I haven’t been inside a brick-and-mortar library in years, but the one in my town kept the public computers out in the open so the librarians could keep an eye out to help anyone who got stuck. Here’s how that worked out one day for me.
While my wife wanders around picking out books, I grab a computer to kill some time catching up with the news. When I sit down, there’s a string of tiny windows across the bottom of the screen. As soon as I try to close one, a regular-sized window pops up, with a closeup of a couple in flagrante.
No matter what I try, I can’t get any window to close; new ones keep popping up, and soon I’m standing up to block the screen while I click away. So of course one of the librarians sees me having a problem of some sort and comes over to help. I have to give her credit – once she gets close enough to see what’s going on and I say something like “Um, I’m having a problem closing these windows that were up already when I got here, I swear”, she says “Damn those high-school kids”, grabs the mouse and starts closing windows herself.
This apparently is one of those sites that doesn’t want you to leave, so there’s fresh activity blooming all over the screen and we’re both embarrassed and trying to address the problem of closing the windows while making believe we don’t see what’s going on IN the windows. After another minute, a different librarian figures there’s a computer problem that can’t be resolved and SHE comes over to help, leading to a discussion of whether to restart the machine instead. So there I am with two librarians next to me, porn all over the screen, and down the aisle starts my puzzled-looking wife with her bag of books to tell me it’s time to go. All I can say as I turn her around and walk her toward the elevator is “I can explain everything.”