If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you already know that I’ve worked quite a few odd jobs in my life – it has been my lifelong goal to have the haphazard and chaotic resume of a Dickensian orphan, and so far I’m pretty much nailing it.
But of all the strange jobs I’ve held in my life, one of my favourites was my after-school gig as a page at a public library.
For those of you who have never been quite punk-rock enough to work in a suburban public library, being a library page is a fairly straightforward job. People return books. You take the books out of the unimaginably filthy book return bin. You check the books back into the computer system. You load the books onto book return carts. You put the books back on the shelves. Every now and then you field a question from a library patron who somehow came to the library to find an incredibly specific book despite not knowing a single thing about it.
I worked at the library for almost four years, and in that time, I became well-acquainted with many of our regular library patrons. And we had quite a few regulars – every week, I would get to interact with such delightfully memorable characters as “lady with dementia who thinks this is the women’s changing room at an Eaton’s department store and keeps taking all her clothes off the in adult fiction section”, “man who comes here every weekend to check out the same books about divorce” and “teenager who thinks he is being much more subtle about watching porn on the library computers than he actually is”.
Come on, man, we can all see you.
But then there was the Dog Poop Lady.
Her.
The library that I worked at was pet-friendly, for reasons that nobody seemed to entirely understand. This wasn’t something that we advertised; it was something that you had to learn from someone already in the know, like ordering off the secret menu at a shady McDonald’s. Or, lacking an inside source, you could simply rock up to the library with a ferret in your sleeve and hope for the best.
Ferrets: God’s answer to “what if you could keep a stinky necktie that bites you as a pet?”
We placed no real restrictions on animals coming into the library. If you decided that you really couldn’t handle the thought of browsing for cookbooks without your trusty Emotional Support Bison at your side, that was your prerogative. The only things we required of pet owners were quite simple: keep your pet under control, clean up after them, and don’t allow them to eat any unattended children.
One of those rules proved to be too difficult for one particular patron to follow.
Not this rule, fortunately.
On an especially warm and sunny summer afternoon at the library, I happened to spot a woman standing in line at the front service desk with a medium-sized dog sitting at her heel. This was fine. This was normal. The weekly outdoor farmer’s market was in full swing just outside our front doors, and it was common to see people popping into the library with their pets once they’d grown tired of browsing organic carrots in the hot sun.
Behold, your average farmer’s market customer.
I started to make my way around to the back of the desk so I could retreat into the comfortable darkness of my book-checking lair, when I detected the unmistakable smell of a fresh dog turd roasting in the summer heat. The library that I worked at was housed in a building that had historical preservation status; this meant that we were not allowed to make any significant changes to the building, even to install central air conditioning. On hot days, the building felt like an enormous, sweltering barn. And so the dog turd sizzling on the floor didn’t smell like any ordinary dog turd; it smelled like a dog had taken a steaming dump right into a hot E-Z Bake oven.
I have never been particularly well-known for my powers of deduction, but I saw a fresh, glistening dog poop resting on the floor next to the only dog in the vicinity, and I figured that it was pretty safe to draw my own conclusions.
As a page, I wasn’t really supposed to talk to patrons – and I had spent enough time working in retail to know that it was best to avoid interacting with a member of the general public if you could avoid it – so I approached one of the librarians working the front desk and informed her that I had located the source of the smell she was crinkling her nose at. And then this brave librarian ventured out from the safety of the service desk to gently remind the Dog Poop Lady about the importance of cleaning up after her dog.
It could have gone better.
The librarian who bravely set out to restore order and clean floors to the library was a little old lady who looked, sounded and practically smelled like a stereotypical librarian. You could take one glance at this woman through a pair of binoculars from 400 yards away and know instantly that she had a name like “Dorothy” and a purse positively brimming with Werther’s Originals. She gave off the impression that if you got within 10 feet of her, she would offer you a warm gingersnap and a copy of a C.S. Lewis novel.
In other words, you did not mess with Dorothy.
Dorothy approached the Dog Poop Lady and gently explained that the library isn’t a dog toilet, and that she would need to clean up after her pet. Dorothy even offered to fetch her some paper towels and wipes to aid in the cleaning process.
The Dog Poop Lady looked at her like she’d just been offered a big jar of human teeth.
“You think that my dog did that?” she asked, disgust written across her face.
Staff in the area scanned the room for any possible mystery dogs or stray coyotes we’d missed and, seeing none, slowly nodded our heads.
“Well, I don’t think so,” she snapped. “If you didn’t personally see that poop leave his backside, you have no right to accuse me.”
Dorothy tried to explain that she wasn’t being accused of anything, merely being asked to clean up after her pet, but the Dog Poop Lady exploded.
“You know what I think?” she said, jabbing a finger in Dorothy’s direction. “I think that’s your poop, and you’re just accusing my dog so no one will find out you took a shit on the floor!”
And with that, she turned on her heel and stormed out of the library, tugging her dog along behind her.
I honestly didn’t think we’d see the Dog Poop Lady again. If I had publicly accused a sweet little old lady of having a bowel movement on the floor of her workplace to avoid taking responsibility for my dog, I would probably look for a way to jettison myself into the deep vacuum of space. But several weeks later, there she was, striding through the main lobby with her dog in tow.
This time, it was one of the other pages who found the dog turd.
Specifically this one.
My best friend was also a page at the library at the time, and she had witnessed our first run-in with the Dog Poop Lady. And so when she detected the unmistakable aroma of butt nuggets while shelving a cart of Danielle Steele novels on a blistering summer day, she knew the Dog Poop Lady had struck again.
This time, the Dog Poop Lady didn’t hang around to play a game of “Whose Poop is it, Anyway?”. As soon as she saw someone with a staff name badge coming toward her, she ducked behind a shelf and started power-walking out of the library, confused dog trotting along behind her.
And just like that, the hunt was on.
From that moment on, I was no longer a mere library page, meekly shelving cart after cart of James Patterson and John Grisham novels. Oh, no. I was the Sherlock of Shit. Ace Ventura, Poop Detective. The Nancy Drew of Doggie Doo.
If the Dog Poop Lady wouldn’t take responsibility unless she was caught in the act, then by God, I would bear witness to her crimes. I was Inspector Javert, and this woman’s dog’s butthole was my elusive Jean Valjean.
Nobody forced me to draw this.
The next few weeks were like an elaborate dance, one that only the Dog Poop Lady knew all the moves to. She was in the lead, and all we could do was helplessly follow along, trying not to trip over our own feet as we went.
She often visited the library on Farmer’s Market days, but kept her schedule just random enough to keep us guessing. She moved through the aisles like a ghost, slipping around shelves, ducking behind study carrels and slinking unseen into the safety of the women’s bathrooms. Sometimes we’d miss her entirely, only being alerted to her presence hours later by the discovery of a sad, dried-out dog turd.
In the end, the final confrontation went down in the very same place it all started – at the front desk.
Several staff were milling around the front service desk one afternoon, performing some of the various functions required to prevent the library from collapsing into an especially bookish kind of anarchy, when we saw the Dog Poop Lady come strolling into the library with her dog trotting along beside her.
And then, in front of God and Brenda the Children’s Reference Librarian, her dog squatted down and took a dump right on the floor.
We stared at the Dog Poop Lady.
The Dog Poop Lady stared back at us.
Eventually, Dorothy the Librarian broke the silence.
“We ask that all pet owners please clean up after their pets in the library, ma’am.” Then she added, “And we all just saw your dog make that mess, I’m afraid.”
The Dog Poop Lady looked at us like we’d just asked her to donate her left nipple to science.
“You know what? No. I’m not going to,” she said. And she turned on her heel and left.
In the end, we won the dance of the Dog Poop Lady. But she was still one step ahead of us.
***
To read more about my adventures in minimum-wage service jobs, check out these tales from my brief stint working in tech support.
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Oh as a former bookseller in a pet-friendly store, I feel this pain on a deep level.
I’m flabbergasted that a pet owner would behave in such as manner. I can’t even image what her backyard looks like! I loved the part about the easy baked oven and references to Les Miserables.