Saturday Morning

I am not liking today's schedule.

This is the kind of scheduling that makes me wish so fervently that I'd been assigned back to my neighborhood facility, warts and all. Were I there instead of here, I'd be working the big busy desk charging things out and checking them in, and/or (probably and) assisting with incoming stations. Or I'd be moving along the aisles maneuvering trucks groaning under the weight of returned items (always and inevitably re-routing materials to outgoing stations trucks for return to their branches of origin). The morning would hum with activity, then settle into the kind of quiet that lets a person think a bit.

Not this regimented one hour here, the next hour there, and so on. I didn't need daily spreadsheets telling me what my workday would be. At the neighborhood branch I knew what needed to be done and as time and circumstances permitted I did it. I knew my job. I was good at it.

Half my day today will be spent in the time machine room. As a patron I used to like that room a lot. I had no thoughts then of working for the city, least of all in a library. Being posted to that room each day reminds me why I felt that way. I loved libraries, I always did, but was convinced that working in one would somehow spoil both my enjoyment of the facility and all my childhood memories of what public libraries--especially the stately main downtown building--repre