Wanted to go to the library for a few things: Doing our fantasy baseball draft (which we are not doing; more on that later, maybe), using the scanner for a report I need to send ... and, that's it.
Decided to eat at Wendy's as close to 11, the earliest allowable time to eat lunch, because I needed to get ready and prepared at the library when the draft began at noon. Except that on Sundays, this library I'm at does not open until noon. Forgot that. Thought that another branch of the county library system opens before noon, therefore this one will; guess I was wrong.
Back when I didn't have a laptop I would sometimes get to the library just as it opens. I was reminded of those days when I walked into the library lobby and saw a bunch of people -- most of them men, of all races, and poor-looking -- sit on the tables in the lobby, waiting. And then, just a few minutes before noon, as they saw more activity on the other side of the electronic doors and the security guards finally stroll in with keys and coffee cups in hand, those poor losers (including me) walk up and towards those doors. The only thing needed to change that tableau from pathetic to downright scary is if we got up close to those doors and starting running our tin cups against them.
So come high noon, up came the doors, and unlike the times in the past, we no longer ran to the computers in the computer lab. Maybe it's because there are plenty of computers to use, more computers than people there, and the computers are all around the library, not just the lab. And maybe we no longer run because we look stupid.
Nevertheless, once me and the other pathetic losers who were there before me got to the lab, we all eventually kind of came together. Specifically I was the fourth person through the door to the lab. The three before me are men, and instead of spreading out amongst the 33 workstations, they quickly congregated around four of them -- all lined up together, all of them facing towards the wall of the lab without windows, all of them in an area no one would have any reason to walk through.
Ah, how I miss Library Porn Row. All of us guys who probably would not get up if our mothers were on their deathbeds if we were too sleepy would wake up way ahead of our circadian rhythms -- like 9 in the morning -- just to make sure we get one of the four computers in Library Porn Row. That means we could spend hour after hour just looking at porn and not get caught or bothered. Oh yeah, back then you didn't even need to get a library card. You didn't even need a guest login; you just had to get to the computer and use it.
But they changed that. First they required sign-ins at all workstations, so they would know who was looking at porn. Then, after a local station ran a report on people looking at porn in libraries, they disallowed that, too. And now security is supposed to walk behind us here on Library Porn Row to make sure we're not doing anything unseemly. And I just tried to visit Playboy's website, and it has been blocked, so we can't look at porn here anymore, either. Shoot.
Still, it's funny that we still insist on taking the "best" computers. Maybe even without the access to porn we still insist on having privacy. Shoot, one guy ripped a privacy screen from a computer that was facing towards the wall with windows to put it in front of his screen at Library Porn Row. Maybe there is nothing untoward he is surfing and he still doesn't want anybody knowing his business. Or, he's new here and he thought he could look at porn, found out he can't, and he doesn't want to let on that he just realized that.
I really, really wasn't going to join these three guys at Library Porn Row. I mean, if you can't look at anything pornographic, what are you trying to hide? Besides, I needed to just get to a computer to get to the fantasy baseball draft I'm not doing right now. But those three ahead of me went there, so heck, why not? But none of these four computers have a scanner, which is the main reason I needed to go to the library. So I'm going to log off real soon, go to my car, get the thing I need to scan, then come back and go to a computer with a scanner.
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