Banishment - Part 1

The library practices an ancient tradition that we commonly see in fairy tales and other histories and that is being banned, banished, do not enter the realm again. When you are banished you cannot enter any library in the land, meaning those in our city limits and also our garage. It also means you might try and come into another branch from where you were banished and see if we can really catch you.

Everyone banned gets a personalized letter that lays out the charges and the sentence, very guantanamo like. I've heard rumors that one of our customers took her case to court, probably small claims, and received  justice. Or in her case refrain from drinking and spitting tobacco into a cup.

Yesterday I wasn't in such a great mood, I'm usually cheerful and try to greet everybody who comes to the Commons, but I stayed up too late and didn't get enough beauty sleep. So I banned somebody, well the royal we banned somebody. I started it but part of my job is to be on the alert for "objectionable material". I've been here for awhile but I haven't seen a lot of objectionable material, a lot that I might object to, like smells, but not any sex stuff. It is the great American cause of the war against sex that we fight in the library. We give everyone free access to the Net (I'll talk more on that later on why we are the good guys who don't take any government money) on our dime and that means you can go anywhere and see anything but we still kind of watch you, meaning me.

Well a customer comes over to me and whispers in a very low voice mumble mumble mumble and I say you have to speak up because I can't hear you if you whisper, she whispers a little louder and I lean forward and tell her little louder please. She looks at me and gives me the look, I'm embarrassing her and finally tells me number 20 is looking at pornography. Wow I look up but he's in the far corner and the porno for me needs to be blinking with a large red arrow pointing at it for me to see it really well. What I actually saw was he had switched over to YouTube and was viewing videos of pets and kids in their back yard, innocuous to the extreme. Nevertheless I open our spreadsheet list of warnings after I look up his library card number and find out his name. He's got a long record of one type of crime, viewing "objectionable" material. I add his name again and notice that this is twice in the same month, banishment potential. First thing in the morning I had run into our young security officer 'R' and he was looking worse than me. He had worked security at a bar till 4:00 am and it was now a little past 8:30. We had a run in with a young woman who it turned out he knew and didn't want to get involved with so early so we let her pass. 'R' told me it would involve her screaming and neither of us would have appreciated the increasing volume of screeches. So this new encounter was with # 20 later in the day and I told him who he was and that this was the second time this month along with his long record. At that point #20 got up and was walking slowly toward the elevators, actually doddering toward the elevator would be more like it ( I also realize while writing this that I was a year older then him). 'R' walked over to him and spoke to him and he nodded a few times.

'R' came back to me and told me he was banned, banned for three months, for being a recidivist and viewing very quickly objectionable material. 'R' said he would write up the incident report and since I had brought him into it right away I didn't have to write up my version. So we banned a very old doddering objectionable viewing man (who I'm one year older).

Travelers

My job is part host, behind me are the computers, around 50 of them arranged in rows. I try to greet everyone with a good morning or a hello, partly to make them feel welcome and also to gauge what type of person they are, friendly would be a plus. Most of the people have library cards and just walk on by, straight to their seats and to the world wide web. But others are travelers. Some are here for a short stay, or live in the streets with no fixed address ( I think they know exactly where they live; we just might not know based on our numbering and street names), but some are on the road.
We call travelers guests and they're required to show us an ID to get a guest pass. The pass lets them get on the Internet like anyone else. An old man came in one day and I thought he might have been the oldest traveler I had seen, he was in his late seventies and had been traveling a long time. He told me had come down from Wisconsin and was heading toward Florida, racing against winter. I didn't have any real idea how he traveled, bus, car, walking.
The other day 3 hobo's came into the Computer Commons. I liked saying the word hobo, was it from hobnobbing? They were really road worn another word for being dirty. But they were very young and I could think back to my days when I hitchhiked all over the US. But I was often by myself so traveling in a trio must have been a challenge to get rides, maybe they walked like the old man from Wisconsin.
The 3 hobos were guests for two days, I haven't seen them since that time. One of them had a dirty brown coat but it had the most amazing doodles and written words on it, kind of almost a magical coat. He asked me in a British accent if I had any spare notebooks so he could record his adventures on the road. I laughed a little and said no I didn't but I could give him what scrap paper we had in our recycle box (actually one of us, not me, cuts up the paper into little squares so our customers can scribble little notes when they are on the computers). After that the 3 hobos left together, talking softly  cause it's the library and laughing a little.

Great First Impressions

We have a certain group of people, I call them the typers. They type and oftentimes use the computers that don't have internet access. I imagine they are writing observations, stories about their lives, poetry or a novel. Sometimes I'm invited to look and then the veil of sanity can drop before my eyes. My first time was when a customer asked me for help in printing his letter. Unfortunately he had used the notepad program on the computer, which is not meant to be used to write a letter or a screed in his case. He showed me his print out of his letter and it was a jumble of formatting, paragraphs running along the page and then suddenly stopped and large white spaces appear. First impressions always count and he was afraid that his letter was not going to work once he mailed it.

I tried not to read it since it was his private work, but he had seemed rational and clean, cleanliness in my opinion was an important factor in my opinion of rationality. But certain words popped out, missing money, plots against him, television and how this particular political person was tampering with his mind ( that in itself in an election year is not so far off base).

We manuevered around and I helped eliminate a lot of the white space and moved the words closer together. Not a great letter in a first impression sort of way but it would do.  We spoke briefly about Microsoft Word and how this would work for him and launch him into an unfettered letter campaign with great first impressions. I saw him a few more times and he had moved to the typing computers and was now making use of MS Word. I didn't have to read them anymore and he was printing away (at 15c per page).

Set Up

The set up is this, I sit and watch and talk to the people flowing by me. I work a little at a library in a slightly southern city. People come by and sometimes talk, or ask for help, I listen and sometimes I help and sometimes I can't.

I'll be sharing my stories and observations.