The Good 'Ol Days

As I was contemplating several rather dismal homemade ornaments, the most random person popped into my head.  I do a lot of craft programs for the library.  People seem to like them, though I hate crafting with a passion.  I was never very good at it, and these ugly ornaments are proof.  I like to do my crafts beforehand so I can work out any kinks, though when I'm demonstrating I always start out with, "now, I know yours will look nicer than mine."

But the name was the interesting part of this story.  For the first time in years, I thought of a somewhat unbalanced former patron with a very distinctive voice whom I'll call DD.  DD made calling telephone reference a regular part of his day.  He was one of many.  It wasn't until I began working in telephone reference that I began to realize how many severely mentally unstable people there were wandering the streets.  Anyways, one of DD's tricks was to call every day to ask if a particular person had been released from jail.  I believe he was in trouble when this man got out, which didn't happen while I was working there.  DD would also call for various phone numbers, and once he asked me to write him a business plan so he could submit it to the government and get his free money (thinking, I believe, of an SBA grant).

He was a handful, but he was easier to deal with than Washington DC lady, by far our most persistent caller.  Washington DC lady would call for the numbers to various businesses, some of which no longer existed and some of which had very different names from the ones she gave.  She would call for the same number several times.  When confronted with the fact that her mind was almost gone, like when we told her some business did not exist, she would become very angry.

She was easier to deal with than Morphine Man, who was trying to get his roommate arrested or fired.  When he was done complaining about his roommate and trying to get legal advice from us (we didn't give it), he would try to stump us and then complain about receiving inadequate service.  A typical question from Morphine Man was, "so
what's going on these days?"  He got his name because we suspected that he was at a methadone clinic.

There was the Reverend BJ, who would sometimes ask me to read her every quote from the Bible with a particular theme, and sometimes thought our answers were too quick or simple, at which point she would say, "don't get smart with me!"  Media Man only wanted the numbers to various media outlets, about 3 a day, while HQ man thought that we could find him the direct line to a company's CEO if he just asked the right person (he kept asking for the head librarian).  South Carolina man was fascinated with the Romans, and wanted lots of little facts about them.  He then wanted to know where we found the answer.  He would ask the same question several times, and didn't like it when the answers weren't consistent, so we started photocopying the source material and highlighting the fact.  When someone quit paying his phone bill, he tried to call us collect, but we never accepted.

It's easy for me to tell stories about telephone reference with the fond humor that comes with having left a dismal situation.  Any one of those names would send a current telephone reference employee's blood pressure skyrocketing.  I guess what I'm saying is, crafting isn't really so bad.