Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Today I got a two-new-cars Green Line train again. Our leisurely pace inbound was quite regal.

The worst April Fools joke of all was, of course, the snow.

I stopped by the library on my way home last night and found Walter Jon Williams’ Star Wars novel on the new book shelves. I’d been looking around for it in bookstores, and just realized last week at Pandemonium in Cambridge that the reason I hadn’t found it before was that it’s out in hardcover. Somehow I always think of media tie-ins as going straight to paperback.

I have this problem with the Boston Public Library. I take out books, I return the books - no problem. Every few months, however, the library loses a book I’ve returned, and then blames me. There used to be a special status for such books - claimed returned. I would tell them that I’d returned the book and they would mark it claimed returned. Whether they ever found the missing books was beyond me. This time, however, a manager was trotted out to negotiate with the computer over the status of a useless little anthology in paperback that, even if I were the thieving kind, I wouldn’t have bothered to steal. Then he, the manager himself, trotted out into the stacks to look for this book which the BPL would be better off without. He must get a lot of exercise.

I don’t understand how a completely computerized system can fail so frequently. I doubt the bar code readers are at fault - in fact, I suspect that it’s human negligence, and not just human error, that causes so many books to go missing - somebody’s not in the mood to scan in the returned books.

Either that, or they’re running Windows.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2003 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Boston. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.