I'm the reason we can't have nice things

When I was a wee one, I used to think librarians kept running tallies of who ALWAYS had overdue fines, who returned books with bent corners and who checked out the Danielle Steel books.

Well, OK, part of that came from my actually working in a small-town library (we had like, 34 books) and listening to the librarians gossip. "Suzanne checked out 'Wanderlust' like, two months ago. What is her problem?" "I know, her son came in and sneezed right in 'World Full of Monsters' and then put it right on the shelf."

Something like that.

When I moved to Toledo and joined its huge branch of libraries, I should have known no one really pays attention to some random Raymond Carver book from the '80s that some college girl (me) checked and returned a week late. But I didn't think that. I thought they knew I was a late-returns kind of woman.

And that pretty well shamed me into turning things in on time. Good for business, I suppose.

You can imagine my horror, then, when I went online to renew my books tonight and saw I have $1.50 in fines.

Wait. What? Me? Oh, God, they're going to burn my card and kick me out of the summer reading program, I thought. I actually did feel a bit of panic: "You mean I went in there and let Dave check out a book for me, all while the librarian had to have known I was harboring three DVDs and some change?"

I am so ashamed.

It's paid now, too, by the way.