December 26, 2016

 Today everyone who was on the desk had to answer phone calls asking whether or not we were open. I guess it was a federal holiday and a lot of places were closed so it came as a shock to at least a small portion of our population that we were open. I decided that we should have picked a number and after we had answered the question that many times, then we would get to close in order to live up to the assumption of our patrons.

I spent the first part of my day updating my homebound spreadsheets. The rest of my day, when not helping patrons, was spent playing with my new weeding list. I'm weeding part of the art section and based on my initial numbers, I'm apparently going to be weeding it pretty hard. Based purely on the original standards, out of just over 1100 books, I was going to weed over 550. After talking with my boss about it I went back through and for the books that had checked out in the last two years, I lowered the checkout standard from twice a year to once a year. That saved around 70 books and got me down to 497 books scheduled to be weeded. I'm going to have to make some judgment calls when I actually get out in the stacks and see the books, but that's still a lot of books. I'm not in a very popular section.

The most notable patron today was one trying to print stuff. He told me that he debated on what would be easier, buying a printer or coming to the library. By the end I think he wished he would have bought a printer. He started by trying to put twenty dollars in the change machine because he had just over $20 in prints. Our change machine for the printers only accepts $10, so he had to go down and get smaller bills at circulation. There is apparently a timeout after putting money into the machine and if you don't print soon enough after putting your bill in, instead of spitting the bill back out, it spits out change. This happened to the guy twice upstairs (after he had been sent up from the computer lab because their printer had run out of ink and the kid working didn't know how to change it). The first time he got back ten dollars in quarters, which he then had to feed back into the machine to get his prints. The second time the machine had run out of quarters and he ended up with a whole bunch of dimes. After that he ended up downstairs and I could tell the same thing happened again, possibly twice, because I heard the change machine going nuts. I told him he was probably going to have traumatic memories if he ever went to Vegas. I'm not sure that he ever got all of the prints.

I briefly spoke with a girl I graduated with today. We never really talked in school but were both aware of each other. She knew I was working at the library because she is friends with another girl we graduated with, who I was friends with and whose mother is the head of the circulation department. It is always interesting to find out that people talk about you when you're not around. And I don't mean in a derogatory way. I always kind of assume that I do not have object permanence for other people, so that when I am not around, then I don't exist. I know that is strange because I often participate in conversations where people who are not around come up. So it only makes sense that I would occasionally come up in the conversations that other people have when I am not around. But I still have a hard time believing that. Maybe part of me believe that the world and everything in it only exists in my mind, so that when I am not there to perceive it, it doesn't exist. Like a tree falling in a forest.

When I got home from work I had leftover homemade pizza and a piece of cherry pie surrounded by cake. Both were even better on day two. I am looking forward to day three.

After dinner I organized driving around town to look at Christmas lights. My mom mentioned it happening tonight after our first two nights didn't work out, but then I never heard anything about it. So after multiple texts between her and my sister we decided on the plan. My mom drove and she came and picked up me and my sister. We drove all over for about an hour and a half and talked about a whole bunch of random stuff. It was good times.

Some time in the very near future I will be going to bed because even though I don't work until noon, I am waking up early to pick my mom up from the mechanic after she drops her car off. My work schedule is weird this week. I close tomorrow, open Wednesday, close Thursday, and open Friday. Waking up after closing is kind of annoying, and this week I get to do it twice. Yay.