Full Moon

Full Moon is a new column from our Director of Library Relations, Tony McSeán, that aims to bring some light relief to LC, and share funny stories and experiences from across the globe. Contact us at full.moon@elsevier.com.

Elsevier needs a grown-up newsletter that provides a good, professional read for the working librarian, as well as the product and company news we think might interest you. However, working in a library is not all customer service objectives and mentor realization initiatives. Sometimes, when it’s your turn on the reference desk and the students decide it’s Bring your pet to the library day and the baby alligators get into the water cooler, sometimes it’s just bonkers out there. And at times like this you realise another article about maximizing your customer interface potential is not what’s needed.

What Full Moon aims to provide is a section of LC slightly less firmly rooted in sanity’s subsoil. In particular, we’ll be inviting you to share some of the crazier moments of library life — things that have lightened your working day. So, here we go.

They Asked for What?

We are starting off, as is only right since that is where youthful enthusiasm is broken on the wheel of reader madness, at the public service desk. Everyone who has ever worked on a reference desk has at least one example of a question that might make some sense on Planet Barmy but down here just makes the working day seem to stretch out like the Russian Steppes.

So please, send us the funniest and strangest questions you’ve ever been asked. We’ll print our favorites in forthcoming issues, and award a US $50 American Express Gift Card for every question we print.

Just to whet your appetite, and to prove it’s not only librarians who face this sort of challenge to the equilibrium, here are some genuine queries received by the British Medical Association’s Press Office. It will come as no surprise that not all were answered.

• Would it be OK if I asked my doctor out on a date?
• On the subject of xenotransplantation, what does the BMA think about the ethics of a patient meeting the animal in question before being transplanted with one of its organs?
• Is there anyone who can tell me what men's nipples do?

And, most inexplicably:

• Do you have a photo of a camping stove?

You get the picture. Please enter your submissions to us by emailing libraryconnect@elsevier.com and help brighten the humdrum lives of LC editorial.