Dear Booger-Wiper,

April 13, 2016 2:15 PM

An Open Letter to the Person Who Wiped Boogers on My Library Book by Jacob Lambert [The Millions]
posted by Fizz (48 comments total)

“The effect of your wipery — on myself and anyone else unlucky enough to have borrowed West of Sunset after you — was this:

She was just leaving the floor, sweeping gaily along the fringe of the parquet in an ash-gray evening dress with a red velvet sash that accentuated ** BOOGER! **
His money was gone and there was blood on his jacket, and when he called Sheilah, before he uttered a word, ** BOOGER! **
They nattered on, Zelda mimicking Sara’s sleepy lilt, drawing out her ** BOOGER! **

Every 15 or 20 pages, I was ripped from the story by your nostril-rubbings, forced to grimace and soldier on. It’s a testament to O’Nan’s skill that I was able to finish the book; a lesser novel might have gone back to the library unfinished, me hesitantly returning to the stacks — now a little scarred, a little gun-shy.
How do you live your life, Booger-Wiper? My first instinct is to imagine your home as a mucus-smeared nightmare hovel, mold at the corners and suspicious stains everywhere. But upon further reflection, I think your home might actually be fairly tidy — seeing as how you so freely deposit your filth on things that don’t belong to you. If I lent you a pair of socks, what would lurk inside of them when I got them back? If I left a piece of Tupperware in your kitchen after a dinner party, would you return it to me, empty and clean? Or would it ruin my day?”

posted by Fizz at 2:19 PM on April 13, 2016

I have nothing witty to add, just wanted to say thank you. I feel the writer's pain, and it made me LOL at work, which I needed.

Also....what is WRONG with these people???
posted by sharp pointy objects at 2:20 PM on April 13, 2016 [5 favorites]

Flick it, don't stick it.
posted by Bistle at 2:27 PM on April 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

True story: At my last place of employment (in a high rise with a shared bathroom on a multi-office floor) we had a rash of booger wiping plague the men's room. Someone, every day, smeared a fingerful of gooey (often bloody, apparently) booger on the wall behind the first urinal right at eye height. My male coworkers complained constantly.

So I sent an email to the building management to be like "hey, there's a rogue booger wiper polluting the bathroom, can you please work with the maintenance staff to get the wall cleaned up? sorry you had to read this." The building management responded by sending an email out to every company on the floor saying please do not wipe your boogers on the wall, please forward this to every employee in your office. Everyone on the floor started talking about it. In the women's room me and the other women on the floor would laugh and laugh about the horrible manchildren we all worked with and how of course one of them is wiping boogers on the wall, the disgusting boors.

One of the supervisors in my office came to me after I forwarded the building email out and he was like "oh god, I know who's doing the booger wiping. I knew the moment I saw the email." And I was like "ok well if it doesn't stop now that the building has asked nicely will you talk to him?" Of course the booger wiping didn't stop. Supervisor kept putting off the discussion. The building kept sending more and more desperate emails "PLEASE, PLEASE ask your employees to NOT WIPE THEIR BOOGERS ON THE WALL, this is a SHARED OFFICE BATHROOM, if they must wipe boogers on a wall please ask them to DO THAT AT HOME. THANK YOU."

Eventually our supervisor broke down and had a heart to heart with the booger wiper (knowing him, I assume it went something like this: "dude. stop with the boogers") and it didn't happen again.

Anyway, what I'm saying is, the guy who wiped his boogers all over West of Sunset? I know who's doing the booger wiping. I knew the moment I read the blog post.
posted by phunniemee at 2:30 PM on April 13, 2016 [31 favorites]

It's no Tomes and Talismans, but it'll do.
posted by klangklangston at 2:32 PM on April 13, 2016

We had a booger-bathroom-wall-wiper in my old office! People put up some great passive-aggressive notes about it, I wish I could remember how they were phrased.
posted by en forme de poire at 2:34 PM on April 13, 2016

You know how The Amityville Horror has images of flies on the first page of each chapter? And there's more and more of them as the book goes on?
My aunt (who was a librarian) told me someone at her library slammed a real fly in their copy.

This is worse.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 2:39 PM on April 13, 2016 [5 favorites]

I rented a room from a guy who did the snot rocket thing inside the house. I was like, eeewww that's gross. He was like, what, I vacuum it up eventually.
posted by peeedro at 2:45 PM on April 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

"Our" library book, surely?
posted by IndigoJones at 2:47 PM on April 13, 2016

Snot on books is really disgusting but at least it wasn't a chewed-up wad of gum.
posted by blucevalo at 2:55 PM on April 13, 2016

Snot on books is really disgusting but at least it wasn't a chewed-up wad of gum.

Oddly enough, I would personally prefer the gum to the snot.
posted by Fizz at 2:58 PM on April 13, 2016 [14 favorites]

we had a rash of booger wiping plague the men's room

Shared Office Bathroom 2: Electric Booger-Loo
posted by oulipian at 3:01 PM on April 13, 2016 [15 favorites]

I've often imagined that the guy who's wiping his boogers above the urinal is the same one who's lashing the wall with urine and tossing fistfuls of his pubic hair at it.
posted by bonobothegreat at 3:02 PM on April 13, 2016 [7 favorites]

OMG after this thread I was afraid to click the comments in case half of you wrongos were in here defiantly explaining that books are the only appropriate place to wipe boogers... thank you all for finally reaching consensus I can agree with.

I'll still be removing this thread from activity, though, since the thread is young.
posted by Mchelly at 3:03 PM on April 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is why your friendly neighborhood librarian drinks. Heavily.
posted by sarcasticah at 3:08 PM on April 13, 2016 [17 favorites]

Be grateful it wasn't a smallpox scab.
posted by boo_radley at 3:11 PM on April 13, 2016

Try working as a high school librarian and you'd have days you were grateful that it was only boogers....

Gad.
posted by Lynsey at 3:26 PM on April 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

I thought boogers went on beer mugs.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 3:44 PM on April 13, 2016

I'm feeling a little queasy.
posted by deadwax at 3:45 PM on April 13, 2016 [3 favorites]

Given the choice between bookgers and cigarette smoked books, which would you prefer? When I was reading the whole SF section of my library as a teen, there were authors afflicted by both kinds of readers. I preferred the boogers, by a nose.
posted by joeyh at 4:01 PM on April 13, 2016 [3 favorites]

(I seem to vaguely associate Asimov and Clarke with the boogers, and Niven and a bunch more with the cigarette smoke. What a horrible association to retain.)
posted by joeyh at 4:03 PM on April 13, 2016 [3 favorites]

Yeah. I just cannot understand the female employee where I work (known to me as Snot Sister) because there's appropriate paper product right there next to you when you're in the stall and feel a need to deboogerize.
posted by mightshould at 4:04 PM on April 13, 2016

ok so since there is a record of who had taken the book out previously, you'd have a pretty short list of possible offenders, and if anyone else complained about similar treatment of a different book, then you could compare the two lists, and track down the (book) killer.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 4:06 PM on April 13, 2016

Putting boogers in a book? Dude, everyone knows you're supposed to eat them. Right? Right? Everyone?
posted by mr. digits at 4:14 PM on April 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

how would you eat a book is my question
posted by boo_radley at 4:17 PM on April 13, 2016 [5 favorites]

The building kept sending more and more desperate emails "PLEASE, PLEASE ask your employees to NOT WIPE THEIR BOOGERS ON THE WALL, this is a SHARED OFFICE BATHROOM, if they must wipe boogers on a wall please ask them to DO THAT AT HOME. THANK YOU."

This reads like a deleted scene from the Illuminatus trilogy.
posted by kurumi at 4:27 PM on April 13, 2016

I once sent an all-office email about urinal booger-wiping, and people complained that I was being inappropriate.

I'M NOT THE ONE WIPING THE BOOGERS ABOVE THE URINAL!



I mean, I'm inappropriate about a lot of things at the office, but in that instance, I think I was wholly justified.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:37 PM on April 13, 2016

I once picked up and started reading a discarded newspaper on the train. A couple of pages in I was confronted with an enormous, green, dripping, hocked up loogie. I have never picked up discarded reading material again.
posted by unliteral at 5:00 PM on April 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

This is the main reason I stopped borrowing books from the library. I have an extreme aversion to that sort of thing--I'd stop reading immediately, and I just now got a gag reflex just thinking about it--plus I don't know how to make it clear that it wasn't me. If I'm just dropping something off in the book drop, should I leave a note or something? Do I have to wait around until I can go in and drop it off during regular hours so I can tell them, driving around for a day or so with the offending booger in my home and my car?

Even when it didn't happen, I'd always be on edge, knowing it could.

There was also a thing with anything that had been an Oprah book at any point, where someone would sometimes go in and mark it up really heavily, like all the names underlined in one color, major events in another, margin notes, word definitions, stuff like that. Not as viscerally disgusting, but almost as unreadable anyway.
posted by ernielundquist at 5:12 PM on April 13, 2016 [3 favorites]

how would you eat a book is my question

Well, it depends on the book:

“Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.”
- Francis Bacon
posted by ogooglebar at 5:40 PM on April 13, 2016

unliteral: I once picked up and started reading a discarded newspaper on the train. A couple of pages in I was confronted with an enormous, green, dripping, hocked up loogie.

I'll thank you not to talk about Garfield that way.
posted by dr_dank at 5:43 PM on April 13, 2016

Putting boogers in a book? Dude, everyone knows you're supposed to eat them. Right? Right? Everyone?

Yes.
posted by telstar at 6:14 PM on April 13, 2016

Switching to getting ebooks from the library has made doing this less fun for me.
posted by Drinky Die at 7:00 PM on April 13, 2016

People are so gross. I once opened a book I rented only to find that the previous reader had left large flakes of dandruff (the biggest was a couple of inches wide) in between the pages. Still better than boogers though!
posted by peripathetic at 7:19 PM on April 13, 2016

Well let me be the first to speak for the mucusniverous. How dare you judge these poor booger-starved souls?

Nah, just kidding. This is gross, and I'm fairly gross tolerant.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 7:29 PM on April 13, 2016

People damaging library books drives me up the wall. I work for a university library and it's ridiculous how many thing are returned with writing, highlighting, tears, you name it. Mysterious stains aren't uncommon. I don't understand how people can justify it to themselves.

Well, the good news is that we do check books before sending them out, and if they return damaged we charge the patron.
posted by teponaztli at 7:29 PM on April 13, 2016

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE ISTG
posted by Space Kitty at 8:03 PM on April 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

one time I found a bloody paper towel deep in the art history library

one time someone abandoned toenails they no longer needed in the study room

one time, I heard a tale about a forgotten bookmark: bacon
posted by jetlagaddict at 8:21 PM on April 13, 2016 [3 favorites]

I checked Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon out from the public library last year on a MeFi recommendation. As I began thumbing through it was painfully obvious that someone had kept it as their toilet time book for the better part of a year. The shitcan fragrances were infused in the paper and wafted up from every page.

I took it back after chapter 1. It's like a 4000 page book and I don't need to spend 100+ hours immersed in some stranger's rancid book farts. Boogers would have been way better; obviously not a deal breaker in the main link. Smells are an invisible foe. It's like facing an angry dog vs small pox or a couger vs nanobots. You can at least fight the tangible enemy. You can't punch a fart.

The boogers will probably crust off some day, but I suspect this unreadable copy of Cryptonomicon will smell like an asshole until the day the pages turn brown and crumble apart.
posted by dgaicun at 8:27 PM on April 13, 2016 [5 favorites]

When I was about 25, (long ago) I crawled into my freshly sheeted bed, just out of a shower with new, clean pj's on. I reached over and got my new public library book to spend the evening doing my favorite activity. I opened it up and a huge green scab looking thing fell out onto my chest. I almost died!! I have never set foot in a public library again. I will not take my children to a public library. Never have. We all read tons of books, I have always just bought them and now, can thankfully download them. My daughter's homeschool co-op coordinator always thought that was so dumb and crazy, what homeschooled kid doesn't go to the library? Mine didn't.... No mam!!

I just emailed her this article..... Slight feeling of redemption bubbling over... I'm not the only victim!!
posted by pearlybob at 9:35 PM on April 13, 2016

Just wanted to say that O'Nan's A Prayer for the Dying, in the Vintage booger-free edition, is one of my all-time favourites. I hear The Names of the Dead is quite excellent as well but haven't been able to source a copy locally.
posted by turbid dahlia at 9:41 PM on April 13, 2016

My Metafilter is covered with boogers today. Which one of you is responsible? :-(
posted by clawsoon at 9:56 PM on April 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm feeling more than a little ill after reading all this. (I cannot ever work in the Children's Room at the library, because nothing makes me puke faster than being confronted with snot. Gaaaaaah, just thinking about it makes me feel pukey.)
posted by sarcasticah at 10:26 PM on April 13, 2016

lashing the wall with urine and tossing fistfuls of his pubic hair at it

MAKE IT RAIN

(wait have I been doing "make it rain" wrong this whole time)
posted by en forme de poire at 12:20 AM on April 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

I feel a lot less bad about humanity being wiped out by anthropogenic climate change now. Damn, but people are cretinous disgustafucks.
posted by five fresh fish at 1:18 AM on April 14, 2016

Reading this has brought up a memory I have suppressed for 30+ years. At primary school we all had trays to keep our books and pencil cases in. In one boys tray was an ever-growing collection of smeared bogies in one rancid corner. I wont name names but Christopher Branson you are a filthy animal.
posted by gnuhavenpier at 1:28 AM on April 14, 2016 [4 favorites]

My dad tells the story of this happening at his office. It went ignored by everyone, until finally out of desperation he installed a cluster of enormous rubber cement boogers onto the bathroom wall. Never happened again.
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 8:54 AM on April 14, 2016

Do I have to wait around until I can go in and drop it off during regular hours so I can tell them, driving around for a day or so with the offending booger in my home and my car?

The only option that preserves my sanity is destroy the book and claim you lost it. Take the fine.
posted by Monochrome at 1:51 PM on April 14, 2016 [1 favorite]