Getting screwed

I live and work in a highly multicultural city, and therefore am very accustomed to cracking the code of what people mean when their english is buried under a heavy accent. Out of the six full-time staff in the circulation department of my library, for example, four were not born in Canada. This wasn't surprising to me at all when I took the job, and I'm actually quite grateful for the diversity. It's especially helpful when you get an irate patron accusing you of racism, and your boss, who is pretty obviously from around the same part of the world as said patron, tells him that he shouldn't accuse people of discrimination just because he was asked to do something he didn't want to do. I'll get into that story another time perhaps.

Anyway, I had to laugh the other day when one of my co-workers, a lady from Hong Kong, left a note for the boss. We have a book drop box on the inside of the library next to the entrance, and it's connected to the outside by its pull door so that people can access the box when we're closed. The top half of the wall that separates the box from the pull is a window. On top of the box rests a sturdy sign that faces the window to inform patrons of our library hours. Before Christmas, this sign could be taken down whenever we needed to change the hours and/or message with those little plastic numbers and letters. When we got back to work after the holidays recently, Hong Kong lady discovered that someone had screwed the frame of the sign to the top of the drop box (perhaps to secure it), making it impossible to change the hours within it. So she a wrote a note to the boss that began like this:

"Some one screwed our board for changing hours."

I caught a glimpse of the note tucked in between some pages of the circulation desktop calendar, and I couldn't help but giggle to myself. English obviously isn't this woman's first language, and sometimes it's difficult to understand what she's saying because of her thick accent. Her written stuff, though, is pricelessly entertaining. I once proofread a reference letter she was writing for her nephew (which is something I enjoy doing), and I barely managed to contain my amusement at the hilarity of her backwards, and grammatically challenged, sentences. You gotta love foreigners. They're nearly as entertaining as our patrons sometimes...

Next, please.