Tuesday Morning Aggravation – UPDATED!
If you…
Have to call the library to find Disneyland’s mailing address
Can’t spell “Disneyland”
Can’t spell “Anaheim”
Don’t understand the phrase “mailing address”
Can only follow a number if I read it out ONE DIGIT AT A TIME
then I really don’t think Disneyland is going to be interested in the book you’re submitting to them. Just a guess.
(The library patrons are already outdoing themselves this morning, if you hadn’t guessed.)
UPDATE! (10:02 am)
The same guy called back just now, and the following exchange ensued:
Confused patron: Can I have the address to Nashville?
Me: Nashville?
CP: You know, where all the country stars go.
Me: Nashville is a city in Tennessee. It does not have an address. If you want me to look up a business or location inside of Nashville, those would have addresses.
CP: So… there’s no way to get the information I’m looking for?
Me: I don’t think the information you want exists. Do you want a map of how to get to Nashville?
CP: No, I want the address for Nashville. See, I’m a writer, and I want to send a song I wrote to Nashville.
Maybe he’ll call back again and top himself! And you thought working in a library was boring.
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July 7th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
I don’t think the information you want exists.
That’s hilarious.
July 7th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
I really, really want to know what these people’s inner monologues sound like.
Craig´s last blog ..recipe of the week
July 7th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
I think they either have no internal monologue, or their brain is ALL internal monologue. Either way, they can’t possibly actually think what they’re saying through.
July 7th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
This makes me wonder whether such people see all the world in terms of monolithic entities. Such lack of imagination and inattention to detail might explain the power of the generalizations conservatives use to paint the bogeyman “Washington” = evil, liberal, wasteful, unreal America, etc.
Such people probably have no concept of metonymy whatsoever. When, for example, Simon Cowell tells advancing American Idol contestants “Welcome to Hollywood”, I suspect for people like your interlocutor that it never dawns on them that Cowell is circumlocuting that the contestants are moving on to the next round and that these will occur at a studio in Hollywood. Instead for them, the entity of Hollywood — liberal, gay, Communist film-producing, corporate-geographical entity — has just sucked in another young’un.
So it seems plausible that Nashville might be such an abstract entity – especially with such programming as “Nashville Star” possibly feeding their figure-of-speech-less misconceptions.
July 22nd, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Does your library have a corp. affilations book/database of some type? I have them at my ref desk. Next time you run into that, drop me a line on facebook or goodreads and send me the persons email address. I’ll look it up for you and send them or you the info. Did they want a list of the music producers/companies in Nashville or Tenn?
July 22nd, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Here’s the title of that corp book I use. I am not sure what the OCLC record would look like, so you might also find it under a diff title. A few of the busin. ref. database subscriptions also have that kind of info, but I hate them. Try refering them to this type of title.
Corporate Yellow Book: Quarto HG 4057.A15646