Central Library Shenanigans
One of the first times I went to the Central Library last year, was quite an experience. Here’s the story, and the underlined portions things you should do or know:
A. and T. and I were a merry trio as we walked to the Central Library to write our papers. Settling into the quiet section of the Reference section, we all whipped out our laptops to accomplish our work by opening up Word documents (and tabs of Facebook). I copied down the call number of the Music Business Handbook, which I needed for my Wednesday night class, and asked the librarian how to find it. She handed me a mapped bookmark and informed me that the book was located on the 7th floor.
I dashed up the stairs to the 6th floor, and then another flight to the 8th floor. Wait, the 8th floor? What in the world? Puzzled, I ran, rather than walked because it was sinisterly dark stairwell, back towards the circulation desk and asked the librarian where the seventh floor had gone. She chuckled and told me to take the main elevator instead.
In the cramped one-man elevator, I mused whether the librarian deliberately didn’t tell people that the stairs would not lead to the odd-numbered floors. Hn. That was probably what she did on Sunday evenings to keep herself entertained.
The elevator dinged and came to a shuttering halt as it arrived at the 7th level. The doors opened to a dimly-lit, low-ceilinged room filled with hundreds of books and a dearth of humanity. Of course, the ML-3975 books had to be at the very back of the Stacks and housed on the bottommost shelf. I plopped down in order to read the titles: Music Education, Music in Hollywood… where was this silly book?
Finding this book was becoming an absurdly difficult process.
I returned to the elevator and promptly forgot the number of the original floor, so I pressed the button for three, which took me to a creepier version of the 7th floor. Looking back now, I see how dumb that was because the main floor had to have been an even number. When I finally arrived at the 4th floor, the main floor, I trudged back to the circulation desk for the third time and the librarian glanced up from her book. After I told her that the Music Business Handbook was nowhere to be found, she looked up the call number herself. A minute of searching the catalog produced no results, so I suggested just typing in the title and, of course, the first item that popped up in the search was my book.
Apparently, this textbook was kept in the Blair Music Library, not the Central Library. Seriously?
Bookless, I returned to our table in a walk of shame and relayed this story to an amused T.
Then I smacked my head on the table in the follow-through of a sneeze.
How embarrassing.
The guy sitting at the next table said, “That seriously just happened.”
Seriously.
Next time, I, a reformed, now avid Vandyland library enthusiast, will give you reasons why you should go to the Central Library!