Excellent Parenting Skills

Who brings their child into the library, plops down at a computer, and surfs for porn while the child watches? That guy over there, apparently. Okay, maybe the kid isn't old enough not to understand what's going on when daddy is looking at nekkid Paris Hilton pics, not to mention the horse and cow sex websites, but...it's time to use my special powers to suddenly lose the Internet connection at that computer.

"Gosh, sir, I'm not sure what could be wrong with that station. Maybe it's a problem with the website you were viewing. Sometimes websites go down temporarily. Which site is giving you trouble?" That usually encourages them to leave, but if they insist that we fix the Internet right now (lives are on the line!), I can always very sweetly offer to take a look at the browser history to see what the problem might be, "because if our computers are having problems with a certain site, we might need to download a plug-in update to make it work."

I swear I didn't lie this much before becoming a librarian.

It's Snowing Outside and Everyone Feels the Need to Tell Me So

I'm not sure if this patron is doing genealogy research on John Glenn, as well as several former U.S. Presidents, because he thinks he's somehow related to them, or if he's doing it just for fun because he ran out of leads on his own family. Regardless, I hope Mr. Glenn's autobiography will give him the "elusive clues" he's hoping to find.

He has apparently been attempting to research my family too, as he emailed me some data about some people who happen to share my last name but are in no way related to me. This is what I get for using some of my ancestors as examples during the classes I teach about our genealogy databases. Darn my great-grandfather for being such a good example of showing up in census and military records with 5 different first names!

In other news, earlier I helped a guy respond to a message he got on an online dating website, because I guess the bright red Reply button wasn't obvious enough. I think it would be rather unappealing to know that the guy who sent you a message had to have a librarian help him do so. It's one thing to need help using a computer. It's quite another to need help composing the message so as to get the best response from the woman. Luckily it was busy enough that I could politely excuse myself from his attempts at virtual wooing.

Clarification Needed

I asked a patron to type ".gov" and she typed "dotgov." I need to be more specific, I guess.