What I'm doing between questions:
12:00 in the children's room
- How to print
- We Were Tired of Living in a House [we have it on the shelf!]
- "Have you seen [custodial dude]?" [he came through with a little black cart about 10 minutes ago]
- Kid is taking, no lie, a full shelf of books to the front to check out....
- Sea lions, seals, and walruses [oh, yeah, we got that covered!]
- "Can I use my [nearish-town] card here?" [yup, long as your record is clear]
What I'm doing between questions:
1:00
- Do reserves left from earlier today: Mrs. Kennedy and Me, Wishes Fulfilled, The Great Santini (on CD or tape), Great Expectations (the Treasury of Illustrated Classics edition) [three are in our system, but I have to order Santini from ILL]
- Headphones
- Help sending Craigslist email
- Headphones returned
- Guy looking at want-ads wishes me a happy Monday ; and then his wife appears and needs a drinking fountain, and the local classifieds [20 minutes later they've scoured ALL the ads carefully and leave]
- Classifieds [or, as he prefers, "Classification ads"]
- Ads are back
What I'm doing between questions: subject heading checking/cleanup
11:00 in the children's room
- No school today, but the weather is outstanding so not too many kids in here
- Pay to print
- ........aaaaaaaaaaaand we have another giggler watching something on the internet [lol]
- Toddler book(s) on body parts [nothing really works for her...]
- The giggler exits, stuffing his coat into his mouth...WHY do kids do this??
- What time do you close today? [same as usual: 6:00] ; Dora DVDs [oh yeah we got 'em]
- When is the last day for the Peeps displays? [later this month]
- Horrible assignment for kids: projects on plants -- this little girl has papayas and peanuts -- and they have to have 5 resources, one of which needs to be in Spanish [apparently there've been other kids in for this looking for guavas, watermelons....WTF, Teach?]
1:40 in the children's room (because once again the schedule changed...)
- Cartoons (funny ones), specifically The Pink Panther [we don't have, so I reserve it for her from another library]
- Bathroom keys for the cleaning guy
- Bathroom key (and he hadn't really started on one of them, so that worked out)
2:00
- Try to help someone print, but he figures it out just as I get there
- There are two women who've been talking--quietly--at one of the internet stations since I got here; they are starting to annoy me, and I wonder if the one logged on is aware that she's on the (internet) clock (no one in the vicinity seems bothered at this point)
- How to get on the internet [or so I suppose since the guy actually utters about 6 words total]
- Pay to print [not that I pay attention--$5 is the same as $1, right?...ugh]
- Director calls to tell me she sent me an email almost 2 hours ago and we aren't listed in the attachment as [city] but as City of [city] [and I care...why?] ; and no it's not crazy, stay in your office [please]
- Look up password ; card is inactive [Why is this poor woman coming all the way out from the children's room? Twice now? Because, she says, there's no one in there--I run around trying to figure out what's going on...]
- Director gets involved in that and makes sure I'm "OK" [gah]
- Look up card number with DL and pay to print -- and his card is inactive [fail]
- Day pass--but he's got no ID, so I apologize for being mean [he's pretty nice about it: "you're not the first to be mean" lol] ; on the other hand, he's now sitting at a computer happily bouncing around the internet]
- Tape
- Is there an Easter egg hunt Sunday? [not here; our city's was last Saturday... :-(]
3:00
- Plato's Revenge [in the new books, where it belongs, yay]
- How to use the internet [upload her new card, get parent's name--and GO!] ; also, how to print
- [phone] Is our ESL tutoring program suitable for an English-speaking disabled student? [I ask the ESL coordinator who says no, but she'll talk to the person]
- Coloring pictures for a nursing home [I check our storytime books, but there are tons online, so she goes hunting there]
- "Can I get a card?" [sure but not here--back up front--another "Elder" doing Time] ; how to get online? [I import his new card]
- Can I get online? [I import her card] ; and print [I take her money]
- Pay to print
- "Did anyone find a USB cable?" [not back here, no]
- Fax
- [phone] Excel tutors? [no, but we are starting class signups again shortly...he'll stop in later and do sort that out tomorrow or next week]
- Headphones [I give him the spare pair we have here]
- Ethernet cable returned
What I'm doing between questions: placing holds on newly-ordered demands, and checking on other demands (not yet ordered) in my collection development sections.
2:00
- Free record in use [new book that has disappeared...it never fails to amuse me when religion books go missing (i.e., get stolen)]
- Pay to print
- New card--how to use internet
- "Where are the newspapers?" [the current ones down in the reading room--I point to the sign] ; "They're downstairs?" [what? no the older ones are UPstairs....?] [ok, when I said "down" in the reading room, it confused him]
- "I don't see you at this desk very often" [I'm not out here that often, but I've worked here for over 15 years...lol]
- "How do I use the internet?" [he has a card from a nearby offline library, so I register him--he's a poet, learning to navigate his New Website, god-help-us]
- Three movies [can't remember which ones, all of this is happening at once; one is out, one we don't own but it's in the system, and one is on order for her]
- Newspaper guy is back, looking for a plumber...in the want ads...[I don't need to know why] ; apparently he has found on, as he is now making calls 20 feet from my desk (SIGH!)
- How to open a CD-ROM
What I'm doing between questions: reading Autocat posts (taking a break from recreating the budget spreadsheet that go over-written somehow by something entirely different)
1:00
- How to use the internet...to do taxes...omglol ; also where's the IE icon [under the SAM popup, which annoys the CRAP outta me, but is easy enuf to fix]
- Paper & pencil [our regular youngish dred-haired "WEEZY" cap-wearing patron]
- Pay to print
- Newsflesh trilogy, book 2 on CD [doesn't exist; she swears she's listening to book 1 on CD, which ALSO doesn't exist...fortunately I know her, so I send her home and tell her to call me when she looks at the box for the book she's listening to]
- Today's classified ads [I get them]...
- ....and needs help with Mapquest [I ask him to come back when I'm done with Newsflesh woman]
- Pay to print
- Pencil
- Three new books, which I can't remember now because this was all happening at once [I reserve one and do demand requests for the other two]
- Meanwhile, Librarian C tells me that the guy on station #14 is using a card issued to a woman ; he's one of a cadre of "problems" that comes in daily, so I tell her I'll knock him off the net from here]
- Pen ... and, ten minutes later, white-out
- History of the local JC's chapter
- Finally have a chance to knock the dude offline... [heh, oh, the power]
- Renew income tax guys' time
What I'm doing between questions:
1:00
- Weirdly, there's no panicked rush for the internet when we open...
- Long process of printing a $25 gift coupon for a local restaurant, which I just do cuz the guy isn't exactly savvy
- Scratch paper
- Pay to print
- Pay to print
- Helping out with a question about Wall Street Journal Magazine and pasta [ppl r weerd]
- Circ desk wants to know why someone from a small library to our west has something checked out and due 3/2/2013 (and the patron wanted to renew it thinking it was due nowish)...no clue
- Patron is assigned to a computer...which one? [#23...over there]
- Map-puzzle woman is done for the day
- Too-old-to-be-giggly women keep causing me to stare at them (in their late 20s)
2:00
- "What's the number I need to use a computer?" [she knows her password...the number is her card #...she's not overly endowed with brain cells]
- Pay to print
- I try to help Librarian C with the dingbat looking for "Irish Gaelic" for someone who is not all that brilliant
- Pay to print
- Fax and "can I borrow your stapler?" [....sigh]
- "Do you have cookbooks?" [yeah...specifically...?] Desserts [off we go to 641.83]
- Printing issues
- Werewolf-woman sent a letter asking for help tracing her Attila-Magyar ancestors...random...weird...blah blah, so we work on that for awhile
3:00
