Friday, July 18, 2014

The statistics of help

Today I will tell you a tiny game we played today at the service desk of my library.

Every once in awhile we have to fill out a survey sheet for our time at the front desk. It is a tally of Reference questions and Directional questions. Because there are a lot of people in a row to help sometimes, and because of the ambiguity and strange complexity of a surprising number of these interactions, it can be a little too hard to really keep proper track of these, or to take the whole thing very seriously, so we sort of guess.

And then today we did this:

Me: "Where is the survey sheet?"

My co-worker: "Here." (pointing).

Me: Makes one tick in the tally under "directional questions".
 
My co-worker: "What is the survey sheet?"

Me: "It's a sheet where we keep track of reference questions."

My co-worker: Makes one tick in the tally under "reference questions".

Then we repeated it until we had filled out the approximate number of directional and reference questions we would handle for two hours. 

Then we helped people.

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