blakspring

I spent today working at a public library and since it was Mother’s Day there were very few patrons all day. I was at the reference desk in the Children’s Department, mostly signing up the few kids that did come in for a computer and doing some searches for last-minute school projects. At no point today were there more than 10 people in the children’s room so I got to relax and catch up with the other librarians. About an hour before closing, as I was at the desk with another librarian, a frazzled looking man in his late 40s or early 50s came up to us and said, “I need help.” We asked what he needed and he went on to explain that he locked himself out of the house. He had managed to open a side window but was unable to fit through. Therefore, he decided to come to the library to see if he could get a child who would be able to fit through his side window and open the door for him.

This is probably the weirdest request that I ever got from a patron. Sure sir, let me just wrangle up one of these kids for you. Little Johnny, go with this nice man and climb through his window, okay? I told him that he would have to speak with individual parents regarding their children and that there was nothing we could do. Part of me felt bad for the guy but the suspicious part of me was wondering if the story wasn’t a little too perfect. He seemed to have an answer for everything. We asked him if anyone else had a spare key but he replied that there had been one under the mat until he decided to bring it back into the house two weeks ago. Were there any other family members that could help him? No, his wife and daughter were at the spa. Could he ask one of his neighbor’s kids to climb through the window? No, he’d been living there for 25 years and everyone’s kids were grown up. (This last one I found very hard to believe, especially since we were in the suburbs, in a fancy neighborhood where having multiple kids seemed to be a status symbol, with an average of four or five per family.) “No”, he said. “It would have to be a small child. And I have a dog so the child can’t be afraid of dogs.”

There was nothing we could do to help him and finally he left. The other librarian and I wondered if we were on Candid Camera. Why not just call the police or a locksmith? Go and hang out in a neighbor’s house until his wife came home? Or ask a neighbor to drive him to get the keys from his wife? When he first came over and said that he was locked out of the house and that he couldn’t fit through the side window, I thought that he was going to ask me or the other librarian if one of us could try since we were much smaller than him. In fact, I almost volunteered myself until I started thinking about The Silence of the Lambs and other creepy stuff. I pictured myself climbing through the window, getting attacked by a killer Rottweiler, falling through a trap door, and being held hostage in an underground dungeon. No, I wasn’t about to go in there without backup. Or at least not without a box of doggy treats and a can of Mace.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2008 at 10:41 pm and is filed under Work Weirdos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.