A familiar face comes to Acacia Road

The names of the individuals involved in this tale have been changed, not only to protect their identities but to posibly save my ass from a thrashing by my uncle James. It all began when a full grown man wanting to check out a stack of books at his local library inquired about having misplaced his library card. Procedure is to request that patrons submit another library card application. That part went well. When he returned to the clerk handling his request, the patron was asked whether he had the extension to his I.D. card which shows the address that he wrote on his application.

I didn't read too deep into the false information. I'm somewhat confident that if I had checked the date of issue of the I.D. the patron was using, I might've disovered that he may have been living there for years and his attempt to assume the forgetful person who erroneously jotted down his old address would not have passed muster.

Incidentally, the first thing I noticed upon seeing this patrons I.D. was that we both had the same last name. After coming home from work, I gave my dad a call and asked about a relative which I described to a cue. Recounting today's incident to dad helped restore some confidence in writing this all down for you to read.

In a nutshell, the patron plays the part of the airhead who accidently wrote the wrong address onto his application. Being suspicious of this, I decide to let it go as long as I have the option to input both addresses on his library card record. I say to him he will have to include both addresses and he makes a big deal out of it. He had also seen that I had filled in the gap in his appl where his DOB was required. He didn't want me to include such information in his account for reasons of security, something I could relate with. I assured him I would keep it off his record, but he reached in with his pencil to further add more hash marks on the line I had scribbled across his date of birth.

When he started to remark why the library was making such a big deal out of one application, he gave the instance that I should take under consideration the type of material he was requesting to borrow "not DVDs." Since we were bouncing our ideas against one another, I thought it would be fine to say that we consider the price of the books, and his books looked like in the 40 to 80 dollar range they were so thick. He took this wrongly, I guess, because when I had emmulated his perspective on things by saying to him had the library card application been a test of sorts to see whether one qualified for an account he would've failed. BIG MISTAKE. He went on grieving about petty little things and took a stand to refuse to apply for a card, and refuse to check out the books he needed.

There was little I could say or do to try to change his mind since I immediately recognized that we weren't seeing eye-to-eye on things. I therefore decided to let it go. "Suit yourself" says I. Because he was still bickering, and I knew that anything I said to him would be contorted to outrageous proportions, we both agreed to end it there. There was a pause before he decided to ask my supervisor's name. His number. My name. My last name. "Um, I'm not giving you my last name, sir. I'm the only Joe Blow who works here, so my boss will know whom it is you are talking about." He seems okay with the information I gave him and I thought he was about to leave, so I just stood there. He then continued to write with his pencil all the things he was itemizing that I said to him that he took badly. That I told him his library card application was a test. And some other outrageous shit I can't even recall, it's so absurd. Perhaps it just seems absurd because here I am planning to waive a $3 replacement card fee because I couldn't find his name in the database, I'm about to issue his card just as soon as he write his current address on the application, no questions asked, and his birthdate will be stricken from his account per his request, WTF?! Right.

I can't take very much seeing the little smack is about ten years my bitch, and his face reminds me of Uncle James, how could it not seeing our last names are the same. I tell him to excuse me because I'm going to take my break and he sarcastically retorted "Yes. Go take another 15 minute break. Take your book to read, which you were reading before I arrived!" He was too much. Too much energy. Somebody really needs to extract that corn cobb stuck in his asshole.