February 7, 2017

 I got a bit of a late start this morning. I need to get better at respecting my alarm clock.

On my way to work I nearly got in an accident. The person in front of me came to a sudden stop so I had to come to a sudden stop. I'm just glad the person behind me did the same.

We're falling behind on sharpening pencils in our department. I ran out of sharpened ones this morning before I could fill up all the missing ones and was then only able to sharpen maybe ten more before the sharpener overheated and died. We need a new/better pencil sharpener.

I helped an old man on the phone this morning with his ebook app and it was an interesting experience. The phone was initially answered by another librarian but she wasn't sure what to do so she said she was going to hand the phone off to me. The man didn't even stop for a breath and was speaking for several seconds in the span of time it took me to walk over to the phone. And then he kept talking. And talking. I kept trying to interject to find out more information, or even what the problem was because he didn't get the memo that he was being handed off. When I was able to ask a question he kind of acknowledged it but then kept talking about whatever he was talking about. At one point I held the phone away from my ear for about ten seconds just to let him talk before I tried again. I eventually got him to give me his name and number so I could look into the problem and call him back.

I found some information on what I thought the problem was and gave him a call back maybe five or ten minutes later. I caught him off guard because he wasn't expecting me to call back so soon. At first he couldn't hear me because his TV was on. On the way to the TV I heard a bit of a commotion and he informed me he was in a wheelchair and had run over some stuff. And by the end of it I was still having to practically shout into the phone, repeating myself multiple times, because the battery in his hearing aid died in the middle of the phone call. We never heard back from him so hopefully my solution solved his problem.

I discovered the link to my Minecraft class page was broken today. The permalink for the page was missing a slash and I tried two different ways to correct it but it wouldn't save my changes. I'm assuming I don't have the privileges to make those kind of changes. The PR lady couldn't figure it out either but she had a lot of other stuff going on. My solution ended up being to change the link on the image the patrons click to get to the Minecraft page. The syntax of the address is not technically correct but matching the link to the page address ended up working out so I'm happy.

And speaking of the Minecraft page, I updated it with a list of library books and other links that I thought might be useful. It's nothing special but hopefully it will be informative. I'm up to one person signed up who I have actually seen in person so I know they exist, and one person who probably lives in New York, so I'm not holding my breath. I've got until Thursday for more people to sign up. Plenty of time.

Our dawdling patron was there today and the library who introduced her to Google Drive wasn't there yet so she pulled me over to ask questions. It basically consisted of me trying to describe “the cloud” and the pros and cons of saving things in multiple places and in multiple formats.

I spent way too much time working on an updated label thing for our phones. Three names have changed since it was last printed and it has annoyed me since I started working at the library. So I avoided other things by working on that. The most frustrating thing was that I downloaded a PDF template from the phone manufacturer and it was too small. I will blame our printer though because even when I measured the space with a ruler and created my own template in Excel to that exact size, it still came out small, even though I told it to print the actual size. It took several little tweaks but I ended up getting it close enough and called it good. And now our phone labels finally have the correct names. I also saved the template so that if anyone else decides to quit or change there name, we'll be good to go.

I ended my day with two hours on the desk and in the middle of it things got a little crazy. In a very short span of time All of the following things happened.

• I helped a couple figure out saving pictures on the microfilm machine.
• I got a chess board for two teens.
• I got tape for another patron who had already helped herself to our scissors.
• Our frequent caller called four times to get address and phone numbers for church-related things all over the county. She had already called three times earlier in the day.
• I responded to a chat but only once because I was juggling so many other things that they left before I could respond again.
• I showed a patron how to use our printer.
• I signed out our three book talk books to a patron.
• And, I helped an older patron print out tax forms.

This last one was a bit of a redemption for me. He had called earlier when I was on the desk and asked what tax forms we had. He was hard of hearing and I couldn't speak loud enough for him. For the second time today I was basically shouting into the phone (while in a library) but it wasn't quite good enough and he sounded a little frustrated by the end of the conversation.

And then he showed up at the library. He got the form and book he needed downstairs but then came upstairs because he needed help printing out all the other forms he needed. It is surprisingly easy to find tax forms online so I was quickly able to find all of the federal and state forms he needed. I downloaded them to a flash drive and then we went over to a public computer so I could log him in and print everything off. That is the easiest way to print things for patrons and still have them pay for it.

He was incredibly grateful for my help and I think I made up for not being very helpful on the phone. He also had a pretty good sense of humor in person. The funniest thing was when he dropped a coin that rolled over to another patron. He went over and told the patron he had dropped a nickel by the guys foot as he bent down to get it. He then discovered it was a dime and said it must have multiplied on the roll over. I thought that was pretty funny.

All of this stuff probably took less than half an hour, even though it felt like it had been several hours. And I still had forty-five minutes to kill.

But I eventually made it to five o'clock and was able to leave. On my way home I stopped by my mom to pick up the pants I had ordered, because my Amazon stuff is still delivered to her house.

When I got home I ate dinner and then spent the rest of the night watching YouTube videos, paying bills, and clicking around the internet. I need to get better at doing productive things with my evenings. Or not. But probably.

I did manage to start writing this a little earlier than normal so it's only just after ten o'clock at the moment. Not bad. Now I'm going to record my audio journal. I'm not sure what game I'm going to play yet. Probably Minecraft so I can just zone out and dig tunnels while I talk about my day.