Beware of falling fruit

The girls and I were hiking in beautiful Waimea Valley during our January trip to Hawaii when I spotted this sign. Naturally, my first thought was "oooh, this would make SUCH an excellent blog post title!" I've been waiting ever since for fate to hand me a day to match. It was today.

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, I work in the archives of the Atlanta History Center, smack dab in the middle of the most posh neighborhood in Atlanta. We are free and open to the public but thanks to our location, we are generally (and mercifully) free from the, shall we say, interesting patrons that find their way into many public libraries. Our patrons almost exclusively fall into one of four categories: a) elderly folks researching their family histories, b) students of all ages conducting historic research, c) absent minded professors intent on getting their next book published, and d) spouses and domestic partners of those in categories a through c that get dragged along for the ride.

I guess I need to add a new category, coined by one of my co-workers, for the woman who visited us today: Wackadoodles. We wondered if she really belonged with us when she floated to the reference desk, signed in using a made-up patron number and the name "Fatima," and proceeded directly to the computers. My co-worker walked over and asked her if he could help. She said, yes, would he bring her a cup of coffee? When he explained that we allow no food or drink, she sort of sniffed as if she'd suddenly found herself seated in a sub-par restaurant, and turned her attention back to the computer. For the next several hours, we watched as she intently surfed the internet, filled out online applications and printed dozens of real estate listings while alternately mumbling to herself, wadding up paper balls and tossing them across the table, and making odd gestures at the computer screen with her hands.

Now, I should probably point out that mumbling to oneself and making odd gestures at the computer screen is behavior that we frequently see from a lot of our patrons--in fact, it's behavior we occasionally indulge in ourselves. I think it's part and parcel with being a history geek. This woman was not a history geek. At one point, when I walked past her, I noticed that she was most definitely not conducting historic research on the net. The hot pink logo on the screen (in the shape of a bunny's head) gave it away. People may read Playboy for the articles, but I doubt they have much to do with history.

It wasn't until she started walking laps around the Reading Room and pulling books from the shelves to stack them in odd piles on the tables that we finally decided it was time for Fatima to leave. After security escorted her off the property, we found that when she wasn't with us, she had been alternately scattering papers around the atrium of our building and trying to clean the bathrooms. She left what looked like a hypodermic needle in the ladies room--further investigation determined that it did not contain a needle and that she had apparently been using it to whiten her teeth (when she wasn't cleaning the bathrooms and surfing porn sites on our computers, that is).

So. I guess it's to be expected that while working with the public you're occasionally going to stumble upon a nut or two. I could write a book about some of the wacky people we deal with on the phone and via e-mail. But this is the first up-close-and-personal experience I've had and I have to admit it was a tad unsettling. I felt sorry for her. Maybe she just has a cell phone with AT&T...