Sources close to the situation — meaning every guy at Dave’s Sports Bar on Thursday night — confirm that the new fine system involves Ms. Cross personally reviewing your checkout history, leaning across the returns desk to inspect your library card, and making extended eye contact while she types your information with what one witness called ‘suspiciously slow keystrokes.’ Several men have admitted to deliberately keeping books past their due date just to experience the process firsthand.

One anonymous patron, a 34-year-old accountant who has checked out seventeen books in the past month despite reportedly ‘not being much of a reader,’ described the experience: ‘She leans over the counter, looks you dead in the eyes, and says she’ll need to discuss your account in detail. I genuinely forgot my own name for about four seconds.’ The library’s romance novel section has, inexplicably, never been more popular with male readers.