It’s been a while since I’ve felt that way but today I think it’s definitely justified.

Roomie has reading assignments each week in college. Over the weekend she was focussed on a research paper and left the article reading until today so that she could get the paper done and turned in. Come to find out that her card and password for her college don’t work and the resource she needs is through NetLibrary which IS an online resource BUT is only accessible through an actual library campus or building.

I couldn’t find a link to it through our county library system, so I called up my old colleagues and the county and asked them. They determined that if we went to our local library we should be able to access it but unfortunately not from the house.

I decided I would use my googling skills and see if there was a copy of the article online anywhere, because occasionally that happens. I remember lucking out that way several times with articles I needed from grad school. I didn’t find it online but I did find that it was published in one of the Bloom’s series of critical essays and that our local community college has a copy of it.

So, I decided to call them up. To make things easier I asked the nice man, James, who came on the phone if seeing as I was going to UCF which was affiliated with them would I be able to use their library to copy an article I needed to read because the UCF library was being uncooperative and I couldn’t access all of their resources since I was a distance learner. A slight white lie, but it’s easier than going, “My friend who is currently threatening her computer with a large axe because of UCF would like to know,” and he said, “Absolutely, of course,” and told me how to access their catalog as a guest before I left to double-check if it was available before driving out there, but if for some reason someone checked it out in the hour before we arrived they had access to a different online resource where most of Bloom’s works were digitized.

I explained this to Roomie and thus saved her computer from being rearranged with a very large axe. She’s been telling me how much I kick butt and am a life safer, which is nice to here. With the disability appeal and everything I’ve not been feeling very capable. I have my days though. As I told her, “if there’s one thing I know it’s library’s,” and I learned very quickly while trying to do grad school, and work, and dealing with various inter library loan departments, there are ways around everything, and there are always, always, always more than one way to get information (unless you’re dealing with microfiche) but we, thankfully, are not, in this case.