Sort of. In that, I don't really have an office, and if I did, I didn't spend much time there. But it was just another day. I went there for about two hours and started labeling the books I'd cataloged yesterday. In a small library such as this one, everyone does everything. There are no assistants and paraprofessionals to do tedious, repetitive, clerical tasks. The whole library is more or less a one-woman operation without volunteers such as myself. It's good to get practice doing all levels of work for a few reasons. For one thing, in small library settings, you may be called upon to exercise skills in completing menial tasks efficiently in order to serve your patrons. For another, if you wind up in a management position, you'll know what your front-line staff feels like in their day-to-day work, and this will allow you to empathize with your employees and help foster understanding and good relationships across management levels. It will also keep you in touch with the everyday work that makes the “big picture” happen, keeping your visions of grandeur in check.
Not everyone who lives and works at the college has their own transportation, and being in a remote location can make it difficult for people to get their basic essentials. Therefore, someone from the college takes a trip to town every week, and anyone who needs one or two things can give the driver money and a list, or, if they need to do specific tasks in town or want to browse or have a quite a few things to get, then they can come with. Well, I needed a few things, and wasn't sure of a few things, and needed to do specific things, so I decided to go to town today. I got what I needed in less than 45 minutes, and spent the next four hours waiting for the driver to complete his other tasks in town and pick me up. This was not fun. Although, I did manage to play a game of tag/follow-the-leader with a couple of kids in town who were waiting for their father to complete some important-sounding task at the payphone. This was rather fun, while it lasted.
Upon returning to the campus, Sunel refused to let me work late to make up for the town trip taking longer than expected. Instead, she gave me food and told me to go relax. That was nice of her. I wound up reading the rest of Africa Geographic magazine and going to the library after-hours to use their WiFi. It was quite a good evening.
Today I was really tired and barely made it out of bed and into work on time. Tea time really helped. As did lunch. Particularly because I spent most of my day cursing the abomination that is Microsoft Word. I really hate that program. It's such a pain in the ass. After finishing the labels from yesterday, my new task was to format a bunch of course manuals. The library puts together, prints, and binds the manuals (read “textbooks”) that nearly all of the courses use. The professors write up all the information the way they want to teach it, and it's our job to make it all look pretty. Well, let me tell you, that getting documents from several sources and trying to make them all look uniform, particularly the layout that we were required to use (set forth by the director of the college), is annoying as fuck. Pardon my French. But seriously, I friggin' hate Microsoft Word, and all its tables and bizarro word-wrapping rules and retarded clip-art.
I mean, it's been so long since I've been forced to use inferior Microsoft Office products to this extent, that I felt like I was learning the whole convoluted system all over again. The first few documents took forever to cobble together (The scope of the project made it not possible to make a blank template and simply place the information into it as needed, all formatted nice-nice and headache-free.), but after I sort of got the hang of it, the rest of them were slightly easier. Slightly. I think Microsoft needs to stop trying to be user-friendly. Every attempt just makes things worse. Microsoft will never make sense, and changing the order of its chaos and putting shiny new buttons on it will make it no more comprehensible than would writing table-assembly instructions in calligraphy in another language and using modern-art expressive interpretations of the life of a table help me to figure out how to put the damn thing together and make it work and look nice. I suppose I need the practice, though. Most professional environments haven't caught on to open-source software that works and is user-friendly, so I might as well get used to it now and when I'm out in the real world, I'll be more prepared (to constantly bang my head against the desk).
After work I went home and cleaned the house up a bit. Seriously, if you don't sweep the squirrel poop and dead bugs up regularly, it gets nasty very fasty. Then I just spent the rest of the evening chatting with my roommate, Vivian (I got a human roommate a couple of days ago, btw), who seems really nice so far. I like having someone else I can talk to outside of work who resides in my timezone and doesn't require technology to do so. She goes to bed earlier than I do, so I started reading some of the assignments I downloaded last night, before I just got sick of it. Anyway, I'm rather tired, so I think I'm going to call it a night. Ciao for now!
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