On the off chance you were wondering "Why Sparrows?"

A lot of my fellow classmates' blogs have fairly self-explanatory titles, so I thought I might should make a little posts explaining mine.

The first reason is fairly simple: it's my last name.

The name Spurlock roughly means Sparrow+Lake (although I have seen it listed in name origin books as meaning "a person dwelling beside a lake infested with sparrows"...really).

The second reason is somewhat multifaceted: For starters my wife and I are both first semester MLIS students and work in public libraries (separate systems), hence Sparrows being plural. The other being that looking towards the future I intend to keep this blog so that we can reflect on library life, etc.

Reflection is really what my whole third reason for naming this blog the way I did. I absolutely love the Song of Ice and Fire series of books and the Game of Thrones HBO adaptation. In the series, one of the main auxiliary characters, named Lord Varys, continually refers to his network of spies as being his "little birds." It isn't so much the idea of spying on library users that makes me think of patrons sometimes as "little birds," rather how we are given small glimpses into our patron's lives (often times humorous). So with humor in mind, I had initially planned on offering glimpses into some of my interactions with my "little sparrows" whenever I found an anecdote appropriate. Unfortunately I haven't really found a place for technology-related anecdotes yet, but I will leave you with one now:

Little Sparrow: "Your computers are broken."
Me: "What do you mean?"
Little Sparrow: "I trying to insert my card in and it won't give me my card back."
Me: "You put your card in the computer?"
Little Sparrow: "You told me to."
Me: "..."
Me: "Hold on."

At our library we use EnvisionWare's PC Reservation to manage our computer labs. We have a first-come first-served policy when it comes to computer use, but since different systems have different policies a lot of patrons come up to our service desk to be placed on a computer. When this happens we usually state, "You can get on any computer with a blue log in screen. Just type your card number and your last name in and you can get on." Apparently, this patron heard me say, "Insert your card and type your name." So what happened was that the patron stuck the card in wherever they could fit it:  in this case, with our computers being 10 year old Pentium 4's the patron stuck their card into the floppy drive. One pair of tweezers later and they were properly put on the PC.

Lessons learned: Always make sure your patrons heard you correctly.