Shirl Kennedy

Service Ethic Personified

“Shirl, can you help this guy on the phone. He needs to download forms off the computer or something. I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about.”

Sure I can help. I’m a librarian…service ethic personified. I pick up the phone. The elderly man on the other end of the line starts telling me about some special stipend he is entitled to because he has a combat-related disability. Our elected officials, bless their hearts, recently passed legislation that provides the funding for said stipend. This gentleman – a retired non-commissioned officer – called the Master Sergeants Association for information, and they told him he could “download the information from the computer.”

He doesn’t have a computer. He doesn’t have Internet access.

He is blind.

Fortunately, someone at the Master Sergeants Association had enough sense to tell him to “call the library at the nearest military base.”

That be us, here at MacDill.

OK. This kinda sounds like a problem the Internet can solve. My gentleman caller puts his wife on the phone. She is not blind; she reads me a paragraph from an article in a magazine for military retirees. A URL is mentioned. I get her to spell it out for me, character by character.

This definitely sounds like a problem the Internet can solve. I bring up the URL in my Web browser. Sure enough – there’s a link that says something about combat-related disabilities and payments. I click through. I read a page saying that the appropriate forms are indeed available here. I click another link and am presented with a screen that requires a login involving personal information.

I explain what I’m seeing to the wife. She puts her husband back on the phone. He asks if I will be there tomorrow if they come to the library; he will give me the information I need to log into this site, and maybe I can print out the forms for him?

Would you have said no?

Me neither.

***

They show up the following afternoon. She is holding his arm. He is holding a white cane. They are both smiling. Take away the white cane, and they look so much like my own parents (who are no longer living) that my jaw practically hits the floor. We introduce ourselves and make a bit of small talk.

Heck, they even sound like my parents – friendly, easy-going, mentally sharp….

I miss my parents.

The wife hands me the magazine from which she had read to me on the phone the previous day. I sit down at the computer and navigate back to the appropriate URL, clicking through till I get to the login screen again. Her husband sits down in the chair next to my desk and tells me his Social Security Number, birthdate, full name, etc. I fill in the text boxes, click the magic button and there they are – links to the forms they need and the information they need to complete them, all in Adobe Acrobat format.

Some 30 seconds later, it’s all printed out and I’m paper-clipping the stuff together in some logical order for them to take home. “You know,” the man says, suddenly, “there used to be a little wooden chapel right here on this spot – where the library is now. My daughter was baptized there in 1953, when I was stationed on this base. Right after that, I shipped out to Korea.”

I look at his wife, standing behind him. She is nodding. She has tears in her eyes. I feel like I am going to lose it. Instead, I ask them about their children and their grandchildren. I tell them about my sons.

We talk about how confusing it is to deal with the government…to try and track down all these forms, get the paperwork completed and submitted to the appropriate agencies. The government, of course, thinks it has made life easier for us by dumping all this stuff onto the Internet. Now when you call and talk to some faceless bureaucrat in an office somewhere – after you’ve made your way through a lengthy, Byzantine telephone tree – you are quickly given a URL and told to download what you need from the Internet.

Everybody has the Internet. Everybody has a computer.

Everybody can see.

I give these folks my business card and tell them to call me if they need anything else. I escort them to the library entrance.

She hugs me. I hug her. I hug him. He hugs me.

I go back and hide out in my office. After awhile, I come out, slip into the restroom and try to scrub the dried rivers of mascara off both of my cheeks.

I am the toughest person I know, and I have a reputation to maintain. Conan the Librarian. Yeah, that be me.

I go back to the reference desk and distract myself by indulging in a little game I sometimes play – seeing if I can get some of these hard-nosed military types to crack a smile as they pass by. The Jarheads are the absolute worst.

***

A young man wearing civilian clothes slips quietly into the chair beside the desk. He looks at me -- shy grin, beautiful eyes. He tells me his English is not good; he is from Peru. Because MacDill is home to CENTCOM, we see people from pretty much everywhere. This guy’s English is better than my Spanish. He manages to explain to me that he needs help filling out some sort of government form for his wife. He pushes a piece of paper across the desk which describes the form. I look at it.

Sure enough, there’s a URL.

When I sigh, it’s long…drawn out… But I just gotta smile.

Sure I can help. I’m a librarian…service ethic personified.

I fire up my Web browser.

###

Shirl Kennedy is the reference librarian at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. She has been a .com, a .net, a .org, a .us and a .edu. Now she is a .mil. But the best way to reach her is at sdk@reporters.net.