Panties & Political Statements

We weren’t open for more than 15 minutes yesterday when I got a report of a guy down in the Children’s Department who’s carrying around women’s underwear. As I went to investigate I had visions of the guy actually wearing granny panties over his pants. When I got there what I found was Stink Paw (now also known as Panty Man) with panties stuffed up his sweater. Although this is bizarre behavior there is nothing illegal or against policy about carrying around underwear (yours or anyone else’s), or even wearing said underwear as long as someone is fully clothed while they’re doing it. So it was more of a disturbing yet amusing curiosity than anything else.

After investigating the incident, I spoke with the Children’s Librarian about it and as we were talking she notice that there was some grafitti painted on the outside of the windows. Something was written in big two foot high colored lettering. Thinking the worst, I went to investigate. The message read: “VOTE OBAMA 08.” I went back inside and relayed this to the Children’s Librarian who smiled and commented that it could have been a lot worse, and that all things considered she didn’t really mind. At this point I informed her that I was an Obama supporter as well, but first thing Monday morning we were going to have to call Public Works to remove the political statement from our government building.

In the mean time, the woman who brought Stink Paw to my attention was concerned because she needed to get online but the only open computer was the one next to Panty Man. She asked me, “Do you know him?” I smiled and told her that, yes, I know him he comes in regularly. She then asked if she though it would be safe to sit next to him. I told her that I thought she’d be OK and that if she needed me for anything that she should feel free to call me over.

After this, I headed back to the Reference Desk and noticed two young boys fooling around with our screen magnifier. This device is used to magnify text for people who otherwise can’t see so well. Generally, people read the newspaper with it. These two kids, however, thought it would be amusing to magnify the comics page. The big color saturated superman on the screen actually looked pretty cool and since nobody else was using the thing I let them have at it. A while later, I noticed that they were giggling and when I looked up at the screen I saw one word from the newspaper filling the 25″ screen. It read: DICK. As I was about to go over to tell them that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for them to be magnifying their dick, they removed it on their own… All in a day’s work, @ the Library.

~ by Woeful on March 23, 2008.