May 18, 2018

Last night I slept horribly. I think it was a mix of anxiety related to the weekend and the book situation with Alan Lightman. I also think I stood to long yesterday while covering the tech desk and my legs were feeling very restless.

And on top of that, I got up early, so I could leave early, and go to the UPS Store before work. That trip turned out to be entirely useless and pretty frustrating. I explained that an author was sending me books and I wanted to send an envelope or box with the shipping paid for to him. Or maybe contact the author's local UPS Store and set something up so the author could drop off the books and I could cover the charges. The kid behind the counter wasn't having it and wasn't interested in trying to help me figure something out. He told me they would never ship books in an envelope so that wouldn't work. I have gotten dozens of books in envelopes, so that was obviously bullshit. Then he said he needed to know the dimensions for the inside of the box and the weight. I said I could look up the size of the books and he said he didn't care about the books, he needed to know how big the box would be. I tried to tell him that if I added up the size of the books we would know how big a box I needed, but he kept saying he didn't care about the books. It was like a broken record and we just went around and around. It was probably the worst customer service interaction I've ever had. UPS is known for their precision and accuracy, and that has helped them become a dominant force around the world, but their customer service (based on this very insignificant interaction) is atrocious.

I was off desk for the first three hours when I got to work so I went upstairs to work in the meeting room. The first thing I did was send Alan Lightman an email, updating him on the shipping situation. I am still hoping we can figure something out. It would have been much easier if I had been able to directly ship him a book with a return label, but time constraints didn't allow that, and I had to ship him the books from the original sellers, so now we're here. After the email I spent the rest of the time looking up information for the tech class next week.

I had two walkthroughs during the noon hour. I used the folding machine upstairs to fold a bunch of brochures. It took me a little while to get it set up again because it seems like every time I use it, someone else has used it and moved things from where I had them previously, but I got it figured out. I also talked to the person at the children's desk for awhile after each walkthrough, and talked to my coworker at the desk to round out the hour.

After lunch I covered the tech desk and mostly just looked at articles. Then I spent the rest of the hour, about a half an hour, sitting behind the desk and talking to my coworkers.

I spent my two hours on desk mostly working on the tech class for next week. I started coming up with my idea for a slideshow that I could then use for a handout. I took a lot of screenshots and did a lot of tweaking of the slideshow to make it look how I wanted. The summer reading site also crashed multiple times today, so we dealt with that throughout the day.

I spent the last hour of the day talking to my coworker. The entire hour. And we covered all the random things. None of which were work related. It was nice.

Near the end of the day I heard back from Alan Lightman and he said he would pay for the shipping. How cool is that? That was a huge amount of stress lifted from my brain going into the weekend. I'm definitely sending him a Thank You note. And I'm going to find out how much it cost to ship (which will require going back to the awful UPS Store) so I can include a check.

When I got home I did all the things. I packed, changed clothes, washed my windshield (because it has been dirty forever and this seemed like a good excuse to finally clean it), ate dinner, and finally left the house around 7:45PM. This was forty-five minutes after I planned on leaving but I wasn't surprised by the delay.

The drive went smoothly, largely due to the GPS. That thing takes a lot of stress out of the end of a trip when you're off the highways and interstates and dealing with exits and side streets. The GPS did suggest an illegal/impossible U-turn, but other than that it was spot on. I also needed a little help with the house because the numbers weren't clearly marked for most of the houses on the street, but the academic librarian's friend jumped up and waved her arms in the front yard after I had parked a few houses too far down. We went and sat on the back patio for awhile before calling it a night.