A few days ago I was at the main library in the nearest city
to where I lived; I didn’t have the internet at home so I was planning to use
the web for an hour. The library was
busy so I had to pre-book – I got given my computer number and the time
allocated for me to use it which was around forty minutes away at 4.15pm. To kill time I perused the bookshelves then
sat and read a newspaper; when the time got near I climbed the stairs to the
first floor where the computers were.
I made my way over
to my terminal and the monitor read: ‘Time left: 2 minutes, 7 seconds’ in large
white figures and it was counting down each second. I would just have to wait another couple of
minutes. Sitting right in front of the
computer, side-on to it and facing each other, were a couple, probably in their
late-sixties. They were extremely grim
and dirty-looking. The man was wearing a
thick grey jumper and warm-looking green coat even though we were indoors and
it was a sunny and warm day. The few
hairs he had clinging to the top of his head were dark and extremely greasy-looking;
they were swept back to the top of the back of his head into a kind of knot but
then the hair spread out again to the lower part of his head – but instead of
naturally flowing down to a stop or being neatly trimmed, it stopped in a sharp
square well short of his neck. He looked
utterly ridiculous. The woman, who was
sitting directly in front of my monitor, was extremely fat and ugly-looking with
thick, tape-repaired glasses. She had a
few warts on her face and single grey hairs sprouting out from under her nose
and on her chin. They clearly weren’t
using the computer but I wasn’t going to move them out of the way until the
time ran out; but then, as it got to under a minute to my turn the woman delved
into a Tesco carrier bag and pulled
out some sandwiches wrapped in cling-film.
She passed one to her partner, opened one herself and started taking big
hungry mouthfuls.
When the countdown
on the monitor got to zero it was exactly 4.15 and ‘RESERVED’ appeared on the
screen. I approached the couple and told
the woman that I needed to use the computer; she just grunted, barely appearing
to register me, and pointed at the screen with a mouthful of sandwich – bringing
my attention to the word ‘RESERVED’.
‘Yes, reserved for
me!’ I exclaimed.
She grunted again
and then in no particular hurry, they gathered their stuff together and
disgruntledly and very slowly left the spot – her face seemed to say: “what a
pain in the arse you are, could you not use a different computer?”
I
pulled a chair to the screen and sat down to start my session, greeted by a
sharp smell of dirt and body odour.
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