Thursday, February 23, 2017

February 23, 2017

 Today was kind of an odd day at work, but it has been an odd week of work so it's to be expected.

Throughout the day I tried to work on class things. It was real hard. There were a lot of distractions and a lot of avoidance. Despite that, I managed to finish watching the videos for this week and taking notes. Now I just need to finish all of the assignments for the week. I seriously doubt I get everything done tomorrow but we'll see.

I may not have made much progress on my class stuff but I did accomplish some work things. I helped a bunch of patrons throughout the day, ones in the library, on the phone, through email, and in chat. Occasionally I was even juggling things and helping multiple people in various formats. I helped most of the people during my two and a half hours on the desk. I was only supposed to be on desk for two hours but it got extended because other people were doing things.

I also helped my coworkers with things. One of my fellow librarians is going to make a display next month that involves chili peppers of different colors but she was having trouble finding good enough pictures. She found one that she liked and tried changing the color in Word but it looked like crap. I ended up finding a big one and used a web-based editor to change the color and saturation to get the three different colors she wanted. The only tricky part was keeping the stem green. I ended up achieving this by duplicating the layers and then erasing the stem on the top layer so that I could change the color on that layer and the bottom layer stayed green. I originally planned on doing something way more complicated so I'm glad I thought of the layer thing.

I also set up a spreadsheet for the lady who does one-on-one tech training. She needs to keep track several different things for her reviews, like the number of appointments she has each month and the number of new patrons she gets, among other things. She has been keeping track of this on paper and asked me about using a spreadsheet. While avoiding class work I threw together an example with several different charts so when we meet tomorrow morning we can hit the ground running.

There was a little drama today with the IT department and my boss. An author was going to call the library tonight from Mexico to talk about the book we were having a book discussion about. It has been a possibility for a little while now because the author's agent actually contacted us when she learned that the book discussion was happening. It was only recently confirmed and this morning my boss was trying to figure out the logistics of making the call and getting it set up so people could hear the author and the author could hear the people. The second she brought it up with two of the IT people they immediately said it couldn't be done. It was impossible.

I was told about this later from another librarian and I immediately had several ideas of how it could be done. And the librarian telling the story said everyone else who our boss talked to immediately had ideas, instead of just saying it couldn't be done. Our IT people, who are supposed to be forward-thinking problem-solvers are a bunch of negative nancies who naysay every idea that isn't theirs. Or rather, two of them do, the head IT guy is really good at his job an open to new ideas. The problem is he can only do so much, and he is probably overworked because he's having to pick up the slack from the other two.

Anyway, my boss ended up talking to the library system people in the basement and they said they would be more than willing to help set everything up. At some point along the way the director of the library got involved and kind of kicked the IT people gear. It seems like admin are frequently having to get involved when various departments try to interact with the IT department. I can't imagine this lasts too much longer before something changes. At least I hope so. It's getting a little ridiculous.

In the end, everything worked out, despite the arguments form the IT people. The IT guy actually stayed late to set everything up and run it. It would be nice if the people under him could learn from his example. The discussion was posted online and I watch half of it, and it's pretty cool. It might be because I'm a librarian but I'm a pretty big fan of authors.

Tonight I just watched YouTube videos and played GTA5. I've been going with the 'V' recently but I need to go back to the '5' because the 'V' just looks like a letter, not a Roman Numeral. Anyway, it took me awhile but I found a new minivan. I accidentally got rid of mine when I ran out of room in one of my garages and then I was afraid they had taken it out of the game because all I was seeing were these minivan-SUV crossover things. The spawning is weird in the game. Once I saw one they were all over the place. And now I've got one again and it's great. I think they may have tweaked them since my original one because I remember it being incredibly so. The new one isn't a speed demon by any means but it can actually hold its own on the road a little better. I like it. I also found a four-wheeler, which I didn't realize was a vehicle I could steal. I'm still always on the lookout for a hearse. It seems the only way to get one is for someone else with a hearse to drive by the church to trigger them to spawn. A natural spawn is apparently exceedingly rare. On the plus side, I have one in singleplayer, and it's incredibly slow and not very fun to drive, so I'm not really missing anything.


And now that it is midnight I am going to stop writing and record my audio journal so I can go to bed. Tomorrow I hope to get some class stuff done. And then after work I get to go to the book sale. Can't wait.

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