Totally ripped off from a book

I guess I'm in a blogging mood lately! Today I started reading Reference Librarianship: Notes from the Trenches by Charles Anderson and Peter Sprenkle. It was recommended to me by a librarian as a funny book. Well, so far it isn't laugh-out-loud funny, but it is witty and amusing. The concept is this: for one year, the reference librarian at a public library kept a log of all her transactions with patrons. The log is interspersed with relevant essays. The log entries range from typical (requests for dictionaries, pencils, and directions) to bizarre ("Do [you] deliver books to inmates?" or "My boyfriend's brother is in jail, and I want to find out why"). Most of the interactions involved computers and/or the Internet. To me, none of it is surprising, but it's fun to read about. Although my current job mostly involves circulation, not just pure reference, I decided to steal the idea from this book and write down all my library transactions for an hour. NB: Normally we aren't this busy during any given hour, but it was lunchtime, and I was alone at the desk.

-A gentleman asked where our tax forms were.

-A woman didn't remember ordering The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, but she checked it out anyway, asking if it was interesting (I haven't read it, but I told her I saw the author at ALA).

-The same gentleman came back and said we didn't have the right tax forms. I said that what we have is all we're getting.

-A woman needing help deleting her Word document.

-An old lady - a regular - left me a long list of about 15 books to put on hold, and then disappeared. The list was very specific about requesting either Large Print or cassette tapes. When I had a question about one of her holds, I couldn't find her.

-Made a new card for someone.

-The security guard came in for the day, almost an hour early (as usual).

-An old man couldn't find his books on the holdshelf (even though I told him they were in alphabetical order by patron's name).

-"Do you guys have self-checkout?"

-"Do you have titles instead of authors?" He meant he couldn't remember the author of a book, and wanted me to look up the title.

-Guy asked where the drinking fountain was.

-Man wanted to check out his wife's holds on his card. Usually we don't do this, but I made an exception because he was nice (I do that a lot here. Nice people are so few and far between, I feel they should be rewarded).

-"Can I use your phone?"

-Guest pass for the computer.

-A girl wanted horse books. I showed her where they were, but we only had 2. Turns out, she was doing a research paper, specifically on horse obesity and diseases with names I can't pronounce. I found a few books outside our system, but she needed them sooner (of course). She also needed a library card.

Again, not a lot of reference questions, but many computer and Internet questions I didn't include. It seems like in any given library that this is more of the trend. Even when I worked at the main branch at the reference desk, most of the questions I got were computer-related (perhaps because the reference desk is in such close proximity to all of the computers).