I volunteer for the Pontiac Archives, which mostly involves me opening and staffing the Archives on Saturdays. It’s usually pretty quiet: many days I go without a single customer, but I believe it’s important to be available. Frequently I get people coming in hoping to use our Internet access, which, of course, we don’t let them do.

Today, though, it got weird. Shortly after I opened this morning, a youngish woman entered looking quite flustered. She wanted to check the Internet for something. More precisely, she wanted to check the Internet to see if something had occurred that would, as near as I could gather from what she was saying, be the sign of the imminent Apocalypse or something.

That’s right: she wanted to check to see if the Rapture was nigh. And she was quite agitated about it.

I suggested she try one of the public terminals upstairs in the library. She asked me whether it would matter if she didn’t have a library card.

Now really, if you’re expecting Götterdammerung, shouldn’t you be better prepared than that?