Chaos

The transition from semester to semester in an academic library is always an unpredictable thing, especially if you depend on work-study students to fill out your desk schedule as much as we do in Access Services. Sometimes you switch from Fall to Spring with nary a hitch, maybe bumping a shift here or moving some hours there, and other times everything goes to Hell, as if the schedule had been written on an Etch-a-Sketch and someone decided to shake it up for no good reason.

This is one of those latter transitions, I'm sorry to report -- it seems every single one of my work-studies wants to swap out their hours as they settle into their new class schedules, so it'll be a legitimate miracle if I can somehow get them all situated and not have huge Mack Truck-sized gaps in coverage here at the Reading Room Desk. Ah, well! And I thought the end of the semester had been a bumpy ride!

However what this situation does do is give me the impetus and opportunity to hire a new crop of students to help fill out the schedule. Ever since we've had a change of supervisor I seem to acquire a new responsibility with each passing week. Mind you, this is a good thing, as not too long ago I'd begun to worry about stagnation on the job (whereas now the situation is anything but, although I'm still keeping my eye out for a chance to land that first entry-level professional gig). What this means though is that I have to schedule myself off the desk much more than I have up until this point, so I can give myself at least even odds of getting all this extra work done without clocking in overtime.

But that will take more coverage, which means more students. Which of course means more hiring and training, which naturally takes time -- the one thing that is in painfully short supply (and isn't that the reason why I'm doing all of this in the first place?). Oh, well. No one ever said life in the Big Library was going to be a cakewalk...