Date Due Card

Thank you for your lovely congratulations. Aren’t you all nice!?

I had seen a similar concept for birth announcements with the due date cards and wanted to replicate it when we announced to our parents that we were expecting. We no longer use due date cards in my school libraries, but we have stacks of unused ones from years ago when they did, and I meant to take one of those, but never remembered to actually put it in my bag, and thus we arrived home for Christmas without one.

The day we arrived at my parents house, we knew we wanted to tell them that night, so it was imperative that we somehow get our hands on a due date card. Thus, I invented a totally lame excuse to go to the local public library, and Bart, Crawford, and I set off (Crawford, of course, had no idea why I wanted to go to the library, and happily, he disappeared off to the fantasy section so I was free to skulk around as needed).

I went to the teen section and flipped through a few books, discovering, to my dismay, that the library no longer used due date cards. I mean, I didn’t think they’d USE them, as automated systems have pretty much made them obsolete, but I thought they might still be in there.

I went to the non-fiction adult section and started flipping through books, realizing they too had no due date cards.

Next I went to the desk in the children’s section and asked if they had any at all, but the lady told me that, no, we don’t need them anymore because of the computers. I was getting a bit frantic (I could have made my own due date card, I suppose, but if you know me at all, you know my artistic skills are so abysmal it’s almost amusing).

I found Bart and told him that they didn’t use them any more and my only hope was to find a really really really old book that might still have one. We started pulling the oldest, most decrepit-looking books from the shelves we could find, and finally found one with a due date card glued in the front cover. But the bar code had been slapped right on top of it, so there was no real way to take the due date card off without causing mega problems.

Finally, we discovered a very old book about plant life in a specific region (can’t even remember what now), and, lo and behold, it had a due date card in it. And no bar code on the top of it. As you will see below, the book appears not to have been checked out in over 20 years (the most recent date stamp being 1988), and I assume that because it was never taken out, no one every bothered pulling the due date card.

Bart coughed loudly while I carefully tore the card out, trying hard not to damage the fly leaf it was glued to (success!). Bart said, “Shouldn’t you be morally opposed to this, what with being a librarian and all?” and yes, I probably should have been, but instead I was feeling exultant about not being thwarted by an automated world.

I stuffed the card in my pocket, we found Crawford, and all went merrily on our way home. I added our due date to the card, circled it in red, found an envelope in my mom’s stationary collection, and we were ready.

It was probably defacement of public property and such, but I got what I wanted, plus a terrific story to boot. I can’t complain.