Monday, January 23, 2006

The lights are on but nobody's home...

Today has been very trying. I turned up to work to discover we had no lights. Our library has no natural light, what with all the lovely stained glass, but it makes it a bit like a cave. Despite health and safety concerns, the big cheese had us open as usual (I have yet to encounter a situation where we would not open as usual, including sitting in the dark with no power at all for a week). As we speak, now it is dark outside, we have a few nominal lights up and running after 7 hours of work by the sparkies. Queue a day of extremely stupid yet obvious questions from most of the people who have been in today. I have compiled a League of Stupidity.

No. 1: one bloke came up to the desk at 2.30 pm and said "is it possible you can turn the lights on as I can't see to read"

No. 2: "haven't you paid the electricity bills this month?" (ho ho) or "haven't you put 50p in the meter?" (double ho ho)

No. 3: (after wandering around looking puzzled for a while) "Is there a problem with the lights?"

No. 4: "When are the lights coming back on?" - I did consult the psychic person who lives in my head, but still had no idea. I hazarded a guess at "maybe an hour?" - standard response to any sort of failure!

How do you respond to these people without being rude?! I have given up trying to be polite, I just look at them for a while and then say "yes we have a problem with the lights". These people are supposed to be educated!!

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