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Friday, July 19, 2013

Summer work

I have worked for two weeks, and there is no rush at the library, fortunately. There are few patrons here now. We get some tourists who look at the exhibits and hobby researchers, like genealogists. The problems we have regard people who are not here normally, they don't know that you have to order the books a day in advance.

We got a new staff member recently, to replace a guy who is on paternity leave. We tried to shock the new guy by making him retrieve books at the storage the first week, but he isn't easily scared. He has worked hours in the stacks before, so he had some experience. I have spent these two weeks trying to catch up. I have looked for missing books, written reports, read reports, retrieved books, answered a huge number of e-mails, corrected some mistakes made by the movers and put up new lists of the contents of every compact shelf on one floor. There are more things to do, so I will work also next week (which wasn't the plan, really).

It's pretty nice weather here, sunny and warm. Sometimes too warm and rather humid, but we have to complain no matter what. I haven't done much else than working, just some visits to a few malls. Minor purchases; a yellow top and a fly swat! Had dinner at TGI Friday in Malmö one evening, but have stayed at home most of the time. This book moving project has meant that I haven't had time or energy to attend to my apartment. It looked very messy, so I have cleaned and tidied up a little. I'm also trying to get my genealogy files into a better order, but that's a long term project.

Saturday, July 6, 2013

Vacation or something

Tuesday June 18th everything started to go wrong. The fire alarm at the library was no longer functioning and we had to vacate the building. We were not allowed to be there for safety reasons.  The movers who were dismantling the shelving system in the basement could finish their job, but the book movers had to stop in the middle of it. Too bad, I had hoped they would get more done. I quickly re-organized the work and went with all the movers to a storage. They started tearing down the wooden compact shelves that I had been told we wouldn't need anymore. As this was supposed to be my last task relating to the move, I said goodbye to the movers and went on vacation. The library was closed for four days while the technicians worked around the clock to try to figure out what was wrong with the fire alarm. Amazing that it took that long time. The library being closed caused a lot of problems, both to us and our patrons.

The Midsummer weekend was nice and rather relaxing. Lots of herring was consumed. Also strawberries. The following week my mother, sister and I (with help from about 25 other people) were working with the flea market at Furuboda. There weren't as many things to sell as last year, but the quality was higher so we sold for about the same amount.

We have also celebrated my mother's birthday (including an extra celebration for my aunt), played with the kids, taken shopping trips to town and solved a few crossword puzzles. But my vacation has mostly been filled with hard work and my back hurts more now than before. Unfortunately, my cell phone has been ringing a lot, because there are problems at the library. An example: the shelves I thought we were going to discard were supposed to be reused, which means an enormous waste of money, since the movers threw away most of it (several thousand meters) before this was discovered. The messages from work finally got so annoying that I had to go there Thursday to clear some things out. It hasn't been much of a vacation, to be honest. Now I have a cold also, so things are not that great. I have to start working again on Monday. Sigh.