One day Hannah faced an almost $12K fine for 119 unreturned books as the library reported them ‘lost’
The contents of the email struck Hannah in much the same way that Galileo Galilei was struck when he first looked at Jupiter through a telescope. Or maybe when he received a letter from the Inquisition – after all, this email from the library has a lot in common with it. The fact is that after thirty days, library rules considered an unreturned book lost, and for this the user was served a fine of a hundred dollars.
What’s more, in Hannah’s own words, she regularly put a reminder on her to-do list to return the books, but since this task had a low priority, it found itself buried under more important things almost every day. However, the end of the story turned out to be happy enough – like Galileo, Hannah managed to avoid serious punishment, and the library let her renew all of the 119 books for a ‘reasonable’ fee of $20.