Waiting for the inevitable

In the second of a stunning series of posts that include the word waiting in the title, this time I'm talking about Death (not the election). My job as a librarian forces me to help people with their information problems. A strategy we have to combat these problems is to use communication techniques, like asking questions and giving fact-based answers. One of our tactics involved in this strategy is to approach people whose body language appears to be saying, I don't know what I'm doing and I need help or I'll start crying. Since they are too proud to come to us, we'll magnanimously go to them and ask, "Is there anything I can help you with?" Aside from ending a sentence in a preposition, which never starts off a conversation well, we are assuming they have a problem. I know I hate it when salespeople do this to me in a store. It's like they want me to have a quick, hassle-free experience with personalized attention. Don't they know I'm just wasting time looking at khakis I'm not going to buy while my girlfriend/sister/mom looks at purses or shoes for what seems like forever? [To be fair, they have to do the same thing when I'm looking at books or movie scores.]

Well, despite my internal conflict with roaming the library asking people if they are OK, I do get to observe people who don't normally approach me at the reference desk. When we roam around, trying to see if someone has a problem with printing, a computer, finding a book in the stacks, or where their classroom is(n't), sometimes we see things we aren't supposed to. Contraband prevails in the upper floors. Drinks, chips, cookies, people talking on their cellphones, fun of any kind. Cellphone conversations aren't banned outright, but only when they are the inane ones where someone is bored and can't stand the thought of passing the next ten minutes without talking to someone, anyone, who cares to listen about why they're pissed at their boyfriend/girlfriend.

Aside from the naughty things people do in the library, which I mostly let ride cause I'm cool like that, I get to see how people spend their hours in the library. Many of them study dilligently, many sleep dilligently. Many stare at their book or laptop, hoping and praying that a light will come on. It's sort of like looking at your refrigerator and expecting it to stop that horrible humming sound all by itself. You might have to do something or call someone. Desire won't get it done by itself - I've tried that. Besides all of the typical students sitting in our nooks and crannies, I saw an older woman who I recognized as an employee from downstairs in one of the university admin offices. What was she doing?

Waiting for death, it would seem. She goes upstairs in the library everyday for, let's say, probably 4 to 6 hours, hoping he will come by. There are several reasons I suspect this: she sits alone at an empty table, never a carrel; she always has a magazine open in front of her, but never looks at it; she doesn't write or talk or draw or do anything but sit; her glasses are usually off and laying on the table. It's possible that she could be really bored with her job and uses many excuses to say she is doing work that no one will ever check on and instead wastes her day in the library. But the way she does it is so heartbreakingly sad.

It's one thing to play hookey and do something fun, like get some Starbucks, buy and axe from the hardware store, and see what happens. But it's another to sit all alone with nothing to do but wait out this life, hoping for the end. Some compassionate person might think it prudent for me to carefully approach her and ask if she needs some help - of the emotional kind. Librarians have learned from painful experience not to get involved in that arena. When someone wants to talk it over, and they find a unsuspecting dogooder who has no escape, then they will latch on like a tick on a dog. So, I'm not about to say mum to this lady.

I could, however, find some books on the topic of "what to do with your boring life when all you have left to do is think about why you have arrived at your current situation and aren't having fun like those other people on TV" and lay them ever so casually on her table and then forget to pick them up again. She usually has that thousand-yard stare, so I might have to cough or trip or something to break her laser-like gaze into the fourth dimension. It's like she can see her future where she is sitting in the same seat at the same table and finally has that coronary her doctor has been promising for a while now.

I realize this seems very sarcastic and negative, which it is, but I do want to end on a positive note. If you ever find yourself in this situation, please try to break out of it. Life is for living, because we don't really know what else to do on the planet while we're here. Libraries aren't a bad place to be in a glum situation. They have vessels of knowledge from all parts of human discovery. Many times, if you can still use your imagination, a person can derive ideas and thoughts that could turn into fun and productive ways to spend your precious little time on earth. If you sit there waiting for something to happen in a library, it probably won't. They're really boring and will just make it worse. And death isn't allowed in - we have a permanent tresspass warning because he is always talking loudly on his cellpone to his broker.