I've finished most of TNG Season 4, now. Not all of it, because two of the discs have been lost/broken/stolen from the library system somewhere along the way. Fortunately, one library still has them on VHS tape.

If there's anything that infuriates me more than library property being lost or destroyed, I don;t know what it is. I buy the videos for our library, and there's nothing greater than the satisfaction of putting something new on the shelf, something you know is good, maybe even rare, and knowing that lots of people will now have the opportunity to see something they may not otherwise have ever come across.

Then stuff mysteriously vanishes off the shelf. We had to start keeping our DVDs behind the counter because things started vanishing so quickly--we were later informed that some of our videos were actually being sold in the halls of the local high school.

Even more exasperating are the people who check things out and then simply never return to the library. Usually it's just someone with a screwed-up lifestyle, or occasionally they've been robbed or lost the discs somehow and don't dare face us, but one guy checked out about ten of our newest releases, then moved out of town.

But worse yet (because there's NO excuse to understand) are the people who deliberately vandalize items. We've had a few DVDs and audiobooks ruined lately--someone scratched the disc up and put it back in the package, so we didn't realize anything was wrong until a customer complained and showed us the damage. (It was clearly not accidental damage, either.) At that point there's little or no way to tell who actually wrecked the item, since many people simply won't take the time to complain about defective library items, so it could have passed through ten peoples' hands before we were clued in.

I really, really, really hate when I check up on a new purchase to see how it's going over, and find out that ir's gone already...or stuck permanently to some patron. They're not just robbing the library, they're cheating the hundreds of people we serve, and whose taxes and generous donations paid for the stuff.

(takes deep breath)

Anyway, still fighting off the urge to draw Star Trek fan comics about Captain Nog aboard the experimental spacecraft, the USS Shepard. I can't help doodling. Nog was a particularly uninteresting character at the beginning of Deep Space 9, I thought--just the stock juvenile delinquent and bad example for Jake. But from the episode where he demanded Sisko recommend him to Star Fleet Academy, I became fascinated with him, always waiting for the episodes that advanced that storyline along.