I am repeatedly amazed at the number of patrons who ask if there is a fee to check out books. It befuddles me... in a slightly sad way.

Lieutenant Dan!

1. There's a man who has been coming to my computer classes.... I have no idea what his actual name is, but I think of Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump every time I see him. I'm not 100% sure why, as I don't think he's like Lt. Dan at all. He just has long shaggy hair... and always wears camo pants and army boots.

Anyway, this guy can talk your head off, mostly about making money on eBay. This would be the theory of making money on eBay, though, as he doesn't know how to use it. He keeps coming to the computer classes in hopes that I will somehow teach eBay tricks or something. I told him to come to the Internet class, but aside from that, I'd show him some books we have about eBay.

I guess Lt. Dan would not be interested in eBay, as it did not exist at any point in the timeline of Forrest Gump. Ebay was founded the year after that movie came out.

2. I have evaluation forms for my classes that I hand out at the end of every class. Honestly, I get rather useless feedback from them, but I keep up with them just the same. Anywho, one of the questions is, "Is there something you didn't learn that you wanted to learn? If yes, what?" One of the answers from yesterday's class: "To learn how to check spelling or grammar" (and yes, it was spelled correctly and everything). That would be a lovely suggestion... if it weren't for the fact that we definitely DID talk about right-clicking on those squiggly lines. Granted, it was a brief discussion, and we didn't talk about the full spelling & grammar check, but still.... It seems somebody failed to pay attention.

The other day....

I'm going to call the following patron Amy. I doubt her name is actually Amy, but you know how some people just look like they should have a certain name...? Yeah.

Anyway, Amy just came to get those books... you know, the ones you had sitting behind the desk for me? From a few days ago?

Well, actually, that was about 2 months ago and we have since reshelved them.

Oh, well, can you just tell me where they are?

Sure, but you'll have to remind me what books they were (because I do not have a super-human memory).

Well, they were blue or green... and there were two of them.

Oh, I see -- and what were they about?

I was looking up definitions.

So, dictionaries? I took Amy to the dictionaries in the reference section and there was, lo and behold, a matching set of blue and green dictionaries (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, to be exact).

Oh, those aren't the right ones. I remember they were a couple of shelves over.

Hmmm, well that's interesting, since there aren't any dictionaries a couple of shelves over. But okay, let's go look over there for kicks.

Amy decided that we still had the wrong books picked out but that they would work "okay."