At the Library Tech Lab

Witness

Today at the library tech lab, a Bohemian-type in her seventies wanted to send a manuscript to her publisher. Her documents were hard to find. I swiped through every menu on her cracked Android until I found them.

“My manuscript is very dangerous,” she said. “I’m in the witness protection program.”

At this place, you peer into the caverns of people’s lives through their phones. Texts, photos, missed calls from their children. I saw she sent a text that said “I was poisoned last week”. It seemed possible that she had delusions. Before she left, she said to me, “You’re a light-giver, do you know what that is?”

Maybe she thought of me as a guide with a torch. I think I’m more of an excavator.

Security

Today at the library tech lab, I helped an eighty-something woman submit a job application as a Target cart attendant. She typed agonizingly with two fingers, searching for each letter. 

I typed it for her, though I’m not supposed to. When her account needed a password, she said, “Oh, that’s a tough one.” I took a golf pencil and wrote a password I devised on a note she could take home.

“Could I have your number?” she asked. We can’t give those out, I said. When we printed her application, I paid for the print, though I’m not supposed to.

Arno Llgner wrote about perceived risk versus actual risk in rock climbing. One is irrational fear. The other is calculated potential harm. It’s important to be able to distinguish between the two.

Teeth

Today at the library tech lab, I helped an eighty-something man in a wheelchair charge his phone. It would take 20 days to charge until full, totally unusable. “A guy in the street gave me this phone for free,” he said, seemingly proud of this.

“She’s trying to kill me. My niece. I’ll show you what she did to me.” I was nervous that he was going to expose his skin. He pulled back the corners of his mouth - pink gums where his molars used to be. He tried to escape them, his niece and the dentist, but they tied him down and took his teeth anyway. “Maybe they needed to come out for your health,” I said.

The first law in improvisational comedy is “yes, and”: encourage the basic premise already established by another comic.

Those who have learned to collaborate and improvise have prevailed - Charles Darwin.