Ohhhhh!

Found out our board president is down with a cold. That explains why he didn't call Tuesday when Mrs. A and Mrs. C were out.

Too bad he hasn't given the cold to the 8000 other people who keep calling. And Mrs. A and Mrs. C both keep putting themselves into positions where they can't be contacted. Yesterday they were both in a meeting upstairs and were not to be disturbed. At one point during this, I was trying to help a patron at the desk and the phone kept ringing and interrupting us. No one else was available to answer it, so I had to keep excusing myself to take these calls, all of which were for Mrs. A who I had to keep explaining was unavailable. And while I was on these calls, other people kept calling in and giving me the Call-Waiting beep before I could finish taking the first caller's message. Our policy is that when we get a beep we're supposed to ask if we can put the first caller on hold while we take the second call, cause God forbid the Board President should call and not be able to get through immediately. During the one call I had to take three separate Call-Waiting beeps, all of which were for Mrs. A and all of which sounded desperate.

This happens every year. For some reason, our library is the processing hub for registration forms for the upcoming "liberry" association conference. In the defense of the "liberrians" who have to send in their forms, the form itself isn't the least confusing form in the world, but if you actually follow the directions and fill it out properly it should be a no-brainer. I suppose most of them actually do fill it out properly, but there are so many "liberrians" sending them in that there are still plenty of folks who don't fill them out right, or they fill it out incompletely and have to call to give us the rest, or they have to add another person to their list of attendees and have to call us about it. Meanwhile, none of the "liberry" ass.es has any answers for any of the issues these folks are calling about and they only seem to call when our "liberrians" are unavailable to take the call.

I wish our system would get with the 21st century, or even the 20th and just do online registrations so we don't have to hassle with it all.