal shit hit the fan in October, they were there to give me a hug, offer advice, or get me drunk, depending on what I needed.  My girls were my rock and my boy was my Guy’s Point Of View.  They helped me so much and I feel like I can’t help them.  They’re damn good teachers and it’s like all their effort was for nothing.  “Last one hired first one fired” - I understand it but it feels like bullshit right now.

But my favorite so far is 300 which is absolutely stunning and brilliant, beautifully designed and illustrated.  It makes me want to steal it for myself.  Also, it makes me want to yell This Is The Library!!! and kick the annoying chatter-box seniors down a big hole.  Or at least out the door.

But right now I don’t need to complain.  I’ve got an hour till my weekend starts and you can hear a pin drop in here.  Actually you can hear my keyboard as this is the only sound, other than a page rustling here or there.  I think I’ll go and stick my head in one of the boxes of books to replenish my straight-from-the-printers-smell high and then head out for some yummy drinks with my completely kick-ass colleagues.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Besides, the bunny slope was more than enough for most of the kids that were on the trip.  I think a lot of these kids have never even left the five boroughs, never mind strapping on a pair of skis and going down a snowy hill.  In fact for first-timers, many of them did really well; conquering what to a newbie must seem like a horribly steep descent while wearing cumbersome and awkward planks on their feet.

That’s not to say that we didn’t have our share of misadventures.  Just managing the rope tow was a bit of a challenge for some of the kids.  There was one time I had just gotten to the top of the rope, taken off my board, and started the climb up when I heard everything go quiet.  The motor of the rope tow had abruptly stopped and I turned around to see what happened.  There was one of our students lying in the snow, pistachio-green jean-clad legs sticking up, skis a mess, his body tangled up in the electrical cords that had kept the motor going.  I called out to him  if he was ok and got a “my bad” in return.  Apparently he did not let go of the rope when he reached the end of it and was hurled into the power cords, pulling them out of their sockets.  I watched him start plugging things back in, convinced that he would die of an electric shock since the plugs were now in the wet snow, but he managed to finally get all three and the rope started again.

For those who didn’t want to brave the hill on skis there were lots of other options.  Most of the kids have gone snow tubing (something that I will never do again after a crazy accident a few years back where I ended up airborne, flipping out of the tube, and slamming down hard on my neck) and ice-skating.  There was a really big pool where the kids liked to goof around while I went out to the deep end and wished that I was a mermaid so I would never have to leave the water.  We had a pool party which was completely fun and chaotic, karaoke, dance parties, even a make-your-own-sundae event.

The food was really good and there was plenty of it.  I roomed with one of my favorite teachers in what turned out to be a phat suite with a huge hangout room and two bathrooms.  The kids were really good for the most part so it didn’t even feel very much like work and most of the actual chaperoning was reserved for the late-night hours.  Between the snowboarding and the swimming (and the commitment that the teacher and I made to use the stairs instead of the elevator) I got one hell of a workout.  The weather was nice, the company was great, and the atmosphere was very fun.  It wasn’t the snowboarding vacation of my dreams but in its own way maybe it was even better.