Wednesday, August 11, 2010

La culpabilité

It would be lovely if, when you "took out" documents (i.e. took them to a table a few feet away), the person whose job it is to scan them* as "servi" actually did so. And, better yet, if when you returned the documents, making a note of the fact that three were in the same bubble-wrap envelope, all three got scanned as rendu. This is now the second day in a row that I've been falsely accused of having a document out that I'd returned. Today, as yesterday, this was cleared up quickly, but there's no guarantee things will run so smoothly next time (and there will be a next time). The presumption of guilt will always be on me, as a library patron, as an American who doesn't know how to say "bubble-wrap" in French, and as someone with no way of proving that my deepest desire isn't to abscond with a 19th C pamphlet that wasn't even useful for my project anyway.

*As a former library-book scanner myself, one sympathetic to the difficulties and drudgeries of the job, I reserve the right to criticize others' job performance in this area.

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