I love being a reference librarian. But omigod, an April Sunday brings out the loonies. I had my usual sweet little guy who rasps philosophy and poetry and wanted information about voodoo, a city in Mexico, and Nome, Alaska, and an address for a friend from high school (who luckily turned out to be an artist with a website). He had a mini rant/story about Osama Bin Laden training children to kill that I thought was going to lead to a Vietnam flashback; then he left "to go buy a bag of... uh, beer." I had the woman who's a student employee here searching for the flash drive she lost last Wednesday. (Nope, don't have it. Sorry) There was the guy who couldn't get his Tripod site to display commas as anything other than question marks--and he was convinced it was because he's got a political site and the government is trying to give him a hard time. There was my other regular who, instead of researching for his book about oil and politics, was trying to find an article he read sometime in the late 1980s or 1990s about a woman who'd been imprisoned for hiring illegal immigrants. He's a former USGS employee, and his political rant was about how federal offices used to be accessible to the public and now they're not--but when I muttered something non-committal about 9/11, he explained to me that it's been this way since Timothy McVeigh. And finally I had the woman who yelled at me because she found nothing on "differential curriculum" for Native American students, yelled at me for wanting to take out the word "differential," and then finally thanked me profusely once my search for "Native American" and "curriculum" turned up lots and lots of citations she thought were good. She didn't have a political rant, but she talked to me for another 45 minutes.

I'm exhausted.