Brother, can you Spare 60 wpm

The other day while I was at the reference desk a man asked if I could type a short letter for him. He looked like a hard luck case and it was slow at the desk so I agreed, although I told him that this was an extraordinary, one-time exception and that if he told anyone I would deny having performed this service for him. If word got out that the librarians were transcribing or taking dictation then every patron with a manifesto, 20 page rambling letter to estranged family, social security disability plea, resume or neighborhood bulletin warning about CIA brain monitoring* would storm the desk, papers in hand, demanding equal treatment. Those kind of favors always bite you in the ass. If my colleagues discovered that I had started this precedent, one of them would probably slip up behind me in my cubicle and slit my throat, Colombian narco-execution style. I can’t say that I would blame them.

The patron was gratifyingly appreciative, and promised to maintain his silence. The next day while I was clear across town for a dentist’s appointment the same patron approached me and asked me for spare change in a suspiciously aggressive manner. Not to sound like a melodramatic paranoid, but I think he may have been considering mugging me. I was out of context so he didn’t recognize me until I said hello, and then we both had a good laugh. I was glad that he remembered my kindness, especially if it stopped him from taking my wallet.

Even though I live in one of the largest cities in the United States I find that I run into people I know with eerie, improbable regularity. One day when I was working at my old branch I helped a girl fresh from a Midwestern backwater figure out which buses she needed to take to get to her interview. Two days later, in a neighborhood miles away, the same girl, not recognizing me at first, came up to me and asked me what bus she should take to get to another part of the city. I wonder if she thought that I had materialized like some bus schedule guardian angel, or something more sinister, like she was in some sort of Truman Show situation.

*All items I have been asked to type while I was on the reference desk