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).