last night i was going to a small christmas party to make an “appearance” (a.k.a. a very short stay just tell the people who were putting on the party that they are important to me and then a rush back home to go to sleep). pam, my wife, asked me if i could drop by the library and return a book on CD/DVD that was due today. it was overdue according to the note we received from the note re received in the mail which said it was due 10 days ago, but according to the stamp they placed in the DVD itself it wasn’t due until the 15th. normally this wouldn’t be a big deal. you are charged .05$ a day for an overdue book and i would gladly give the library .50$ as a contribution. the problem is that DVDs have a late charge of $1.00 per day thus making the late fee on the DVD we had $10. while i would gladly give $.50 for someone else’s mistake $10 is an entirely different story.
so i decided to go to the library and correct the problem. surely any reasonable person would see the stamp inside the DVD and realize the mistake an say “no problem”. of course, i didn’t realize that my problem would be that the library doesn’t hire reasonable people. i went to the jones creek branch of the baton rouge public library and presented my DVD. the male librarian took my borrowed movie/book and then asked me for $10. i told him that there was a problem because the DVD/book had been stamped as being due the 15th and thus not overdue. he said he would look at it and then immediately turned to his computer. he looked at it and then told me “nope, it was due ten days ago.” i grabbed the DVD and showed him the stamp. he looked at it and then said “the computer says it was due 10 days ago. that will be a $10 fine, sir.”
i could continue but i won’t. needless to say we went back and forth like this for awhile. he would say it was due 10 days ago and i would point to the stamp and say it was due today. after innumerable repeats of this scenario i became tired of the whole situation. i reach the conclusion that there were only three options:
1. be a wimp and pay the $10 fine.
2. be a wimp and never go back to the library and continually run from the library collection agency that would be after me.
3. take matters into my own hands and give the librarian an attitude adjustment.
option #3 seems the best so i grabbed that 70 year old man and began to hit him repatedly. he fought like a tiger, a very old tiger but still a tiger, and after knocking over 4 or 5 stacks of books he said i could take the matter up with the main library downtown. victory is mine … i think. it felt good to forcibly convince the guy to let me talk with another person. sometimes you just have to be forceful to get psuedo-results.