Customers from hell and further afield
as in Mars and possibly Alpha Centurii

I worked for a year at Cambridge University Library in the "reprographics Department" ie we photocopied stuff, maps, Phds, old and rare books and provided a service to all staff and employees who could not be trusted to understand copyright law (then it was 10% or one chapter of anything under 50 years of age, or a complete phd if permission was granted from the auther)

The customer from Hell - I never met him, but he made my job a misery, this chaps name? no idea, but we called him Engine Shed. Every few weeks we would receive a pile of maps with a list of grid co-ordinates he wanted copies of. they were of engine sheds from the 1880s to modern day, quite cool to look at the evolution but a royal pain in the arse to copy as some of the older maps were huge, and the copiers not sensibly laid out. these engine sheds had to be EXACTLY in the centre of the page, if they weren't a week after posting these off you would get a snotty letter and a sheaf of rejected copies, which had to be done again and sent out free of charge, I came to hate this man and his damn sheds.

Another one was a chap who turned up at 9am, and demanded a copy of a 360 page Phd by midday! midday! it took me 25 minutes to find the damn thing and it was bound pretty poorly by some fucker making the book not lay flat to copy easily, I finished the bloody thing at 11.45 and was this chap grateful? was he fuck, bah humbug.

Customers from Further afield.

Eventually the library bowed to modern ideals and provided a photocopying room for people to use which was cool and took a lot of the more mundane* work from us, however this meant we had to look after the machines and provide help a lot instead.

As you can imagine on most days there was on average 25-30 sheer unadulterated geniuses (genii? very clever people) in the building, and as we all know your run of the mill genius might well be fantastic in a certain field but can sometimes have a bit of a tenuous grasp on the everyday humdrum of reality, this quite often involved little young me trying to teach some of the greatest minds on earth how to make a photocopy of a book.

nnnnnnnnnggggggggggg.

Imagine being asked to teach Eistein how to piss in a pot, or to show Crick how to make a bowl of cornflakes and you get the drift of what it was like.

Some people do just not get it, and its very very very difficult not to swear or curse at an Archbishop that does not comprehend how to change a machine to landscape, and some of the greatest legends of open university tv were baffled by the form feed.

oh lordy how I miss that job

*hah like everything else we did was laugh a second bundles of joy, well apart from the sealed room, its a copyright library which means it has one of every single porn magazine published in the uk ever, a whole fucking room of grot.

locked up bah, but the erotic books were kept on levels 12-13 of the tower and we were allowed to take what we wanted that wasn't from the rare or main rooms :)

The less said about some of the medical books that concentrated on child abuse injuries and suchlike the better though, was actually violently sick once from the pictures of some poor kid and I have seen some ghastly shit (as posted regarding my hospital job)
(Halfy By light alone, Fri 5 Sep 2008, 20:10, 1 reply)

hah!
You've probably run into my parents at some point. Incredibly clever academics, but can't figure out how to change the channel on the TV sometimes...
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Sun 7 Sep 2008, 20:11, closed)