This just happened. My immediate supervisor said "Just let it goooooo...." and I am trying....but I figured I would share it here first.
My supervisor was actually the person who initiated the reference interview. The patron wanted to read "professional journals."
Professional journals on what?
Professional journals.
What was it the patron wanted to learn about?
I just want to read professional journals so I can learn stuff.
About?
Just give me a list of your professional journals.
At that point, supervisor had to take a phone call, leaving unmedicated me with the patron who insisted he wanted a list of all the professional journals available so he could read them all.
I explained about our electronic resources and showed him the list of 16000 journals available to him, but I also explained that he couldn't just click on a title and start reading, that he had to have a subject of interest.
I just want to start reading.
At this point, unmedicated me (yes, I left the house in a rush and forgot to take that which makes me less irritable...we call them my "Keep Patrons Alive Drugs") says "Sir, you can read on any topic you want at any time. But you can't just go to the first journal and start reading."
"Well I want to know everything."
My supervisor got back into the mix and told him that if what he is after (and it was) is to just start reading professional journals a - z, then we don't have what he is looking for as we are a public library and not a college library. We offered him what we do have (JAMA, professional journals for librarians, and so forth....nope, he didn't want to read on a topic, he wanted everything.
And walked away.
Now, here's the thing that's bothering me....I still don't know what it was he wanted to accomplish. I asked him if he was looking to learn more about a specific profession, because I could get him information about differernt professions with books we had. Nope. Was there a topic relating to a specific profession? No. What did he want to learn about? Everything.
Well, I wanted to point out to him that if he wanted to learn "everything" that he should just go to 001 on the bookshelf and start reading and keep going until he hits 999.999. But apparently that wasn't as good a plan.
And now that I have told my story, I am going to assume the lotus position, do some "ohms" and see if I can let it go.....