June 16, 2016

 This summer is exhausting.

This morning I got up early and went to campus so I could shadow my supervisor on the reference desk. No one came to the reference desk and no one asked a question in chat, so there wasn't much to shadow. We did get a chance to talk about future activities, however, which was one of the goals today, so that was a success. My next task is coming up with questions for the scavenger hunt. At some point it will probably be helpful to walk around the library more, with the idea of creating questions in mind, but for now I'm just going to go from memory. I've got a meeting there next Tuesday morning so I might walk around for awhile after that. Then go home and eat lunch before going back to help with orientation. At some point I also need to pack for my trip. Things will definitely be forgotten.

At noon I went to work and it was like a mini-reunion. In the first part of my shift I spoke with one of the kindergarten teachers and two paras who were their with the teacher's daycare, my favorite substitute teacher, and the new sixth grade teacher. It was cool getting to see everyone. It still feels like summer though, so it won't be weird until August roles around and I don't get to go back and work with all of them.

A lot of my shift was spent working on various spreadsheets. I liked it. I started doing some formatting things to my homebound patrons because each one was slightly different and it was annoying. I also updated the chat log and the chat statistic spreadsheet. I did a little formatting on the statistics file and created a graph based on last year's statistics, just because.

I took a couple breaks from the spreadsheets. The first was to complete a scavenger hunt of sorts for our website and resources. I will admit that it was fun and I actually learned a lot. My next break was to write a letter to one of my homebound patrons. Yesterday he told me to email him so that he would have my email address and could send me his book requests. When we got back to the library I discovered he didn't have an email address on file. Rather than trying to tell him my email address over the phone, which probably would have been rough for both of us, I decided to send him a letter so that he would have it in writing. It took me a couple tries to print the letter, and a couple to print the address on the envelope, but I got there in the end. The letter was actually good the first time but I had the wrong ending for my email address, which I got from the reference email address, so we learned that the signature in the emails we send out has been wrong for at least a couple months. Good to know.

Throughout the day I also helped patrons and I helped the maintenance guy move a filing cabinet. I helped patrons figure out the printer, I submitted an ILL request, I looked up fines, I found books on solar cells and programming in R, and there was probably some other stuff.

Now I'm going to bed because it is eleven o'clock and I have to wake up for work in the morning. On the plus side, I get off a half an hour early tomorrow. On the downside, I get off a half an hour early because I have to work eight and a half hours on Saturday. Hooray.