Saturday, August 27, 2005

and it wasn't like he even checked

My friend Mark told me about a book he'd gotten from the library. It was all about life and simple things to do to get the most out of it. More like an owner's manual than a self-help book, though. It had really helped Mark. I could see how much he'd changed since reading it, and he hasn't gotten a speeding ticket in months.

"Some of it's just mnemonics," Mark said. "Some of it's isometric exercises. A whole bunch of stuff. You should check it out."

What was dumb was that Mark didn't remember the title exactly. "Something kind of boring, actually," he recalled. "The Dynamics of Something Something Something. But, you know, not really 'something, something, something.'"

Mark found the notebook that he'd written the call number on, though, so I got the number and went down to the library a couple of days later to get the book and see what it was all about. I couldn't find it. Mark must have written it down wrong, because that sequence of numbers didn't seem to be where it was supposed to fall.

So I went to the guy who was working that floor of the library and showed him the number. He looked at it, but didn't really say anything. I told him what the book was and that it was The Dynamics of Something Something Something, and he just shrugged. "We don't have that," he said and looked back at his computer so he could ignore me.