day in the life of a trainee

People have been asking me what I do at my job. What did you do today Country Mouse? they ask. Tell me all about your job! They exclaim. Well, I'm afraid that if I give you a "day in the life" break down you're going to be asking yourself WHY in the hell would anyone want to do that for a living? or WOW she must be bored! or WHAT the hell does that even mean anyways? But I'm going to do it anyways, and just pre-empt this by saying; it's not so much the tasks that I enjoy (though I do enjoy some of these tasks) it's the overall feeling of what I am doing. Which is fine tuning a public libraries' catalogue and making sure it can be perfectly accessed. It's behind the scenes work (that I have always seemed to gravitate towards, can you say "wallflower"?) that eventually betters what the public sees on the face of the operation. OKAY shhhhhhhh now here we go.

7:00 alarm goes off hit snooze
7:10 alarm goes off hit snooze
7:30 alarm goes off grumble grumble and get out of bed. Make bed. Yes I always make my bed (though I didn't ALWAYS make my bed). Shower.

7:45 drink Carnation Instant Breakfeast, preferably chocolate flavoured though I have been known to suffer through vanilla. Or eat some kind of cereal. Make tea. Blowdry hair. Get dressed. Try to convince myself I look professional. Put on mascara for good measure.

8:05 walk the 100 metres to work.

8:15-8:30/9:00 check work emails. There are memos, statistics and reminders about upcoming meetings. Usually there are a few about changes that need to be made in our catalogue. If it's something I can change I do so, or if it's something that has to be more indepthly changed in the item's MARC record I may have to alert the regional office. I often make adjustments to call numbers, item locations and item notes. I am still getting the hang of a lot of this so correct me if I'm wrong.

Sometimes there are some emails about changes that need to be made to serials (as in magazines). The TSLs (me) are responsible for generating and upkeeping predictions for the serials in their regions so that each magazine doesn't have to be manually entered into the system. Usually it makes life easier, but sometimes if there is a problem with the predictions it is really tricky to figure out how to correct it because... well... because you have to *predict* what magazines are going to come next. Lots of magazines don't publish on a monthly basis. Some have special and annual issues that come out at the same time every year. Stuff like that. Can you tell that I actually really like this part? I really do. It's like a logic puzzle.

10:00 break time! Smell that coffee. We all gather in the meeting room and I eat my apple, drink my coffee and do my best to keep up with the very entertaining, but very francophone, conversations that occur. Some of the employees play this card game called "Charlemagne" (sp?) which looks kind of like Euchre.

10:15 ish - Noon depending on what needs to get done I will either be receiving orders, which involves entering all the books and their prices into WorkFlows and then designating what library they will be sent to. Or I will be hanging around the back sorting through the weeded books and deciding if they should be removed entirely from the collection, sent back to the library for reassessment, or redistributed to another library (still getting the hang of this). Or I will be sorting through patron requests and ordering the appropriate copies from the appropriate vendor. Or dealing with donations for tax receipts. Or investigating donations in kind, which I think I basically do the same way as donations for tax receipts only without the receipt bit.

Coming up there are also some special projects that I will help out with: the Outreach project, The Inventory project (*mental note* which I have to do some prep for tomorrow) and a large fund to build an ESL/FSL collection that I will be doing selection and ordering for.

Oh. And I was just recently informed that I will be re-vamping the Emergency Preparedness Plan. Which is this big complicated document that outlines how to save the people AND the books if there was a fire, flood or uhhh.. bomb threat or what not. Believe it or not there is a special section that outlines the procedure involved in *leaving someone in the library* in an emergency situation. Like a fire. No joke there is a procedure and a form to fill out if I was ever in a situation where I decided that I couldn't get a person out to safety.

Noon: I walk the 100 metres back to my apartment and chat on the phone with Jamie while I eat either soup, sandwich, leftovers or all three.

13:00 back to work and basically start the whole process all over again.

15:00 more cards, apples and French lessons.

16:30ish home time.

So that is pretty much my day in a nutshell. I wonder if it has satisfied anybody's curiosity or, raised more complicated questions, or put people right to sleep? I'm sure that this time line of events will change as I become more competent at my job. Right now the day is interspersed with me knocking on my boss's door, holding a book saying "Bonjouuuuur... J'ai une AUTRE question... " or emailing A. in Fundy region (she trained me) "Hellllooooo... I have ANOTHER question... " Yes I am definitely learning and changing every day. This time line will mean nothing to me in about three months I guarantee it.

I'm going to my beloved Halifax this weekend. See you when I get back! We'll talk more then.