Sometimes people make fun of me if I don’t know something off the top of my head.

“You’re a librarian.  Shouldn’t you know that?”

I laugh about it with them, because of course I don’t know about the eating habits of Amazonian lizards, or whatever it was they asked about.  But today, I learned that not only are we, as librarians, supposed to know every piece of academic information, we often know all your “bidness” as well.  Whether we’re supposed to know or not, we do.  Watch out.

I walked a patron to the stacks in search of some humorous books I thought he would like (Darwin Awards–check them out if you haven’t before).  We had a brief conversation about nothing much, and he introduced himself before I left him to peruse the books.  No big deal.

Five minutes later, I get a phone call at the reference desk.

“Was he cute?”

No kidding, those were the first words on the other end of the line, not “Hi, Hannah,” or any other greeting.  Phone calls at the reference desk are always about the next computer class or what books we have checked in.  I was ready with Professional Hannah Voice and everything.  The boy talk definitely threw me for a loop.  Turns out that the co-worker in question was shelving books one row over as this guy and I talked.  Hilarious!!