Small joys of face-to-face reference

As much as I am a proponent of digital reference services, I must admit that no one in a chat session ever told me what I heard from a student at the reference desk this morning. After helping her find the call number for an item on reserve, she said "You have the cleanest fingernails I've seen all day." She followed up her odd bit of praise by saying that she'd seen the nastiest fingernails on people this morning. It was only 9:30 a.m., but since this library is in New York, the student had probably already seen about 1,000 hands that morning on the subway before she came in to the library.

You get a little banter in chat sessions, mind you, but it's not as frequent or as entertaining as what you get at the desk.