I am not Google!

[sierrazen]

This afternoon I had a lady call the store and ask me when The Lord of the Rings was published. After jumping onto Google to find out it's original publishing date, she then asked if there was a limited edition that was published. I tried to explain to her that considering how long The Lord of the Rings has been around there have been countless

Comments

[antonstrout]

Ahh, how I miss those calls!

[ruisseau]

I don't remember if I've told this story here or not.

I once had a lady call up asking if we had recipes for Greek chili (which I'm fairly certain does not exist). I tried using the book search to find such an animal and came up with nothing. She then wanted me to go to the cookbook section and look in the index of each Greek cookbook for the recipe.

I told my manager as I was setting out on this fool's errand and he picked up the phone and told her no. It wasn't the first time she'd tried this stunt, apparently.

[werewolf_lib]

She wanted you to what??

Now that's when you put the phone on hold and spend a few minutes doing whatever you like before picking it back up again and regretfully informing the patron that no, you couldn't find it. All while wishing you could add that they should take their crazy elsewhere.

[kid_lit_fan]

Evidently, Greek chili does exist, but that doesn't offset the insanity of her thinking you had time to do this for her. (And I get the feeling that it's not a traditional greek recipe, or maybe it's called something else in Greek cookbooks, and there are as many recipes for a thing as there are recipe books. I think maybe it started in Texas).

See, I found all that out by five minutes of googling on my own time, much quicker than checking through cookbooks (and why couldn't she do that HERSELF!).

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to send Let Me Google That For You through phone lines? :)

[roguebelle]

The directions thing used to drive me crazy, because I worked at a bookstore on an island that was literally half a mile wide. And people would ask how to get to the ocean. Or where the lighthouse -- the tallest thing for fifty miles, and less than a 100 yards from our bookstore -- was. There was a lot of headdesking.

[booksavvy]

ROFL. Yup. Got those all the time. Especially ones about looking up recipes or looking for what was basically a reference book that a bookstore is not going to carry. They would be amazed when I would suggest trying the library... "A library? Never thought of that." Especially annoying since it was literally down the street.

Now that I am a librarian, the opposite is the case. "But it just came out today, why don't you have it already?" LOL

[libwitch]

Libraries are not google either. They are better then that.

That aside, as someone who works in both, I am boggled by the number of times I am confronted by people in bookstores who want to buy say, travel guides because their kids need to write a paper on the history of Florida. "You could to to a library and look in an encyclopedia," I say, and they just stare at me. "I could?!"

[kingshearte]

I've noticed this too. I would never have dreamed of going straight to a bookstore for my research material when I was in school. It's bizarre.

[stephaniesmom]

My parents OWNED a bookstore when I was a kid, and I STILL went to the library first! Silly people these days! I shake my head at them, and rant in my head at the bone-heads.