Friday at the Library

I saw this in the YA section and for some reason it made me smile. I went around the library grinning and trying not to catch anyone's eye. Below it are a bunch of pamphlets that say "like the Hunger Games? Then you might like these books!"

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What is up with these college students and their enormous drinks? I saw a girl with a giant economy-sized jug of Kirkland bottled water that she was pouring into a smaller pink waterbottle. The jug was almost gone, and she was the only one drinking from it.

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I have decided that I will never write a book with the word "Christmas" in the title.

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Sitting at one of the desks by the window was a Japanese college student who was studying on his iPad. I can see why he would bring an iPad instead of a computer. It's a lot easier to carry around.

While I was shelving in the row opposite him, he got up from the desk, stretched and walked away. Just walked away, leaving his iPad right there on the table. My first thought was - isn't he worried that it might be stolen? I could have walked over there, grabbed it, and been out of the library in under two minutes, and he would never have known. Of course, he might have had it locked. But still... I had a backup plan for if someone tried to take it. I would say:

"Hey! Stealing is a crime!"

Or something else obvious like that, and if the thief tried to run I would ram him with my cart. Er... at least I would try (this is all a hypothetical situation, remember).

But nothing happened. The Japanese guy returned to his desk and resumed working on his iPad, with no idea of the worry he'd caused me.

So I kept shelving.

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I think one of the prerequisites for a rock music album cover is that it must either be hideously ugly or make no sense at all. 

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This also made me very happy:

They're new, and I like them because a) they look very professional and b) they don't have that weird buzzing noise whenever you walk through them.

The reason they don't make the buzzing noise is because they're for RFID tags. They work on radio waves (RFID stands for radio frequency identification). The self-checkout stations are different as well. Instead of the scanner and the tray there's just a big black square. You scan in your library card, and then put your stack of books on the square and it checks them out all at once. It's pretty neat.

That was my Friday afternoon. How was yours?