Library day in the life, Round 8, Thursday

• This morning, I had training on our new City-wide eRecruitment process. The training was 9-1 at 100 Constellation, so off I went on the packed #95 bus.
• But first, I checked email from home and forwarded a message from an employee cancelling a shift today to someone who’s actually at Carlingwood to deal with it... On the bus, I scanned Google Reader news.
• I am allowed an extra coffee if I am going to a meeting. Unfortunately, I had a thermos + milk fail (at right). Meh. Black is OK.
• The training was really interesting (basically, the eRecruitment tool will allow us to manage and modify competitions online from start to finish – I’ll spare you the details).
  
• Here’s the thing with me: I hate, hate, HATE webinars in general, so I made sure I signed up for the in-person version of this training because I know webinars this long about finicky tools like this bore me to tears, and as a consequence, left to my own devices in the office, I will get distracted by real work and forget to follow along. At least with others around me, I am generally embarrassed enough to stay off email and ignore my to-do list.
  
• That being said (you knew there was a “but” coming here, didn’t you?), I did manage to send out the monthly report (completed), sign up for some training http://www.ala.org/pla/onlinelearning/webinars/dynamic (I know, a webinar, but it looks so interesting! And I’m going to get a group involved to keep me on track), sent a quick email about FTRW planning, scheduled a few 1-on-1 meetings with my team, set up a few reminders in Outlook, and put in a Grand and Toy order. I did all this either during the break or when everyone was working on exercises during training (I always finish first).
• I also received an email saying the day-long workshop I was presenting at on Saturday has been cancelled. Oh well, I was starting to get stressed about not finishing my presentation, anyway, so one less worry this week!
• Meeting with colleague upon arrival to branch
• We’re screwed for the schedule tonight so I called around for a replacement. The lovely JC stepped in (shout-out!) She will also soon be appearing in an article for Feliciter with me.... Mwha haha!
• Faxed some timesheets and met with circulation supervisor
• Followed up on a few things that came up in conversation with my team.....
• Hacked away at the to-do list.
• Had to call a patron about program registration and ended up having a great, if somewhat depressing, conversation about patron privacy and ease of use of library cards by spouses. Basically, in order to pick up your spouse/partner's holds, you must have their library card. Which is kind of inconvenient, but intended to protect people's privacy. There is no other option as yet to assign someone permission to access your account... Anyway, we debated a bit, and I promised to pass on the patron's feedback.
• More hacking. Several draft messages from earlier this week were sent!
• Wrote some quick reviews for our CLA BOYCA shortlist
• Sorted some more email, made some lists.....
• wandered over to Info desk to drop something off and got sucked into elaborate ebook download question. I'm a bit worried about that patron .... His eyes glazed over with confusion.... I kept asking if he was following ok, and he kept saying yes.... I sent him home with some handouts, too, because Ididn't think he was totally with me
• Clarified some more policy
• Succeeded in completing very few tasks to my satisfaction today. GRR.