The Montgomery County Public Library of Maryland has earned the wrath of Malienation! Gather round, my minions…it behooves me to educate one and all.
The library system allows you to reserve books online. So far, so good. The problem, though, is that if a book is popular, you can get grey hair waiting for it to come in. So, to get around that, it behooves (oooh, oooh, got to say “behooves” twice!) the user to reserve many books, and taking them as they come in. So? The problem is that it is too easy to get stuck in a dry spell, bookwise, then 2 or 3 books come in at once (ya got 7 days to pickup). Hey, I got a life…I can’t plow through that many books at once (popular books can’t be renewed). I just had to return Manhunt, the book about the 12 days after Lincoln was shot, when John Wilkes Booth was being pursued. A page turner, sure, but I had other stuff to do, too. Now I gotta abandon a cool book in the middle and go to the end of the list again!
I asked a librarian once if it were possible to turn down a book, but not get shoved to the end of the line, i.e., the next guy to want the book gets it, then I get it after him (like at fast food places where you don’t know what you want, so you let the guy behind you go, then it’s your turn again). She looked at me like I had 3 fucking heads, and said, “no, we don’t do that.”
Since I’m pissing and moaning about the library, I might as well mention this too: you can’t reserve a computer for more than 1 hour. I rarely use it anyway, but when mine took a dump, I had to. It’s still fucked up. One hour seems reasonable, but if there’s no line for computers, you don’t get extra time…so the computers just sit there, unused. Not only that, but the entire county keeps track of your daily usage through their network, so going to another branch will not help! They have a network involved enough to do that, but they don’t have network administrators smart enough to see that it is in everybody’s best interest to operate at near full capacity! Grrrrrrrr… :mad: