Wednesday, January 11, 2017

January 11, 2017

 Waking up in the mornings this week has been exceptionally rough. I'm not a fan.

This morning at work was a little hectic. I had plans to do things, which I no longer remember because there was so much else going on. It started by opening up the department email and being greeted by a whole bunch of emails. With everything else going on it took me the entire two hours I was on desk to get through them all.

One of those emails became a day-long affair because the patron was very determined. It was a purchase request for The Young Pope which doesn't even begin to air in the US until the 15th. It apparently aired in Italy back in October, which is the main reason for all the confusion. She saw it listed on Amazon and wanted us to purchase it. I wrote her back and said we wouldn't be able to do that because it was sold by Amazon and the show hadn't aired yet so the DVD probably wouldn't be out for awhile. When one of the other librarians was on the desk the patron wrote back that she, used some big words about doing research, and said she found it on Amazon. The librarian wrote back and explained the different region codes on DVDs and that the patron would not be able to play it on her DVD player because it didn't have our region code. The patron wrote back later quoting the price of the DVD on Amazon. Good grief. I then wrote her back, trying to be as clear as possible, that we would not be able to purchase the DVD until it was released in the US. I explained our policy about only buying new DVDs directly from Amazon, not third party sellers. I mentioned again that the show had not aired over here yet and that the DVD would not be released until sometime in the future. I don't know that I could have been more clear that we would not be purchasing the DVD she found. But I also thought we had been clear in the previous emails. We'll see if she responds tomorrow.

This morning I also spent a decent amount of time looking for instructions for the 940 tax form. Or something like that. She seemed to have a good idea of what she wanted and everything I was finding wasn't it. She kept telling me her friend had something with the right information but she couldn't tell me what it was called so we weren't getting very far. I ended up printing out the instructions for her but she didn't actually need those. It was very confusing and I was at a loss. I'm now in charge of tax forms but I'm a librarian, not an accountant.

One of my former homebound patrons came into the library to use the computer and we talked for awhile. It was nice to see her out and about. I helped her get logged into the computer using a guest pass because she said her card number never worked. Later she was talking to one of the other librarians, who is now in charge of taking her homebound books, and it came out that the patron thinks she is being hacked by her former employers and that they have access to her computer and phone, which is really the reason she wanted a guest pass. Who knows.

I briefly helped another patron who had tried the wrong password too many times and gotten locked out of her laptop. She had contacted Microsoft and gotten instructions on how to get back in but couldn't understand them. She needed to create a disc to boot from but she needed administrative privileges on the computer to do that and patrons don't have that. I don't even have that on a staff computer. Because of that I wasn't really able to do anything but I did try and explain the instructions for her. It was weird because the ones they gave her were backwards, which probably didn't help. I tried to sort that out for her so hopefully that was slightly helpful.

Speaking of help, I helped a few different grade school kids find books for a school project. Kind of made me miss working with kids. They have a better excuse for not knowing exactly what they want or need. It is more annoying when adults can't ask what they actually want and I spend time finding what they ask for only to have them tell me they needed something different.

I managed to print my homebound letters and got a start on my homebound lists. It is nice that I didn't deliver the books I picked out for one of my patrons last month because I can just reuse that list. That saves me twelve books. I got a decent start but I still feel a little overwhelmed by trying to get it all done by next Wednesday.

This afternoon we had our staff meeting. It went well. I think this was the second month in a row I forgot to read the policy we were going to talk about. I have read through all the policies at least a couple times, so I wasn't completely lost, but I need to start keeping track of these things better.

I brought my laptop to work today to make sure I could get the video game working before the discussion tomorrow night. Even when I was connected to the internet I wasn't able to log into Steam but I could play the game in offline mode, so we're good.

I think that's basically everything I did at work today. Minus a few little things. It was kind of a non-stop day.

Tonight was Chipotle night so I picked that up and headed to my Mom's house. After dinner I showed videos and then we sat around and talked for awhile. Always good times.

It is now 10:30PM and I'm tired. I still need to record my audio journal, though, so it's going to still be a little bit before I can go to bed. I might sleep in a tiny bit tomorrow but I want to run to the bank before work so I can deposit a couple checks. I also want to stop by Target and pick up some things. We're supposed to get some bad weather this weekend so I thought I might get some things now so I didn't have to worry about them later. I think next week I'm going to go to the grocery store with my sister and get some real food. She was able to go tomorrow morning but I want time to go through some receipts and come up with a proper shopping list.


Now I'm going to stop typing so I can record my audio journal and go to bed.

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