Happy Easter

We're going to have our own Easter egg hunt in the stacks of the the library today and by "Easter eggs" I mean human feces.

David Sedaris did a hilarious segment on This American Life about this phenomenon, although he focuses mostly on the goings on at large retail chains. His theory is that it is an acting out, a fecal uprising, against faceles corporatation, like throwing a rock through a Starbucks window at a G-8 demonstration. He became intrigued after his boyfriend mentioned offhandedly one day that when he worked at The Gap customers would often use the dressing rooms as bathrooms, even though there were bathrooms located conveniently throughout the mall where this Gap was. Sedaris, furious that Hugh withheld such fascinating material from him, embarks on his own informal research project about these incidences by polling everyone he meets who worked at a store if this had ever happened. My favorite reponse was from an elderly woman he just met who had worked at Target. She grasped his hands and gave him a deep, haunted look.

"Why, however did you know?"

She reported employees would find poo all over Target, but the most popular place was in the interior of the circular clothing racks. I suppose humans are no better than caged monkeys, flinging our poo as an act of defiance and rage. As thoroughly revolting as that is, I was relieved to know that the public library is not an isolated target of this sort of bio-vandalism.