For many of us reference librarians, one of the greatest rewards we get from what we do is the immediate and direct feedback that we receive from our users. we help people, we are on the receiving end of their gratitude when we are able to give them what they want. We get a strong feeling of achievement and pride in being able to meet user needs and we get satisfaction from the feel nature of reference service. As reference librarians, we may have to put up with inadequate staffing, insufficient resources, mechanical failures, and evening and weekend shifts, but the feedback that we get from our users often makes up for those annoyances. No other branch of librarianship enjoys this same reward. Circulation staff also interact daily with the public, but too often that interaction is adversarial in nature, centering on overdue fines and lost books. Technical services and systems staff build the tools that we use when helping patrons, but they do not receive much feedback about that work. Rarely does the public--or even other library staff acknowledge the hard work that is done in those areas. Wow--you really nailed that subject heading! or What a great author entry! are not phrases often heard in the halls of the library. Similarly, praise for Web design, authority control, open URL linking, metasearch configuration, and OPAC maintenance is rare. Although users are grateful for all of these features, they do not have the same real-time interaction with their creators that they have with reference librarians. We reference librarians are seen as the good guys of the library, riding in on a white horse, providing the book or the Web site that will save the day for our users. The positive reinforcement that we get from that image is why many of us became reference librarians in the first place. Having been a reference librarian for three decades (as of summer 2008), I realize that I have helped thousands of patrons over the past thirty years. By my rather crude and conservative estimate (five reference transactions per hour, ten hours per week, forty weeks of the year [not counting time for vacation, conferences, etc.], for thirty years), I have participated in somewhere between sixty and seventy thousand reference transactions. That's a lot of people. In those thousands and thousands of transactions, some stand out in my mind. Doubtless you have had a similar experience. Whether you have been a reference librarian for five months or fifty years, you will have experienced some transactions that are simply more memorable than others. I would like to share four real reference transactions that I experienced as a reference librarian. Your mileage may vary, but each of you has probably had experiences similar to those that I am about to mention. The key to this group of stories is not the subject being searched, the methodology used to find the answer, or even the technology involved (which was pretty much nonexistent in these examples), but in how the patrons reacted to what I did. As you read each of these scenarios, think about similar experiences from your own reference work. 1. Why is Germany in Europe? Yes, someone really asked me this question. One reason that I remember it is because it was one of the very first questions that I was ever asked, way back before I even became an official, degree-carrying reference librarian. It was 1977 or 1978, and I was working as a graduate reference assistant at the University of Illinois. An undergraduate student came to the reference desk and asked this question. I immediately thought of a cute, clever, and accurate response, which I proceeded to tell her: Because our side won World War II, which means that Europe is not in Germany. Fortunately, she did not dismiss me for what I was: a smartass, overconfident graduate student. When I asked her for more information, I found out what she really wanted. It turns out that she misspoke when she said Germany (she was studying German history) and wanted to know why Russia (then the Soviet Union) was considered to be a European country. …