Saturday, December 11, 2010

I don't know what a Push Truck is

My volunteers and I have a couple inside jokes.

One of which involves the game "Pig Pong". The box had a tagline that said something along the lines of "Best family game ever". But we couldn't find the "pong" piece (roundish paper foam pieces put together to create a circle). The toy doctor took it home to try and make a new "pong" piece and he tried to play it with his family. He came back and (in more creative words) told me that it is not the best family game ever. I was still trying to make a new pong out of origami paper, nothing worked. So we decided to take it out of the system. About a year later I was going through some drawers and I find extra pieces to games, and to my surprise, the pong pieces for Pig Pong. After the game was completely dismantled and partially thrown away, I find it. I laughed for weeks when I told this story because to me, it meant that eventually everything will be found, sometimes it just takes a while.

The other joke is that I don't know what a "Push Truck" is.

Librarians have their own language and that's bad enough. The Toy Resource Center Language is a dialect of that Librarian language. Like a teeny tiny island language. We're either overly descriptive in the labels so you know exactly which item belongs with the toy, or so completely vague it's ridiculous.  This happened my first year here. I found this bag full of plastic food items, colorful cans and milk cartons, the label reads "For Push Truck". I have no idea what it is. So I begin asking the volunteers, the woman who used to work here, random patrons what a "Push Truck" was. And no one knew. So I begin to obsess about it, a little (maybe more than a little). I take down every possible truck and vehicle toy to look at the label. Nothing. I Google it. Nothing. Look through eBay sites, look through pages and pages of catalogs and images. Nothing. Eventually, (like after 2 years), I put the bags of cartons and cans with the kitchen sets. I gave up on the poor Push Truck. But when I find something random, I usually say, "if only I could find the Push Truck too". Since then I have been a little more careful about explaining how the items go together, makes life a little easier. I have to remind myself often that it is not second nature to everyone. There haven't been many people that speak the Toy Language.

It has been 5 years this week since I was hired. I have had the pig from Pig Pong on my desk for about that long. And I still don't know what a push truck is. And this is where I insert the point of this whole entry...

I have been officially hired at Sully Branch Library to be their new Young Adult Librarian. I am super super excited to be taking on a new position, but it's stories like the ones above that make me truly sad to be leaving such a great place in the library system.

(I apologize for the possible future corniness in this post.)

I have literally grown up with these toys. Not only as a child when I played with many of these same toys, but I have been here for 5 years, an important 5 years. I have been in and out of Graduate school. I have been in and out of relationships, my hair has gone from ridiculous shades of red and back, moved out of my parents house, I have a nephew now! All these things have happened. I have shared a lot of my life with a many of the patrons who have come in. I want to thank them for listening. I want to thank them for making me as much apart of their life as I have made them apart of mine. I will miss the people as much as I will miss the toys.