Warm Fuzzies

A polite young man came into the library on this brutally cold evening to look for a few obscure items. I helped him search for a DVD. The library owns copies of this particular film, but our branch's copies were checked out and therefore unavailable. Since he needed it for tomorrow, requesting a copy from another branch (to be shipped to us, a two or three day prospect) wasn't an option. Next we tried to track down a couple of books, but either the library doesn't own these items or we had the titles or authors' names incorrect. I felt badly that I was unable to do much for him.

I showed this young man how to use other websites such as Google or Amazon to enhance his search, how to better use our online search on our library website (which he can do from home) and how to use resources such as NoveList on our E-Library. Finally, I showed him ways he can suggest book titles to our acquisitions department.

As he was leaving, the young man thanked me for my help and told me that every staff member he has ever dealt with in our branch has always been friendly and helpful. He said he'd like to commend us to our manager, but he couldn't give just one name: each and every one of us always goes that extra mile to assist him.

Wow. That gave me the warm fuzzies. Someone else might have complained because we didn't actually find a single book or DVD that was wanted. This fellow went away empty-handed but happy because he felt that we did our best to help, even though we weren't successful.

Add another tick to the "nice customer" column.