March 11, 2018

Well, this morning could have gone better. My alarm went off at ten o'clock and I decided not to run on the elliptical because my left knee was bothering me yesterday. Instead, I went to my computer and watched a little bit of a livestream. And then I looked at the clock in the corner of the screen and it said 11:03AM. It was then that I remembered that Daylight Savings had happened. The adrenaline kicked in and I quickly hopped in the shower, ironed my pants, ate lunch, and was in my car by 11:40AM. I'm glad I decided not to run on the elliptical because if I had I probably wouldn't have noticed the time until it was far too late.

I ended up getting to work five minutes before noon, so I met my goal of getting there a half hour early. I then did all of the opening stuff upstairs and downstairs, including the magazine count, which is a thing we do once a year (maybe), where we have people put the magazines they read in a basket so we can get a better idea of what people are actually reading. People do game the system, however, and this morning we were obviously being trolled. There are usually five magazines at most because we check it once an hour so there isn't time for it to get too out of hand. When I checked it this morning to see what had been left last night, the basket was completely full. There were twenty-nine magazines. I'm going to say not all of those were legit, but as my boss pointed out, if they are willing to do that, they are going to be equally willing to complain if we get rid of one of those magazines, so we might as well go along with it. I was working with my boss today so after I counted the magazines, we counted the money. It's still a bit of a hassle doing it with two people. I get why they want us to do it, but it's still annoying.

I had two walkthroughs to start the day, a half hour after we opened, and then an hour after that. When I wasn't doing that, I started working on a personalized reading list that has been waiting to be done for nearly two weeks, and the deadline for it was this coming Tuesday. I needed to feel productive, and I didn't want the librarian in charge of readers' advisory (which PRLs fall under) to have to do it because she's done the last three or four I think, so I picked it up.

And working on the PRL was pretty much my whole day, along with helping the occasional patron over the phone or at the desk. Oh, and I just remembered, I tracked down a few articles from an obscure (at least to me) Turkish news website. A patron sent us an email saying he was looking for these articles but couldn't seem to track them down. I found three out of the five, so not bad. I did a Google search and found an article that cited the three articles with URLs. The URLs were broken, however, and just lead to the news site's homepage. So, I copied the link and put it into the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. As it turned out, they had grabbed each of those pages and I was able to send those links to the patron. The other two articles had only been referenced in a single paper and the citation didn't include URLs, so I was out of luck there. I emailed the patron what I found, told him how I did it in case he wanted to try it in the future, and hopefully he will find that useful.

Right before my last walkthrough I finished the PRL, then I did the walkthrough and went up to the staff break room to clean it a little bit, because apparently one of the assistants and I were supposed to be doing that this week. Whoops. I cleaned off the counter and the table, but other than that it looked pretty good. I did learn that cleaning up spilled soap under an automatic soap dispenser is a bit tricky, but I got it figured out and now it is extra clean. And when I got done with that I sent off the PRL to the patron who requested it, and then printed out a new request that came in today.

I closed downstairs, which doesn't happen often. I like closing upstairs because I can work on things longer. When I close downstairs it's mostly just me walking around trying to kill time. Tonight I added more audiobooks to my display, so I at least accomplished something.

On my way home I stopped at Target to pick up a few things. One of those things was sandwich bread. I once again picked a horrible register line and it took forever waiting for my turn, but I've learned to just accept my poor assessment of register lines. To add to it though, when I got out to my car I checked my bags and realized I didn't have the bread. The woman at the register had made a point to not put it in one of the bags with something else because she didn't want to smoosh it. She ended up putting it in its own bag but then forgot to put that bag with the rest of my stuff. And I didn't think to look through all the bags before leaving. So I walked back in, and the lady wasn't at the register anymore, but I looked and the bag with the bread was still on the little bag station, so I pulled it off and walked out with it. I had the receipt with me to explain what was happening, but no one stopped me or even looked at me, so I just left.

When I got home I put my groceries away, made dinner, watched videos, and played CoD: WW2. A very regular evening, including the part where I got really distracted while writing this and it is now one o'clock in the morning.