Retail Hell Memories: Stop being unconscious & serve me!
Thrift Store Hell: Losing An Awesome Store Manager

Comments

Dorrie Jones

I'm looking for a copy of 'The Invisible Kama Sutra'. I don't see it.

Vicky_EJ

That is because the invincible man borrowed it yesterday.

Vicky_EJ

Ah f#ck the invisible man of course.

Jofur

That last one is probably his great expectations for borrowing it.

Virginia Howell

I once had a patron ask, "Where are all the GOOD books?" My reply: "We don't have any, sir. They keep getting stolen."

TechTyger

Which seems like the dumbest thing in the world to me.. why steal books from a place they give them to you for free, and all you have to do is bring them back on time.

I used to ride 20 miles one way on my bike with two massive duffel bags that I'd load up with books, read all of them in two weeks, then do it again. They didn't like me taking so many to start, but when I explained and they saw the condition I always returned the books in, I got special dispensation to take 35-40 books out at once.

Jofur

I was given access to the adult books about 4 years earlier than normal. The kids section was useless for my needs. Try classifying your butterflies using a kids guide to butterflies and moths book. Bonus I was able to check out Poe, Lovecraft, Asimov too. My parents just had to sign a permission slip. Bonus the library was a converted author's mansion, and had little nooks to curl up and read in on cushioned bay window seats. Now the library is a soulless metal building, you want to get out of.

Jofur

I only had to ride my bike 3 miles each way, for the library. A round trip to my cousins was 20 miles up and down hills so I feel for you TechTyger.

TenebrisVenator

Mine was about a 5 mile ride, all downhill going, but the return trip really sucked, LOL. We had one of those converted type libraries as well, but ours wasn't huge, and it was a small town so it was pretty underfunded. I got my first real tech support experience there. It was almost, but not quite, an actual job, and I got paid in books

TechTyger

Florida doesn't have hills as such. :P It's a sandbar with delusions of grandeur. So, it was a long way (maybe an hour and a half each way) but not really difficult.

Even carrying 50 pounds of books. :P

Jofur

I had wire baskets on both side that could fit a paper grocery bag in each, so no duffel bags hanging on the handle bars. Though they did go in bags in the baskets to keep them clean, dry, and in the condition borrowed at.

Kai Lowell

Aah, libraries...

I apparently (I don't remember this - having been a wee bub with my mind on things other than nasty adults) got special permission, when I was five or six, to read *anything* in the library at my primary school. Someone way up in the hierarchy - I think the librarian, but my memory is a sieve - was convinced that despite reading at a high school level, and despite having two much older sisters at home (one of the books I was interested in mentioned That Time Of The Month, shock, horror, gasp.) I was not allowed to read any books outside my grade level, because they were "far too inappropriate". My parents, and I think the principal, were not best pleased with this.

Long story short I basically read my way through that whole library in my time there and they weren't allowed to do shit about it.

TechTyger

I didn't hang the bags from the handle bars, that much weight there would have been dangerous. I had a luggage rack on the back, one bag got bunji'd to that, the other bag I used a couple of the shoulder straps crossed around my shoulders to wear it horizontally like a giant fanny pack.

Kai: Heh. I used to get bored in school, and always sat in the back so I could read while they repetitively repeated repetitions of things I'd gotten days ago. One two separate occasions I got dragged to the front so they could keep an eye on me. In the first one, I was in like fifth grade and the teacher had a stash of college level books in the shelf in front of me, so it was cool.

The second time, I'd been reading as the teacher droned on, and came to my desk 'sneaking' up on me, then shouted a question about what she'd been gibbering about. I put a finger at my spot in the book, looked up and gave an answer in more detail than the textbook had given, then went back to reading. After a cartoonish deflating noise she dragged me out of my seat and put me in the front row on the front right side (this is important). About five minutes later, while I was sitting there pretending to pay attention until I could go back to reading, a glass cylinder of formaldehyde with the various stages of a frog's life had the foot crack off and it fell off the window ledge, on the LEFT front side of the room and smashed on the floor.

Before the stench of decades old frog and formaldehyde hit, everyone looked at me like I did it, but I was 50 feet away... I just held my hands up, 'wasn't me'...

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