When I'm not working at Circulation, I work at the General Reference Desk, and boy do I get some fun questions. A women called in from Missouri or somewhere once wanting to know how to clean a journal of her father's she had found in her shed. Turns out if you're worried about germs (mice droppings, in her case) all you can do is put the book in a bag with some baking soda, leave it over night, and then brush it off veeeery carefully. ("Don't try this at home," was my suggestion to her. "Also, get it digitized.") I've had people ask me the spelling of words, the definition of words, etc. Just now I got off the phone with a nice woman from Texas who wanted to know what direction Houston was from Tomball, TX. She said she'd tried "the computer," but the way she phrased it (I would not have been surprised to hear her say "the computer machine box thing") I knew that I was starting from scratch.
It was actually pretty easy. I went to infoplease.com first and used their handy distance calculator, which told me that Tomball was 27.6 miles from Houston at 30° 5' 49", -95° 36' 57". But it did not tell me what direction they were from one another. Finally I just googled a map of Texas and looked for Houston. There was Tomball, just northwest of it. The woman was so grateful. "We drive to Houston all the time," she said, "But I can never remember which way to go."
Just doing my job, ma'am.
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