Librarians Crazy For Feeling So Lonely

There's this guy at work who talk to himself or sometimes to his computer a lot while he's cataloging, which is cool, I guess, I mean everyone does that sometimes. It's hard for me, at least, to get through the work day without muttering "Goddammit, I screwed that up" or "I am totally the master" or "Blast you insipid machine, what have you done!?!".

But this guy here has full-on conversations (with the computer?) as he's typing and clicking away, and not quietly either. It's not distracting or anything, maybe because I sit nowhere near him, so I accept it. We all have these conversations in our heads, right? So maybe vocalizing it just passes the time. It's usually just standard human-computer interaction stuff.

Usually.

I was just walking by enjoying a piece of my other coworker's homemade honey cake (it's a Jew thing) when I passed the Talker's desk to hear him exclaim: "I'm a guinea pig!"

Yeah. Right you are.

I slowed my pace, hoping for some sort of context, and I peeked at his computer screen thinking maybe he was playing some sort of Flash game in which his character turned into a guinea pig or perhaps into a rodent that could be mistaken for a guinea pig, maybe like a vole or something, I'm not altogether sure what a guinea pig looks like. But no. No context. Apparently today we are simply a guinea pig.

This isn't the first time he's said something totally off-the-wall. Once I heard something about Santa Claus. Another time it was "But there's a lot of sour cream in that!" I imagine his computer is sitting there thinking "Just smile and nod... damn I wish my cell phone would ring right about now."

Now, he's the super nicest guy ever, so I don't want to have him committed or anything. He's smart, and when he's talking to you, it's pretty normal. Fairly normal. Normal enough.

But it's weird and kinda creepy like crazy-talking to nobody is just a gateway drug to the Great Sukkot Library Massacre of 2006. (Look it up.)

I don't know why, but I've taken to calling him Bo Peep in my head. I think in my metaphor, the sheep represent sanity. But whatever, since that doesn't make sense, so now I'm going to call him Olga da Polga instead.