Janie Boschma

Dear Ask Anything,

Library lover

Dear Lover,

Let me begin by saying thanks for having the word “lover” be the second portion of your name so I can now say, after writing this response to your question, that I have written “Dear Lover” to someone. But I’m sure that you’re not single, judging by the curious nature you have, so I won’t bore you with failed attempts at wooing said strumpet.

I started the search for an answer on Sunday promptly at noon. I figured that asking anyone the question would annoy them, as it did me, so why not go the distance and ask them during the Packer vs. Viking game, seeing as though I didn’t care about that game and my beloved 49ers were playing on Monday night.

First, I called the McIntyre Library circulation desk and asked the question without introducing that I was doing an investigative piece for the most herald newspaper this side of the Chippewa River in order to not fluster the person who answered the phone.

The opposite occurred. As the lady who did answer seemed confused, flustered and put me on hold as I heard her go ask someone else in the background who was as oblivious as anyone. I was told that they were aware of the problem, but had no idea what was making the noise.

Now scared that my friendly neighborhood library was doing nothing to keep me safe, I urgently searched further and took the woman’s advice and e-mailed Chris Buckley, the Buildings and Grounds Supervisor for the University Centers. He, like the people at the library, was aware of the problem but had no idea as to why it was occuring. He instructed me to e-mail Mike Traynor, associate director for facilities of the Facilities Planning and Management.

Fearing that I would end up getting the same answer from him and become UW-Eau Claire’s conspiracy version of Lee Harvey Oswald, Area 51, or Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts, I reluctantly took Buckley’s advice.

Because I am responding to your question, you know that I got a different answer from my third and final source. Traynor wrote in an e-mail sent directly to my dorm room that “the beeping that you hear is caused by the fire alarm panel. Any time that a detector is disabled for service or any other part of the system is not normal, the system alarms to notify anyone in the area that something is wrong. We also get a report sent to our central reporting system that something is out of the ordinary.”

So, to sum up your answer in short, Lover, it is basically the McIntyre Library’s fire alarm attempting to be as cool as Stephen Colbert by “putting you on notice!” that the fire detector is disabled, something is happening out of the ordinary and that the system is not normal.

Dear Ask Anything,

Puppy in the window

Dear Puppy,

There is not a person who is specifically given the distinction of inventing the dog years, although it is believed that whoever it was, was friends of the inventor of the Toaster Strudel. However, there are very similar stories from a wide variety of sources that basically say the same thing.

Back in the land before time, when calculators were not invented yet and dog breeders were just getting their big business break, the consumers were sad their purchases were dying off in shorter amounts of time.

In order to put their minds and wallets at ease, the breeders would tell the consumers that the dog was dying because the life of their purchase was much rougher than that of a human’s, meaning the aging process is thus sped up.

When the consumers further inquired into how many years of a dog’s life equal one year of a human’s life, the first person to answer the question chose the number seven because they had just watched the 1995 classic thriller “Seven” and thought it was a cinematic revelation.

Ironically, the “off-the-top-of-my-head” guess didn’t turn out to be that far off. For the middle years of a dog’s life, one dog year does in fact equal one human year. However, in the early years of a dog’s life, from birth until age two, and later their life, age eight to 15, depending on the breed of dog, the equation isn’t as simple as years multiplied by seven.

An equation has been created to determine the exact age of any dog, and I would love to share it with you but it included characters that my laptop computer does not have. I suppose I could have asked someone from the math department to type it up for me, but let’s just say that we haven’t gotten along since that whole “pi is not pie” debacle I suffered about 10 years and 100 pounds ago.

So, unfortunately, you are going to have to search Al Gore’s World Wide Web for that answer if you want to know your dog’s exact age, or do what I do whenever I have a dog issue – don’t write Ask Anything about it and instead call Cesar Millan.