I realized with a jolt this afternoon that the books I’d checked out from the University library were due… yesterday! And then when Mom informed me that the fees are a dollar a day per book… and I had six books… I had a slight panic attack.
Six bucks for one little teensy weensy mistake? This SUCKS, I thought to myself.
But nevertheless, I spent the evening getting what I needed for my paper rewrite out of the books; I carefully transcribed passages and removed little post-it notes and wrote down bibliography information.
One of the books was a collection of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and since the thesis of my paper revolved around his “Divinity School Address,” my checked-out copy was thoroughly laced with post-it flags pointing out interesting portions. I found an online copy of the speech, however, and devoted more than an hour to highlighting all those same passages in Microsoft Word; I even noted where the pages broke in the copy I had, for citation purposes. So around eleven o’clock tonight, after I finally accomplished all this, I went down to the library, all prepared to pay my six bucks and be done with it. I walk up to the counter, and explain my situation to the friendly clerk.
“Actually,” she corrects me, “We bill you through the mail, not at the desk. And the fee is only fifty cents per book per day. And we don’t send out a notice until each book has reached two dollars. So you can get off scot free!”
So I feel a little silly for coming in at eleven o’clock, but I’m still thinking, “Great!”
“Oh,” she goes on, “so should I go ahead and check these back out for you?”
“Huh?”
“You can check them back out. You can only renew them once, but if you bring them to the desk the second time you can check them out again.”
At this point I’m feeling like pretty much a total failure. I can’t even handle library books the right way! Not only did I bring them back late in the first place, but I spent large amounts of time transcribing notes that I just could have kept if I had run down to the library and RE-CHECKED OUT MY BOOKS.
So I sheepishly picked out a couple of the more useful books to check out again and shuffled out of the library like a whipped puppy.
But oh well. Mostly I’m just glad I didn’t have to pay six bucks. 