Wednesday, January 11, 2006

A Day in the Life

I got to work at 8:00 on the dot this morning (which is late for me - I like to be early so I can make the coffee. Yesterday, I got roped at the last minute into helping with a presentation on EndNote - which I had never used before. We had 35 students show up, along with about 5 or 6 staff members. Since I do all the statistics reporting on our instruction sessions, I started today with adding up how many people circled "agree" vs. "somewhat agree" vs. ... well you get the point... on the eval forms. Type up the comments sections, and then write up a nice report-type email to my boss, her boss, his boss and his boss. Time-wise, this took 3 cups of coffee (known in the rest of the world as about 1 hour), which meant I had to drink 3 cups of water...at some point Ick. I decided it was time for my morning break, and took twenty minutes to go outside and walk the circle a couple of times (about a mile) while chatting on my phone, then come in and gulp down two glasses before I could think about it. Back to work. We're currently editing our periodicals list - the "Master List." Somewhere in the two years since it was last published, our Microsoft Office package was upgraded to the 2003 version. When that happened, it apparently wreaked havoc with the formatting of the the Master List. It's entirely in Word, each title in its own table. Each table looks great by itself - but the tabs don't match up anymore, and each one has to be changed manually. So what does that mean? I spend hours at my computer, moving around hundreds of lines. Did I mention that there are 399 pages of this? I'm on the E's; started with page 149 today. I'm determined to get to 180 today. There's another project that I'm supposed to be working on right now; our annual Reference Inventory started last week. We have until January 26th to complete it. Basically, I get the cards (yes, our reference collection still has a shelf list on cards) for my section, take them to the books, and go through the books one by one to make sure everything is there. I won't even go into what we have to do if its not. I've got the 900's (I chose it because I thought it would be the most interesting). I haven't started this yet. I was hoping to finish Project #1 before moving on to this one....but since I'm still not working full-time, I'm gonna have to really rush through the inventory. Thought I'd have a couple of hours to stare at hundreds of I marks, but it was not to be. But about 45 minutes later he shipment of periodicals that we sent out last month to be bound returned ....which means I get the list, and check each volume to make sure that what's on the spine is what's supposed to be on the spine. There were about 95 of those. After that, I got to shelve them. It's amazing how hot I get, moving those suckers around. Back to the computer. After about 20 minutes, a student I've been working with comes to me for some help on a new database. Spent about 20 minutes with him, then checked my email before deciding it was time for lunch. Just as I was standing up, a young officer came over to talk about starting in the Library program at UA (we had spoken once before). By the time I answered all his questions and printed some stuff for him, 30 minutes had gone by. Definitely time for a lunch break. So that's the first 4 hours. I never feel like I'm getting a lot done, but somehow I do. This afternoon, I'm sure I'll get interrupted a few more times at my computer. I'm on the desk for an hour, too, which means I get to help all the random people that come in. I love working the desk - you never know what they're going to ask for next. In between answering questions, I get to index the newest issue of Air Force Magazine (another of my favorite things to do) - this issue has an article about satellites (the artificial ones) and space, and a historical piece about the first jet aircraft flight, plus about 8 other things I get paid to read. And on my way to lunch, one of the bosses stopped me and told me that the replacement CD-Rom changer came in to replace the one that broke 5 months ago (I was voting for not having one at all, but....) - could I make some time this afternoon to install it and test it out? Ugh. I hate doing computer work like that. So how was your morning?

1 comment:

smdrm said...

And all Marion did was sign and dance around the library!!