settle fines with the school library

I still owe the school library eight dollars, and because of it, they won’t send me my college diploma. Suck.

I have some advice.

If you don’t want to pay your fines here’s how to avoid it:

1) Work for the library in question. Many school libraries hire students to do simple work, like stocking shelves and checking out books. Once you’re in, you can learn the computer system and erase your fines. Simple!

2) Make friends with the other students who work at said library. Not only will some get rid of your fines (if they’re not quite ethical) but many will also continually renew your books so you never have to worry about fines again. Again, simple!

Not so easy to deal with missing books, however. Those are more difficult to make disappear so it’s best to own up to those and do your best to replace the lost books. This will probably reduce your fine.

Also useful to remember is that librarians want power. They love having control over these books and your access to that information, often believing that this power makes them smarter than you. If you’re polite, friendly, understanding about their crappy customer service jobs, act interested and ask intelligent questions, librarians will be much more willing to bend the rules for you.

How do I know all this? Well, I spent years working in various universities’ library systems, both as a student and professionally. Fucked up, I know. But I left and I’m all better now. :)

i am so bad. i fell beind on my book returning schedule and recently became banned from checking out books once again. but today, when i found out that the school library’s catalog and student system was crashed, i leaped on the opportunity to trick the library into giving me the books i need to complete my term paper on byron’s childe harold’s pilgrimage. snap! my overdue account is still in existence, but my pile of books is growing. and that, my friends, is how technology can work for you.

In the end, I only paid 18 dollars and I only did so when forced to by the hold which prevented me from registering for spring classes. Now I can enter the breaktakingly unattractive confines of the lemieux library with impunity. Which only means more time in the secret ‘powder room’ which isn’t actually that secret but is blessed with very covetable 70’s minimalist robin’s egg blue furniture. (which i someday hope to pilfer)

the last time i tried to pick up books, the librarian wouldn’t let me check them out because i owed too much money. my fines were almost 9 dollars, and i only had six, and she wouldn’t let me promise to come back first thing in the morning with the extra money if only she would let me have my books. i was saved by the other librarian, who is one of my favorite human beings ever, who walked up and casually gave me three dollars with which to pay my remaining fines. fantastic! i paid her back the next day, baked her brownies for being so nice, and i have managed to not accrue any other fines since then.

How does an innocent girl manage to misplace three library books in the few blocks between her university and her home? How does she manage to lose the only books in her school’s library purchases in the current millennium? How can she be assured that someone else will ever check these three books out after she repurchases them for the library? How can a library with such unattractive architectural features dare to charge students fees of any kind?