Library Blues

Sigh. I'm hacked at the library. Again.

This is the first time I've been since December. I was looking for the book about The Mike Douglas Show and Tom Kelly's Moon Lander, and I also found Mary Jane Higby's book about working on radio and Harlan Ellison's Watching (another book of rants; I love to read Harlan's rantings...). Went off on a delightful tangent in the reference section: they had a great book of children's TV series, a great big radio encyclopedia, and bound issues of the Reader's Digest going back to 1936. Alas, of course reference books are not eligible for withdrawal.

When I got to the checkout counter I was informed I owed the library $3.60 in late book fines.

I exploded (quietly, grant you, but I exploded). Look, I'm not Miss Perfect. I'm rarely late returning library books, but I've been late twice using the Central Cobb County Library, and both times on my next visit when I took my books to checkout, I told them I owed them money, and paid uncomplainingly. Both times it was a matter of one day.

But this is the third time this has happened at the Central Library in the past couple of years and it's driving me crazy. One of the times they sent me a card and told me that I still hadn't returned a book that was due a month earlier. I marched over to the library next day and there was the book sitting on the shelf! When I reported it to the librarian, she gave me a snooty look and said, "We could have two copies of that book." Oh, sure, an obscure book about advertising symbols. Uh-huh. (I later looked the book up in their online catalog. Sure enough, they had only one copy of the book.)

Ironically, I'd borrowed four books from the library on that visit, of which that book was one, and all four were returned at the same time. Yet this one was the only one that had turned up "missing."

It happens every time I put books into the book return drop outside instead of bringing them inside. After the last occurrence (the incident listed above), I was resolved to go inside every time I visited. But on the January trip to return the books, we were in a hurry to be somewhere, so again they were dropped in the outside book return bin. Voilà--it's happened again. Look, if someone at checkout is careless about logging in returned books, that's the library's fault, it isn't mine, and I'm tired of being blamed for it.

To add insult to injury, this time they said the books were six days late! My God, I've been going to the library for over 35 years and I've never brought back library books six days late!

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 3:19:00 PM

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