Just Say No

Anyone who has ever worked in a library knows that they are really funny places to work. Seriously! I have worked in a library in some way or fashion, on and off, since I was 15. When you have worked in a free public building that long...you have seen some stuff.

It is a known fact that there are some quirky people that hang out in libraries...even more than just the librarians themselves. (I am getting cyber glares from my librarian friends...) Because you see them so often, some patrons have developed nick names that all the librarians can recognize them by.

Names like: “Tube Sock Man”, “Perfume Man”, “Building a Bomb in his Mothers Basement Guy”*, “Sleazy Mobster Guy,” and "I want to be your friend Guy” (He is the one that used to yell "I just wanted to be your friend" whenever I would leave the room he was sitting in).

Ahhh yes, Libraries tend to have all sorts of strange people convene in their reading rooms. In fact once, when I was in high school working at a library, a man wrapped himself in toilet paper, naked, and ran through the library. That was “nude mummy guy.”

There is a story here. One night when I was working “Creepy Serial Killer Guy”** was bleeding on his arm and asked me for a Band-Aid. I went out back to get him one, when I came back, he said his hands weren’t working right and could I put it on him…

Now, I like to think of myself as a really nice person...for the most part... But with being nice, and trying to always think about others first, I have developed this problem where I have a hard time saying no. Jamie may whole heartedly disagree with this, but in the setting that I am discussing, I tend to fall off the fence onto the "lets not make waves" side rather than the "Have a freaking back bone Leia, side"

So what did I do? I did it.

YEAH I KNOW…I itched the rest of the night feeling like something was crawling all over me I was so grossed out. There wasn’t enough antibacterial in the world when I got home to cure my problem… I have GOT to learn to say no! If not to a creepy bleeding dude in the library than to who???? Where does it end?


* This guy had a copy of a Chemistry text book out for at least one year…and was very nervous when you talked about fertilizers…(No Leila it isn’t who you think it is)

**I am going to say that I don’t know for sure that he is a serial killer, but he is one of those people that the minute he looks at you, you want to flee like the little screaming child you know you are!