Our head librarian Mrs. A is a great lady, a great boss and a great
librarian. However, as a library assistant, she stinks up the joint.
Yesterday, she filled in for our normal Saturday shift
"liberry" ass., Mrs. H. Mrs. A so rarely has to close up shop that she
gets terribly rusty at it, so much so that she has to use our Closing
Time Duties Check List. Sure enough, I found just such a checklist on
the circ desk when I came in. Every item was checked off, but there were
a few items that probably should be added to future versions of the
list. Items such as vacuuming the filthy blue runner carpet, shelving
ALL the books on the book cart, emptying the trash, etc., which were
left undone.
Mrs. A also used less than her whole ass on some of
the other primary Saturday shift duties, such as the processing and
packing up of our interlibrary loans, which wound up on my docket today.
Doing ILL's is one of my least favorite things to do,
which is why I try not to work Saturdays very often. It's not that it's
difficult, just time consuming and mildly irritating. You've got to dig
all the outgoing ill books out of the ILL Cubby Hole under the desk,
sort them into piles for each library they're going to, find all the
corresponding ILL slips in the ILL'S RECEIVED accordion folder, mark off
each of these ILLs in the ILL'S RECEIVED BINDER, inventory everything
on a ILL'S SHIPPED OUT slip which we put into the binder and then pack
everything up in as few padded envelopes as possible with only our week
to week stock of ratty old padded envelopes to choose from. Depending on
how many books we have to send out, it can take anywhere from ten
minutes to two hours to do.
In Mrs. A's defense, she had actually done most of the
paperwork portion of the task for me, pre-sorted the books into piles
and had even found pre-printed mailing labels for the individual
libraries. She had not, however, actually packed any of them up, so that
I had to do. Still took about half an hour and then I had to do more of
it as other ILL's came back throughout the day.
I guess I'm just amazed that she left a mess she would not have put up with had one of the regular ass.'s left it.
Ironically, I almost left myself a huge mess. I began
composing this entry in Word-Pad while still at the library. I didn't
save the file, just had it open as text which I later cut and pasted
into a blogger file. However, I neglected to delete the original text
which still sat highlighted in the Word-Pad document and had other
windows piled on top of it so that I couldn't see it. I even attempted
to shut down the computer, while I attended to other closing duties,
(trash, vacuuming, shelving), and only as I was about to walk out the
door did I realize that the presence of the unsaved document would have
prompted Windows to ask if I wanted to save it, preventing the system
from actually shutting down. I ran back to the computer and sure enough
there it was. It probably would have sat there all night until Mrs. C
discovered it Monday morning.
I deleted the text and made sure everything shut down.
Whew.
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