Borrow If You Dare

I’ll be the first to admit that I rarely patronise this university’s biomedical library these days. Even back in undergrad, although I was usually based around the area of the biomed precinct, I’d often find myself gravitating towards the Baillieu. In more recent times however, I’ve been catapulted back into the realms of the biomed in order to get access to some older articles. Those really cool ones from journals where the pages have turned kind of yellow and smell a bit funny. And the articles themselves look as if they’ve been painstakingly punched out on a somewhat antiquated typewriter.

One thing that makes the biomed library so distinct is that the people working behind the loans desk are notoriously grouchy. One afternoon a few years ago – either before the advent of the blessed self checkout, or in the period of time where I wasn’t game enough to use it yet – one of the lovely ladies behind the desk gruffly remarked that it wasn’t my photo on my student card. Hmm, at the time I remember thinking that if even if I wasn’t me, I wouldn’t fancy impersonating me. It’s that sort of “service with a scowl” that over the years, doesn’t seem to have changed.

On my jaunt to the library this afternoon, I borrowed a really chunky textbook which I found by pure luck – I find being in the library a bit like looking up a word in the dictionary or going into JB HiFi in that you walk in with something in mind, but after you see what else is on offer, you tend to get a bit distracted and sometimes end up overlooking what you were after in the first place. I borrowed it but still had some photocopying to do. Rather than lug it around, I asked the young dude behind the desk if I could leave it with him for about 15 minutes. After some initial hesitation and quizzing me on when I would return, he said it would be no problem.

After running around the basement of the library tracking down my requisite articles and trying to be mindful of the time, I got my stuff and proceeded to claim the aforementioned chunky textbook. Sadly, the young dude who’d been manning the desk earlier had vanished. In my absence, he had morphed into a middle-aged, crusty-looking guy with an axe to grind. Some undergrads in front of me politely inquired if they could borrow a book that had been returned, but wasn’t out on the shelf yet. This dude looked at them as if they’d just asked him to stand upside-down in a bucket of excrement. “No, you can’t have it until it goes back out,” he barked. They proceeded to collectively slink away.

Luckily, this guy managed to find my book pretty promptly and all I had to endure was a scowl and a look of general consternation. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll ever be good at handling any type of rudeness or even remote whiff of annoyance. I wish it could just be water off a duck’s back and didn’t bug me so much. Gotta squash all that sensitivity!