Tales From The Circ Side

Sideways Sentience Edition

---

Yesterday was interesting. By interesting I mean that the simulation seemed to be about a half a bubble off of level. Everyone jokes about Mondays, as if the entire hive mind of humanity is a little off kilter as the work week starts or something. Well, yesterday at the library something was off, a lot.

To start with, I was busily pulling expired holds from the holds shelf while my boss was pulling the day's holds that were to be shipped out with the courier. We were working in a companionable silence when my manager huffed, "Where the heck did it go?"

"Where did what go?" I inquired. She really did sound miffed.

"The self check keyboard. It's missing!"she replied in a more than slightly stressed tone.

I walked around the corner to see her looking behind the self check computer's monitor for the keyboard that we usually stash back there. The self check station is touch screen, but we manually attend to some functions on that piece on not to often working well machinery. For a second I just stood there with my mouth open, looking somewhat like a beached puffer fish I imagine, for right in front of the monitor was a keyboard. Um....

"It's just gone," she continued frantically, "Do you think JT moved it?"

"Um," I started off, rather unsure of myself, "there's a keyboard right in front of you, isn't that it?" I continued carefully. I mean, maybe only I could see it.

My boss looked down and came to a complete stand still. I am pretty sure that she ran through a full consciousness reboot sequence, because she reached down, picked up the keyboard, and then we both simultaneously burst out laughing. The invisible keyboard was to be an omen.

After the keyboard announced the arrival of an off kilter day, I found that I could not keep anything in my paws. I mean literally, I dropped more DVD's and books yesterday than I ever have. It was like every item I grasped was not quite in this dimension or something. This couldn't be right I thought, I mean, I could see the keyboard, I can't be that far off.

A short while later a patron who comes in at least two times a week strolled up to the circ desk to pick up his holds. I greeted him as I always do and sucked in a breath of worriedness when I saw a perplexed look on his middle-aged mug. "Did you guys move some furniture around?" he asked.

"Uh, yep, like four months ago." I replied.

"No, I mean, you didn't take some shelves out right here." he said as he walked over to the gap between Adult Non Fiction and Young Adult.

"We did do that," I responded in the most polite tone I could muster for I could see that the sideways sentience thing was still a thing and its spread was far larger than I imagined, "in August, when we remodeled."

He looked at me in what I like to refer to as a foggy manner, as if what I was saying wasn't quite computing with his reality. The hair on the back of my neck started to lift into the charged air, mainly because there's zero to no moisture in the air thanks to a stubborn ridge of high pressure, but in reality I think it was because I was a little freaked out. What the heck was going on here?

He grabbed his holds and made for a quick exit. I don't think he was embarrassed, more likely it was that he was just as befuddled as I was about the day's goings ons.

A short while later another one of our regular patrons wandered in. She uses our computers and printers to print out her mailing labels. She does this every week, like clockwork, at almost the same time on the same day. I was checking my email when she materialized at the circ desk like a confounded spectre. A cold sweat broke out on my brow as I anticipated more weirdness, for her presence out of her pattern was already a break from the Monday norm.

"Hun, I need my card number, for some reason I can't remember it. I keep putting in an expired 35 year old drivers license number to log on, but I can't remember my card number and I don't have it with me. It's just so weird, I use that number every week." she rambled in sheepish tone. The deeply etched wrinkles in her elderly face were twisted into a maze of random question marks that matched the general feeling in air.

I think I went on preponderance stand by for a couple of seconds. To log on to our computers you need your library card number. This lady uses hers every. Single. Monday. Seriously, she is in and out like clockwork. That she forgot her number and was trying to use a number from over three decades prior was just too much.

I looked up her number and wrote it down for her. She thanked me in a polite yet distracted way. It was in the same way that I responded to her. My mind was racing. What was Doctor Who up too? Was the Matrix under attack? Why was life glitching so bad in our little library on a Monday?

As the day wore on, things smoothed out a bit. Well, aside from the kid that tried to game the computer reservation system, but I fixed that Seagull. With a smile of course, because I love kids and their ingenuity. As I was processing some books for entry into circulation my mind wandered a bit as I pondered that few hour block of reality weirdness. Life is full of all manner of unanswered things, a fact of which I am perfectly cool with as I love to discover, but I am not going to lie, I hope I don't see any keyboards which aren't actually there today. I haven't had enough hot cocoa or quantum mechanics training to thought work my way through that phenomenon two days in a row....

---

And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's rapidly depleting in battery life iPhone.

---