Car Stealing @ MindSay 
I get asked all the time about interesting and humorous questions at the library. I do my best to remember them, but this one I feel compelled to report.
It was around lunchtime today and I was alone at the desk. There were two customers waiting to be helped and then the phone rang. I picked it up and said, "Information Desk, can you hold please?" A guy replied, "NO! This is urgent." I said, "okay, how may I help you?" He said, "there is someone breaking into a car in your parking lot, call the police." And then he hung up.
The guy was very abrupt with me and I was immediately suspicious. He gave me no chance to ask questions or anything, I couldn't get his name, the whole thing was odd. So, I told the waiting customers that they would have to wait just a couple more minutes.
Following procedure, I called the security office and reported the incident, as our in-house officer wasn't yet in for the day. They put out a call to the roving patrol, who called me back in a minute. Jeremy, the officer on-call, asked me for details, which I couldn't give because I didn't have any. Jeremy said he was nearby and would be there in five minutes. In the meantime he said he would send Richfield PD to cruise our lot.
The PD did swing through the lot and saw nothing suspicious, so they left, leaving the incident in the hands of security. Jeremy arrived moments later, he also checked the lot and found nothing. Then he came inside to talk with me, and I gave him the phone number of the person who called, off of caller-ID. He called the guy back and asked him for more information. The man reported seeing "a middle-aged" woman breaking into an "older model gray minivan" with a wire coathanger.
Well, gee whiz, clearly we've got a major crime on our hands. I've heard that Richfield has been besieged by middle aged women creeping about town, stealing old minivans.
I did ask Jeremy "where would they get a coat hanger from?" That isn't something that people just carry around with them, is it? He, being a slightly more serious employee than me, said he would follow through with the investigation, while I had already chalked this one up to a practical joke or something.
Jeremy went back into the parking lot and came back a few minutes later with this information. There is, in fact, an older, gray, minivan in our lot, and it has its keys in the ignition. Aha! So whoever it was probably locked their keys in the car and was trying to get in. But, like any good sidekick, (Batgirl is a librarian by day...did you know that?) I couldn't help but wonder...where did this mystery woman get a hanger from?
Okay, so you'd think that'd be the end of it, right....wrong. Jeremy ran the plates on the van and it was registered to a man. Hmm. The witness definitely said it was a female breaking in.
Well, there was nothing more we could do. The van was not stolen, there were no suspects lurking about, it was seemingly finished. I asked Jeremy for all the information he had gathered, as I had to file an incident report. He gave me the name of the man who called and the name of the man who owned the van. That's when we got our big break.
The last name of the man who owned the van struck me as familiar. We have a staff member here with the same last name. I went in back and asked her, Vicki, if she could shed any light on our case. Turns out that the van belongs to her, registered to her husband. She left the library to head out for lunch when she realized she locked her keys in the van. She tried all the doors and windows and couldn't get in, so she came back into the library, raided the staff closet and found a wire coat hanger. She went back out and tried to break in that way, to no avail. That was when our witness was passing by and noticed her suspicous activity.
Ta-da! Officer Jeremy and his faithful sidekick have solved the case. Who-hoo! I feel like we should both be given a commendation from the police force or keys to the city or something. All in all, it was a good kind of incident, one that ends well and doesn't stress us all out. Plus, it makes for an amusing anecdote, no?
