January 23, 2018

 Today was fairly uneventful, which is good because it is late and hopefully it won't take me forever to write this.

My day started off less than great. I got up when my alarm went off, which is technically before six o'clock in the morning, and I should have plenty of time to run on the elliptical. But then I couldn't get my Bluetooth speaker to connect to my old desktop or my laptop. I tried both of them multiple times and by the time I finally said screw it, I was running behind. I ended up only being able to run for ten minutes and I had to do it in silence. It was frustrating.

When I got to work I did the usual opening stuff and then I was on desk for two hours. When I wasn't helping patrons I spent that time working on a handout for the tech class this afternoon. I didn't really get anywhere with that. I had a few links to put on the handout but other than that I was hitting a wall. I looked at a bunch of handouts from other libraries but they were more involved than what I was looking to make. Fortunately, I wasn't teaching the class, so in theory the person who was already had a handout. But I feel like I should have had something ready because I'm in charge of training. I can do better.

I had an hour off desk before lunch and I was going to continue working on the handout but ended up spending about forty-five minutes helping one of our regular patrons get back into his email. This was at least the third time I have helped him do this, and I know other staff members have helped him do this before, so who knows how many times this has happened to him. My go-to is creating a Gmail account that he can use that to reset his password. He writes down the Gmail information each time but then loses that information. It took awhile this time to create the Gmail account because I inadvertently tried using address names I have used in the past (but none of his password ideas would work on those old names). And then it took awhile to create a new password for his old account because the first few ideas he had couldn't be used because he had used them previously.

He has a flip phone, with no way to take notes, so I ended up creating a contact in his phone called “Hotmail” and in one of the fields put the new password. I also wrote down the information for the dummy Gmail account and kept that for myself so the next time he needs help resetting his password we can at least skip the step of creating another Gmail account.

After lunch, my afternoon was spent at a mental health training thing with five of my coworkers (and several other people). It lasted four hours and we talked about some interesting things but had too many activities for my liking. Part two is on Thursday and I think it will be better because we will have gotten past all the introductory stuff and will hopefully get into some actionable steps for assisting people.

On my way home I stopped at the nursing home (across the street from my house) so I could pick up the found book from one of my homebound patrons. And then when I got home I ate dinner, watched YouTube videos, and clicked around the internet.

After dinner I played CoD: WW2. Eventually. First I had to figure out how to actually launch the game because there was an update today related to the latest event, and it sounds like it broke the game for almost everyone on the PC. Thankfully someone figured out that if you had the Task Manager open when you tried launching the game, the game would actually work. And thankfully, that solution worked for me, minus a random crash later on, but I think that may have been due to another small update.

One of the new things added for the new event is the Prop Hunt game mode. One team hides around a map as random props and the other team tries to find them. It is based on PropHunt which is a game created using Garry's Mod, I'm assuming. It's pretty fun but can be a little boring if you're a prop and are found early. Then you just sit there waiting for the round to end. There also aren't any consequences for the team hunting. In the original PropHunt, the hunters take damage when they shoot things that aren't props, and can eventually die. In the CoD: WW2 game mode, there is no penalty, so you just walk around and shoot everything. I don't know if adding damage would speed up the rounds or slow them down if people ended up playing more cautiously. Anyway, it was fun, and I'm looking forward to the Demolition game mode coming out soon as part of the event.

And now I'm going to record my audio journal and go to bed because it's late, and I am tired.