Last week was one doozy of a week, so it was perfect timing that it happened to also be time for the second annual day in the life of a librarian. I worked on this last week, but forgot to post it, so before it's completely irrelevant ...
Monday:
Monday:
- started off the week by opening our technology center by myself
- part of that job is reconciling the register from the previous night - for the first time ever (I don't do this terribly often) the register did not balance & without someone else to watch the desk, I had to hang tight until someone could come help me out
- while working in the technology center by myself I had the inevitable rush of people who needed library cards/forgot their pin #/had never been on the internet before all at the same time
- after taking my break, I was shocked to discover that I was scheduled at our circulation desk on the opposite side of the mall that's currently housing our long-term temporary quarters, so I had to hustle over there
- as usual on a summer day, the circ desk was busy, I didn't even have time to sort carts for our shelvers
- After lunch, I headed upstairs to finally catalog for an hour before I was scheduled at the phone room (where we answer patron questions over the phone and the closest thing we have to a reference desk now) where things were unusually busy.
- In Summary: 6 hours at a service desk of some sort, and I actually got a hat trick by working at all three of our public service desks in one day
- Normally this is my night to work, but this week is my turn to work late on Friday, so I felt a little weird coming in in the morning.
- I spent most of the day freaking out about who was going to trade their next downtown day with me. I had been inadvertently scheduled to work at our downtown branch on the same day as my last YA summer reading program, and due to several other weird quirks in my schedule, was having a really hard time finding someone that I would actually be able to trade with.
- I spent 9-11 in the phone room, which is generally a pretty calm way to start the day.
- From 11-1 I tried to get a little cataloging done, while also taking a lunch break.
- 1-3 saw me back in the technology center, by myself again, but this time that was much less stressful.
- From 3-5 was more to cataloging.
- I almost forgot we had a staff meeting and instead of coming in 30 min. early like I should have, I was 10 minutes late for the meeting, where we mostly talked about the week in August where our ILS will be offline while we move the server offsite.
- From 9-11 I was off desk, so I got a little cataloging in before heading to the circ desk at 11.
- As usual, the circ desk was crazy busy.
- From 1-3 I took lunch and prepared for a meeting with the Parks & Rec department and Police to talk with a group of teens and parents about free things for teens to do around town.
- At 3 was the meeting, which ended up having less relevance to the library than I'd expected. Since I haven't been doing YA programming long, it was still good to talk with a group of teenagers for an hour and get a feel for what their big issues are, even if they think our current location is too far away for them to visit us.
- After returning from the meeting, I still had enough time to catalog a few more books before the end of the day.
- I arrived in time to set up for my Wii program at 1. For my final program of summer reading season, I let the kids pick what game we were playing. We had a group of boys eager to play Mario Party and Wii Sports, and it was probably the best Wii program so far.
- I spent 3-5 getting what felt like nothing done. With how up in the air things have been since the Flood, a newer person like me still has no idea who to talk to about a lot of things. Now that it's time to start offering pre-flood services again, I realize I'm going to need to play a role in that, but I haven't the slightest clue a lot of the time who I should be working with, so networking with my coworkers is something I need to spend more time doing, even if my action-oriented brain feels like it's a waste of time.
- I spent the rest of my evening in the tech center, which was a little more eventful than I like. Two times I had to reset the network connection to our public computers because the Internet started to slow and then altogether disappear.
- When I wasn't fixing broken computers, I was catching up on ordering books (fiction and bios are my selection areas).
- Thanks to schedule trading, I got to work two nights in a row last week, starting off in the phone room for two hours. Thankfully, it was quiet and I got to finish catching up on my ordering.
- On my afternoon break I had a totally mundane fashion emergency (it's way too ridiculous to explain) and rush over to the mall's JC Penney's to find the cheapest work-appropriate shirt that fit. Not really library related, but definitely a big part of my day.
- Once my fashion crisis was solved I snuck in a little time to catalog, before it was time for my supper break.
- That evening finds me in the phone room which was ridiculously quiet, except for "How late are you open?" (9 PM) and "Is this the last day to turn in summer reading slips?" (Technically yes, but we aren't doing the drawings until Monday at the earliest)
- With all my "free" time I started going through a backlog of donations, to see what we could actually add to our collection, and what would be sent on to our Friends group to sell.
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