I am in the main reading room of my local library doing research. As usual, the room had quite a few homeless people, all mostly keeping to themselves and enjoying the air conditioning as it’s brutally hot outside.
There are several rows of rectangular tables, each with six chairs, giving folks plenty of room to spread out. Suddenly I hear this PLOP. An armload of magazines slams down on the table across from me. A huffy-looking woman sits down and only then says:
Patron: “Let me share this table with you; I don’t want to sit near homeless people.”
She is not trying to be tactful at all, nor quiet. Several occupied tables are in earshot. She sits there for about twenty minutes and never… shuts…up. She has the magazines (cooking magazines) strewn all over the table. She wants to talk about recipes. She wants to profess her love for some grocery store she used to visit back home. She wants to talk about what a nasty city this is. And she really wants to talk about:
Patron: “This library is being ruined by vagrants and bums and they should not be allowed inside!”
I was doing my best to just “mmhmm” and “ah” instead of actually answering her, hoping she would finally shut up, but my simmering dislike of her went up to boiling hatred when she started tearing recipes out of the magazines. I finally looked her right in the eye:
Me: “Stop it!”
She starts to sputter.
Me: “Just take pictures with your phone.”
She vibrates in place for about twenty seconds and then decides my behavior is too offensive to endure, so she slams her stuff together – leaving the half-destroyed magazines in a messy pile[ and does the Flounce’n’Bounce.
As she’s walking away, I see a notebook she left on the table. I think about it for a minute, then pick it up, run after her and give it to her.
Me: *Very saccharine sweet.* “You forgot this!”
She looks at it, spurts out a “hmph!” and continues flouncing.
Parking in this library is in a giant garage about a block and a half away, and library patrons can park there for three hours free with a validation slip from the library – you hand them your ticket at the reference desk and they staple the slip to it.
No slip? You paid the hourly rate indicated by your time-punched ticket. It was like $2.50 an hour. No ticket? You paid the DAILY rate, which is about $20.When I picked this woman’s notebook up, I could see the little ticket sticking out of the top with the slip stapled to it. When I handed her notebook I had intended to give her the ticket as well, but with that final ‘hmph!’… well, golly gosh. Where did that ticket go?
Shame. Hope you had a twenty in that giant purse, lady.
