It took us a couple of days to get around to the conference with Preacher Man after all, but this morning I managed to snag my boss at a time when Preacher Man was in the library, and we told him his writing on library materials was unacceptable and to stop it immediately. It went better than I was afraid it would; he was very subdued, and didn't deny that he'd done it. He claimed he had asked if he could buy the large print Bible, and was told that we only sell library materials when they are withdrawn from the collection and given to the Friends of the Library for their biannual book sale; he didn't go on to say that he had deliberately defaced our book in the hope that we would then sell it to him, but I definitely got that impression. He did offer, more than once, to buy it from us; he now has a Bible that someone gave him, but he's put in a lot of work on ours that he doesn't want to have to do over on a new book. (!!!)
He also told us that he had been marking passages in the daily papers so that people reading them later in the day would find it easier to pick out the important bits. He didn't explain how his exceedingly offensive annotations would aid that purpose. Seriously, I don't even want to type one of the words he wrote on the paper before carefully replacing it in the proper spot on the rack for the next person to use, and I am not usually squeamish about the seven words you can't say on TV.
I would have been happy if that was the end of the matter. He stops writing on our stuff, and I never have to speak to him again: everybody wins. But he's the type who can't leave a sore spot alone, he has to pick at it, and so he kept coming back up to the staff to ask how we can tell if somebody writing in a book has a library book or a personal copy, and if we're going to require him to show us what he's working on every day, and if we're going to do the same to other people and on and on and on.
Gah.
The good news is that tomorrow I'm spending the whole day at a catalog demo, so I won't have to see this guy at all.
Comments (3)
That sounds fun. Â And he still sounds unbalanced.
I'm very tempted to say, "This guy is in your life to teach you how to punch people in the nose", but that wouldn't be very nice of me, would it. Besides, you'd probably mess your knuckles up and we don't want that.
Honestly, I don't know how anyone deals with people like that. I'm in a situation where I can call the cops to do my dirty work, so I don't have to deal with the morons. Here's hoping he soon finds somewhere else he can plop his weird self and that he leaves your vicinity forever.
Hang in there.
Well...at least he didn't deny it. That would've made it messier. But sadly, he won't leave.