Saturday, not in the park, I know it's not the fourth of July.

I got an interesting phone call at work today, where "interesting" means the same thing as "chaps my ass".

The conversation went pretty much like this:

"Library."

"Yes, hello, how are you?"

"I'm fine; how are you doing?"

"Well, I'm irritated at my son."

"...."

"Anyway, I was just looking through his backpack, and I found two books checked out from your library, and my son is doing an interim term in Hawaii."

"...."

"So he's not here."

"...."

"What can we do about this?"

"Well, you can return them for him."

"No way. It's too long of a drive. I'm not driving to BIRMINGHAM just to return two books. Can't I just pay the fines up to now with a credit card and renew the books over the phone?"

"Um, no, we won't renew when there are late charges in place. You'd have to return them. Besides, we don't have a credit card machine; we take cash and checks."

"I'm just worried about all these fines. They were due on January 2. How much is it per day?"

"IT'S TEN CENTS. PER DAY. They're only about four days late."

"Yes, but that's STILL late. I'll mail them back. Can I mail them to you? What will happen to them when you get them?"

And it just went down hill from there. The oddest thing about it to me was that the woman had a 205 area code, which means she's not THAT far from us. I understand not wanting to have to drive a long way, but she seemed awfully concerned about the books and the fines to be all, "Oh, no, I don't actually want to have to leave the house to take care of this."