I am currently sitting at the book delivery desk at the Boston Public Library, staring at the man who works there like a crazed stalker. Why? Because the book I need is somewhere in this library building and I’m hoping against hope that the person currently using it brings it back in time for me to read it before the library closes at five.<\/p>\n
This, my friends, is what happens when a book on your syllabus costs more than seventy five dollars.<\/p>\n
I’m used to paying that much for a textbook (hello, computer science), but I refuse to plunk down that kind of cash when the book can not be reused a) as a doorstop or b) for killing imaginary spiders.<\/p>\n
(Real spiders are awesome and I have no desire to end their little lives an earlier than necessary)<\/p>\n
I ordered a used copy of the book online, but it got shipped USPS without a tracking number. Which means that it could show up Tuesday, or it could show up a month from now. And I have six chapters to read before Wednesday.<\/p>\n
(Our mail comes late in the day on Saturdays. So there is a chance that it could show up today. In which case I will cry and throw things. Like maybe this book. Which won’t hurt anybody on account of it being so thin and all.)<\/p>\n
My classmates clearly all have the same philosophy on book buying as me, because there is not a copy to be found in any library in the Metro Boston area. I waited a half hour for them to get the in-library-only copy, only to be told that someone else beat me to it. If only they could look these things up on computers…. The guy at the desk had no idea why he couldn’t find the book until his colleague remembered giving it to someone else.<\/p>\n
So, I have some complicated math to do. If I need to read 1 book this weekend, but I have 0 copies and the library closes at 5pm and the book is $75 where X = how screwed I am, solve for X.<\/p>\n
I’m thinking that X is a rather large number.<\/p>\n
How late would you stay? I still need to read the damn thing and I can’t take it home with me. I’d come back on Tuesday when the library reopens, but I have band practice for a gig on Thursday. My only option is probably going to be to start calling bookstores.<\/p>\n
Which is why I’d really like it if you could all send “bring that damn book back to the book delivery desk” vibes to the person who is reading it right now.<\/p>\n
Update<\/strong>: The girl who took it out brought it back at 2:59, a whole entire minute before my deadline! I only had a couple of hours, but I managed to get half of my reading done. Hopefully, the copy that I ordered will show up in time and I’ll be able to finish up before Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am currently sitting at the book delivery desk at the Boston Public Library, staring at the man who works there like a crazed stalker. Why? Because the book I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grumble","category-random","category-school"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s5yggS-2741","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2741"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2743,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741\/revisions\/2743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}