February 19, 2017

 This morning I slept in a tiny bit and then got up, watched some YouTube videos for awhile, took a shower, ate lunch, and headed to work.

The vast majority of my day was spent watching instructional videos for my class and taking notes. I took a lot of notes. I also learned some things, which is always a plus.

On my first walkthrough of the day I had to deal with two patrons in a somewhat passive way. The first was a very small child. Her mother was working at a computer and she had set her small child at the computer next to her and was completely ignoring her. And I don't know how she was doing this because the baby was banging the crap out of the computer's keyboard with the mouse. I walked over, moved the keyboard and mouse out of reach of the small child, and as I walked away she started crying because I had taken her entertainment away. It at least forced the mom to acknowledge the kid for a little bit. I'm not really passing judgment on the mother, though, because I don't know what she's going through in her life. I imagine she is also fairly desensitized to the annoyingness of her kid because she's around her all the time. I got that way with grade school kids after several years of working in a grade school. My threshold for annoying is much higher now when it comes to that age group. It's probably the same thing when you are a parent.

My second patron interaction happened when I got downstairs. While I was refilling displays a patron came up and having a conversation with one of the Circulation clerks and he was quickly becoming agitated. It started when he asked how she was doing and she said “okay”. He did not like that response. In the clerk's defense, she's not really much of a talker, especially with strangers. In the patron's defense, he definitely had some mental health issues. He went on to say he was getting frustrated that she wouldn't engage in small talk with him, even bringing up a previous instance when he tried talking to her. At this point I was behind the circulation desk getting a book and as I walked by them I told him we were just a building full of introverts. This seemed to sidetrack him enough that his agitation stopped rising and he stopped grilling her about not being social. He left shortly after but I stayed around the DVDs a short distance away until he left to make sure everything was good.

I really don't like confrontation, and I was already a little bit worked up about intervening with the kid upstairs, so I'm glad things didn't escalate with the patron downstairs.

The rest of the day was quiet until about thirty minutes before we closed. That's when the fire alarm went off. I assumed I needed to make an announcement to get all of the patrons out of the building and I looked up the procedure for a fire alarm, I was proven correct. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the number to make the call across the PA system. It wasn't on the page with the instructions and I couldn't remember where it was posted. I kept looking but there weren't many patrons in the building and when I looked up they had all been told to exit already so my announcement would have been pointless. Tomorrow I need to get the number and make a note of it on that page of the notebook.

The fire department arrived pretty quickly because they're only a few blocks away but we ended up being outside for about twenty minutes. The library is a pretty big building, so there was a lot of checking to do, but they also couldn't figure out why the alarm went off. It was some sort of malfunction so the alarm company needed to be called. They aren't locally based so it was going to be at least forty-five minutes for them to show up. Thankfully I did not have to wait for that to happen. The head of the maintenance department and the assistant director had that pleasure.

While we were outside the director had called because she had received a call from the alarm company saying the alarm had gone off. When she couldn't get through to us she called the assistant director because he lives nearby and he came over. After we were let back inside I called the director back to let her know what was going on. So technically I did not call the director on her day off, I called her back. I think that is an important distinction.

The closing announcements weren't working but it wasn't a big issue because pretty much everyone left after the fire alarm. I ended up having to stay a bit later because I walked in on some issue with a patron and printing downstairs. I guess she had printed something but didn't get it because of the fire alarm so someone in Circulation credited her account for the prints. But then she talked to the guy in the tech center and he unlocked the door and let her in to get her prints. I had already sent everyone else home, and didn't really know the full situation, so I took her money and gave her change out of the register, which had already been locked up in the back. That can all be sorted out later.

When I left the alarms and lights were off inside the building but there was still an alarm going off outside. My first thought when we first went outside was how annoying it would be to live in the neighborhood. My Dad saw on Facebook later that someone in the neighborhood had posted that the alarm had been going off for an hour. Yeah, glad I don't live near the library.

On my way home I stopped by my Mom's house to pick up my mixer, which had arrived this morning. Then I came home and made dinner. I made the avocado sauce pasta. I was impressed with the creaminess of it but underwhelmed by the taste. It was incredibly bland. I think I'm a little spoiled after the avocado pistachio dip because that was packed with flavor, but even without that comparison, the avocado sauce tonight was just flavorless. That is disappointing because I've got a whole lot of pasta left.

After dinner I set up my mixer. At first I thought my microphone wasn't working with it because the light on the microphone to indicate that it is on, was not coming on when I plugged it into the mixer. I did a bunch of searching online to find a solution but that ended up being a waste of time. I eventually had the genius idea to turn up the gain knob and a couple of the level knobs on the mixer and voila, I got sound. To be fair, they're not labeled “volume” and I have no experience with mixers. But it works now. I guess the power light on the microphone just doesn't work when it is plugged in using the XLR cable instead of the USB cable. I played with the EQ knobs a little bit but was mainly focused on getting the gain and levels knobs in the right spot. I'll have to make tweaks later. Hopefully when I can monitor the sound in real time, rather than having to record something, listen to it, make a change, and then start the cycle over again.

While recording my audio journal tonight I used Firewatch as my video backdrop. My last save is at the end of the game when the fire is close and the world is just orange and smokey. I thought it was appropriate with the fire alarm today.

Now I'm going to go to bed because it is 11:45PM and I have to be up at six o'clock. I can't wait for an exciting day filled with staff training.