Monday

What I'm doing between questions: first hour or so, downloading orders done last week while I was out. Next up, catching up on emails. Then peruse listserves (delete most) followed by ALB so I can check our catalog against the backlog I've developed in my feedreader for that site.

9:00

• Ownership-stamp and distribute today's papers to their spots
• "Can I take the jobs folder to a table?" [technically we're not supposed to, but sure--and he does bring in back in 20 min or so]
• Guest pass
• Pencil
• Help with adding money to print account
• Question from shelver about Spinjitzu DVD; is that what she's holding? [yes]
• Printer not working right [works for me, but the guy moved to another one and now he can print...?? Note to tech ppl]
• Look up card #; help with color printing
• For some reason the Scan/Fax station isn't logging in this morning; Librarian Z is dealing with it because I didn't even notice

10:00 [children's dept.]

• 2 girls and then mom arrive; mom asks for the author of the Gregor the Overlander series [Suzanne Collins--"oh yeah, the Hunger Games author"]
• R.L. Stine books 
• Mom + daughter here getting DVDs and books and doing a decoration for our "gingerbread" house

11:00 [children's dept.]

• Mom looking for the R.L. Stine kids
• People looking at school district art show [the mom (grandma?) is the lady who served my dinner on Christmas Eve--I love small towns!]
• Mr. Pols stops on the way out to chat about the holidays and we have a nice rambling convo--love this guy
• Bathroom key

1:00

• Help with Excel formatting
• Very loud noise from computer bays in the middle of Reference
• Five minutes later, lovely older woman comes to say that it was the guy next to her, and he's drunk and smoking; I go suggest he leave...he's not with it enough to understand or remember
• Another regular (usually drunk guy) comes in to schmooze; the boss comes out in 10 minutes and "reminds" the ACTUAL drunk guy to go [I feel bad--dude's a mess, and it's really crappy outside, but yeah]
• ...and in he just came again [so we roust him again--"I thought you just wanted me off the computer"--uh, no]
• Regular not-drunk-today guy asked for fireplace to be turned on
• Announcement from boss that we're closing early today, at 5
• Friends board member mentions he's addressing envelopes and can't figure out some of the zip codes--because the previous librarian gave him 1997 phone book to use to look up streets [I pull the zip code directory and show him how to use it so he doesn't have to Google 35 addresses....jeez]

Wednesday Evening

What I'm doing between questions: Crazy Cat Lady is on her 73rd vacation of the year--ok, not really, but she's gone SOOOOO OFTEN....--so I'm holding the fort tonight. Reading reviews, checking end-of-year Best Books lists against our catalog, and hoping all the weirdness happened in the 5-6 hour (pages fainting, DVDs returned dripping in some sort of oil/lotion, people battling over study room use, etc.

6:00

• Tutor wars have commenced; first chore of the evening is to remember to go boost one of the people in a Study Room in 10 minutes so next person can use it...yay
• Look up library card number for internet usage ["[Librarian H] would have made me show ID"--and the patron is probably right, but we all know her so that's just stupid]
• Next tutor is her for her room
• "I can't get online" [her card # isn't in the system anymore; there are three other people with her name in town, and none of them have the same birthdate, so she's needing a new card...]
• ...and Circ thinks she got deleted by accident so rather than issue a new card, they're looking for her original application [!!] to reenter
• [phone] Phone number for Good [...] Hospital in [city near us] [dude was JUST HERE--I watched him walk out 10 minutes ago after playing today's chess game online...wth]
• Walk-through
• Tutor needs headphones for her charge
• Dirty looks issued to girls goofing off at the table behind me [wonder of wonder, it seems to work]
• Dude uses pencil on the fly and almost literally flings it back on the desk when he's done

7:00

• Group home folks arrive [they're late--usually they arrive about 6:20]: first request is tractors for the usual guy
• Life insurance lackey is back--he's here a couple of times a month--to fax two patient's data forms to the company; $12 later...yikes
• And he starts pumping me for info about who does our wellness stuff for insurance...sigh 
• Walk-through, and double-check that everything's ok at circ [they never found the card app for the missing account from the last hour--very weird]

8:00

• "Do you loan laptops?" [not even]
• [same woman] "Do you have headphones?" [she manages to miss the point that I have some for sale for a buck, but otherwise no]
• Reference printer is "very low" on black ink so I retrieve a replacement so we aren't running laps when it finally goes. Oh, and I refill the paper while I'm over there
• Walk-though, pick up strays and do a quick head-count
• Waiting on two stragglers: one reading the paper, the other zoning out in a study room EVERYONE ELSE IS GONE
• 8:58 and they are headed toward the door...finally

Saturday

What I'm doing between questions: sorting the cart(s) of items to be cataloged into date order. 

9:00 [Librarian T volunteered to cover my first hour in the children's room]

• [phone] "How do I set up IM?" Librarian T [can't log in]
• "I don't know if you know but I told her that she has to call [other library in consortium: BPL] because she lives in [B] County..." [yes that's how she started the "question"] Librarian T again [Just because you live in [B] County does not mean you're in the BPL library district. Where does she pay taxes? "I don't know!" If she doesn't pay taxes to a specific district, she can pick her home library and pay the out-of-district fee, but then she can't use any other libraries' materials. "Well, I'm going to ask [Head of Circ] on Monday." So why did you ask (?) me in the first place?? This is going to be the longest day ever....]

10:00 in Children's Room

• Naturally, the Read to the Dog lady is here with her dog and there's no publicity or anything about. I'm fed up: email to Children's Librarian and director
• Librarian T comes in to chat, at length, about labels and meeting with other Tech Svc ppl, and stuff and things and OMG OMG
• Finally a patron: "Can I be logged into the internet on two computers?" [no but I can look up your son's card number and you can both be on your own accounts...]

11:00

• Tape
• Stapler
• I look over patron's "Cash Only" signs and approve [he went to school with my son since forever and is low-IQ but generally a sweetie and working hard at managing a hair salon]
• New Debbie Macomber book [reserved for her]
• Guest pass x2
• More help for Cash Only dude re "do we have books back here?" etc, for his ??brother??
• Help printing a Google map
• Printer is over here now x 3or4
• "I asked about [a local recreation book] awhile ago..." [I find the request; it's self-published so we're waiting to hear from them about purchase]
• Guest pass ["I just moved here from California, and my ID and everything else burned"--dear God] -- he goes directly to YouTube, priorities being what they are to the young and multi-gauged
• Pencil

12:00

• Natural remedies for healthy living [not on the shelf, anywhere sensible; I marked it missing and reserved a copy from another library for her]
• "Wifi" [uhm, yes? Not enough bars to please her and no thank you. Nice]
• Extend time on guest pass [yup]
• Problem on Ref #1 [I shut it down]
• How to open an attachment in Gmail [stoopid Gmail...]
• "Where's your wifi?" [she's actually looking for the rude wifi woman]
• Ref #1 just blew up again--"I think it's snakebit" lol [patron moves over and I go kick #1 in the head]
• Phone number for Yellow Cab in [Big City]
• Guest pass [but they have a card for a nearby library; circ told them they couldn't use that card because it isn't in the database...so I enter it for them, because circ is lazy]
• Bones season 2--why isn't it here yet? [because it's not due till the 21st--I promise we'll call you!]

2:00

• "Why can't I connect to the wifi?" [I think you need to learn how to use your very-off-brand device...it's not working]
• Ink nearly out on public printer [reset for 50 more pages and get new ink for later]
• Consumer Reports April issue [guess why? Yes, I get to hear all about his car accident necessitating a review of what to get to replace the totaled one]
• Forgotten PIN [reset]
• And it's pouring rain....

Wednesday evening

What I'm doing between questions: the ever-popular Death Dates list: searching the March 2015 list, but I'm 9 months behind in actual cleanup....oh, and desultorily IMing with my husband periodically.

6:00

• when I arrive at the desk Librarian Z is on the phone trying to explain our ridiculous "bus system" to someone who is calling from 1300 miles away for a friend who lives locally [so that sets the tone, perhaps, for the evening]
• pencil sharpener? [all the 'office supply' stuff like that is on a table together now, in sight of the desk...except scissors]
• Wednesday night group home visit [I warned circ that I really wasn't going to be able to wander around looking for one-hit wonders or random bands for people tonight....]
• Pick up 6 reserves from the hold box at circ--all for the same patron, all true crime stuff from 5-10 years ago, none of which we own [I'm not allowed to ILL anymore because I do so few hours out here, a rather draconian decision taken because of T doing them wrong more than she does them right; she works out here more than I do, but it's "easier" to make a rule for part-timers than be "mean" to T...I love libraries and their passive-aggressive idiocy]
• Annie (the new version) and Home on DVD--the former is checked out, the latter isn't due out for another 5 weeks [didn't want to reserve]
• Same girls looking for Chicago Fire [all checked out, and now they do want to reserve everything]
• Headphones to buy [yup, down to two more pair]
• [the pen I'm using is from a Renaissance Hotel; this makes me laugh: obviously a left-behind-by-a-patronpen]
• How to print
• Librarian H is here--"just a figment of your imagination"--and says "there are only 3 cars in the staff lot--are there only 3 people working?" [we are, obviously, a little short-handed tonight...]
• Note to ILL dept. about the six holds--since they are, in essence, all on vacation next week, should we not order anything for the duration?
• And the YA summer reading checkin is here for the rest of the night, so the prizes and so forth have arrived 
• "Did anyone turn in a library card?" [not here, but....] "then I need a new one" [ok, dude, relax...go back to circ and they'll hook you up]

7:00

• Cute little noisy toddler with apologetic parents trying to do something quickly online
• [YA Librarian T calls to say that she forgot to grab the extra reading logs]
• I pull the apologetic parents over and let them know that there are internet stations in the kids' room if they want to take him in there next time [but he is super-adorbs, just wants to run around so I could care less if he's squawky out here]
• "I got a new card; do I need a new password?" [nope, looks like they just changed the card # on your computer record, so the PIN stayed the same]
• Same guy can't get logged in [we really REALLY need to get the extraneous crap off the login page because people WILL click on it instead of the "go" arrow]
• Hairstyling books for a woman who wants to open her own salon...we have, essentially, nada [so I order some ILL options for her]
• [phone] Address/location of former amusement park in metropolitan area [and I pronounce one of the streets wrong cuz I'm not from around here]; and are there black widow spiders in Belgium, England, or Poland [not native, no]
• ...and I restock the request slips
• ...and the paper in the printer
• I greet one of our regulars, a tutor, and ask how she's doing: "TERRIFIC!" Well, ok then! :-) And she signs into a study room to make a phone call (which is weird since we're dead as a doornail and no one is in any of those rooms, but whatever)

8:00

• [phone] Season 1 of Suits [says it's on the shelf but isn't where it belongs, so I place hold and hope the shelver/picklist person can figure out where it's hiding
• Announcement re CALL FOR YOUR RIDE NOW, we're closing soon
• Catching up on email, reading Now I Know, which is all about leprosy today, so now I'm researching leprosy, which totally counts as a reference question!
• Son texts to say he's home from his hour-long commute to his summer job
• First walk-through to pick up strays done--mostly so I could glare at one of our annoying regulars who spent 10 minutes talking on the phone [ok, he was fairly quiet, but it's SO dead in here that I could literally still hear him in the back of nonfiction]
• Dude, seriously...now we have another regular across the room talking to himself
• "When do the computers shut down?" [y'all have 10.5 minutes...lol]
• Today's papers put away, final warning about computers shutting off at 8:50; time to clear the basement....
• Of course, the only YA to need to pick up prizes arrives at 8:55 AND the children's librarian didn't shut down the meeting room after the program, so closing was a total cluster