It's Alive!

Great news! Turns out our freezer isn't dead after all, bless it's little frost-free heart! I am so tickled that Randy was able to fix it without having to call in a repairman (not that there's anything wrong with that)--my guy sure has a way with plugs. And the resuscitation of the freezer comes none too soon--I can only eat so many loaves of bread before I go into carb-overload!

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So one of the first orders of business when we got to town was we looked up the location of the nearest library and we got ourselves bright, shiny new library cards. We have arrived! I've got to be honest--the "customer service" lass behind the counter either mistook her calling or is just plain stubborn, which might actually make more sense; either way, she wasn't big on service and she sure wasn't all about the customer! She treated us like we were a monumental waste of her time and, I'm sorry to say, was the first person who gave me cause to say, "She must not be a native." Texans just don't act like her.

Now, everybody knows what a fantastic library system we left behind in Columbus, but I had every reason to believe that Arlington would be on the same scale. Let's just say, the jury's still out. First, I inquired from the anti-customer service representative where I needed to plug in my e-mail address so we would be notified when our books were due. She said they didn't use e-mail to notify library patrons when their items are due.

What???

If you can believe this, they use the telephone. How passe! That means that for every reserve book that is being held, and for every book coming due, our phone would ring at least once. Oy vey. I have mentioned how many books my kids put on reserve at one time, haven't I?

True to form, the girls, and Tyler as well, began reserving books in earnest, and in 2-3 days' time they all start coming in to the library. Bbbbrrrring! Bbbbrrrring! Bbbrrrrring! Oh brother. But hey, the kids are happy, and they're reading! Life is good. Now we just have to sit back and wait for the "coming due" phone calls.

Well, we waited. And waited. And waited. And . . . waited some more. Let's see, now what were we doing in the midst of all this waiting? Oh yeah, we were starting at a new school! And getting involved in a new church! And finding our way around a new city! Not exactly waiting for the phone to ring, contrary to what I said a couple of sentences ago. Anyway, last week for some reason (let's call it the providence of God) I got to thinking, "You know, it's been about a month since all those books were checked out. I wonder why we haven't gotten any phone calls from the library? I think I'll just pop on to the library website and see exactly when we borrowed them."

Sure enough, it HAD been a month since the books had been borrowed--and then some. Which means we had accumulated some fines. Now I pride myself on being a responsible patron of the library, and I have tried to teach my children to be the same. We used to have a whole routine for going through the house and rounding up books the day before they were due. And of course, we knew when they were coming due because THE LIBRARY WOULD SEND US AN E-MAIL!

Have I piqued your curiosity yet? Would you like to just how much money we owed in overdue fines? Well, I'll tell you--$51 DOLLARS, that's how much! I was livid. And if they thought I was going to pay $51 in fines when I didn't receive even a single phone call, they had another thing coming!

I marched down to the library and I confess, I was so hoping that Ms. "You're Wasting My Time" would be there but, alas, it must have been her day off. I had to make do with the very friendly clerk who was sitting behind the desk, who very helpfully and knowledgeably told me about the library's e-mail system for notifying patrons of items coming due. Hmmmpphh! I knew it! I told him exactly what the first person had told me a month ago and he acknowledged that a phone call is their means for notifying patrons of reserve items, because of their time-sensitive nature. But he said, and I quote, "When items are overdue you usually won't get a phone call until it's been at least two weeks." Hmm, I wonder why that is? Cha-ching!

I made it pretty clear that I wasn't going to be paying $51 for anything, but the best the clerk could do for me was waive Tyler's and Sawyer's fines altogether, and then cut Darcy's and Peyton's fines in half, meaning I still paid a whopping $21 (because of course the girls had the lion's share of the books checked out on their cards). When I think of what I could do with $21--at the Scholastic Book Fair that's more than a dozen books!