Final Friday

My final week on the job has officially begun. My last day will be next Thursday, so today is my final Friday as a "liberry" ass.

Fridays are usually very busy at the "liberry" even nigh unto as busy as a Monday. However, we usually have enough staff on Friday to carry the load, at least until 5p when everyone abandons the official Friday closer and flees to their weekends two hours earlier than I get to. Fridays also are especially busy because it's our weekly amnesty day and is when all the basket cases bring in their kids' long-overdue books to turn in for free, glutting the book cart even beyond the usual busy Friday turn in. Now, as an experienced Friday closer, I know that it's imperative to getting that book cart cleared out before 5p because after 5 shelving becomes problematic with no one else to run the desk. Imagine my horror, therefore, at arriving today to find every single shelf of the book cart not only completely packed, but packed with other books laying on top of the packed books and then stacks of books laying on the nearby circ-desk itself. I very nearly said, "Uh, sorry, but, no, I'm done."

Mrs. B explained that because our new nonfiction section has recently overgrown to the point that it has begun encroaching upon the territory of mystery fiction, Mrs. A had told Mrs. J to go through every book there and remove the ones with any 2007 date as the first due date. Mrs. A said that she and Mrs. C would then go through those books and decide what they wanted to put back in new NF and what they wanted to shelve in the stacks. Trouble was, it had been a while and neither of our bosses was coming to sort through any of it. Meanwhile, the usual Friday crowd was still turning in all their books, which were the ones piling up on the desk. And meanwhile meanwhile, Mrs. C was in her office furiously cataloging stacks of new books to process and put out as well. And as the guy who would likely wind up processing them, too, this disturbed me. I wanted to say, "No! Stop making more work for me! I've got plenty up there as it stands. Please, come and look through some of it so I can start making a dent in the pile I already have, cause it ain't like the Friday crowd incoming books are slowing down."

Instead, I said a more respectful version of the above and eventually, Mrs. C came and went through the nonfiction on the cart, allowing me and Mrs. J to finally start shelving.

The remainder of my final Friday passed with little incident.