Hypatia's Library Tales

Bug Update!!! The months of August and September 1997 have brought with them more crickets than we can count. We can each kill 10 or 20 a day, and there are still hundreds of them hopping around and making their little crickety noises. It doesn't matter if the floor is carpeted or tiled, the crickets are there. They seem to be everywhere but the upper floor of the library, so the Reference Librarians and the Computer Lab get spared. The other day, I went into a storage room in the back of the building to get some cassette cases. You guessed it! I was crunching up a storm just walking around back there. Luckily, all those crunchy critters were dead. We sweep them up, and a few days later, more are laying in their place. I suppose there are so many crickets, there's not enough cricket food to go around. I never thought about it before--what do crickets eat anyway? If I wanted to know bad enough I could always look it up in a book; after all, I do work in a library!

It's bad enough to find bugs on the floor where you work. Finding them in books is really disgusting.

A couple of books were returned with water damage. The pages were all wavy and stiff and sometimes stuck together. The covers were bowed out. When looking at these books to assess the damage, it was discovered that the books were not only home to some interesting colors of mold, but quite a few baby water roaches as well. Snakes don't bother me; bats, I like; but you put a bug anywhere near me, and I lose all sensibility. Basically, I go a little bit nuts. You can believe I dropped that book a split second after I saw those bugs. It didn't matter at all that they were dead. I just didn't want anything to do with them.

Another place bugs like to live here is in old books that haven't been touched for months or years. I'm not sure what they're called, but these little bugs are white or yellow, and they eat the paper. Gross, don't you think? Not as bad as the baby roaches though.

A guy we refer to as "The Bug Man" comes to the library every month to spray his bug spray all around. He's really nice, but kind of loopy. I wonder if inhaling all those bug spray fumes has anything to do with that . . .

Every year, one of the science teachers at the town Junior High, or maybe it's the Middle School--I don't remember which--has her students make this creepy collection of dead bugs pinned to some styrofoam. All the bugs are labeled as to what family and such they belong. The kids bring their creepy collections in and look in our books to find out the necessary information on them.

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