My tools

One of the main purposes of the schedule at my library is to spread the variety of work among us clerks and pages, keeping us fresh and involved in all aspects of library circulation life. I may be assigned, in any given hour, to work on the phones, to projects (such as ordering supplies for the library), to the front desk, to shelving in a range of areas, or to tending to our mighty check in machine. But for mysterious reasons, ones that are difficult to see as personal, though that's always my inclination, my schedule seems to have lately come off the rails. Working on the machine is a constant for me, but now sometimes suddenly spikes to consuming more than half my day, all while others of my colleagues are scheduled on it little or not at all. I may not see the phones for three days running and then be scheduled on them on a single day for three hours. Tomorrow I am at the library for ten hours and am freakishly not assigned to the front desk at all.

On the whole I find this erratic scheduling irritating. There are no stations of my job that I don't have at least a passing affection for, but they all tend to be a grind when worked in large doses. Usually that large dose is anything exceeding two hours, an amount of time I am encountering most work days now.

Fortunately I keep a grand arsenal of tools to deal with all the difficulties and injustices of my job, whether those be intentionally visited upon me or whether they be accidents of fate. These tools very much come in handy as I face this particular crisis.

My elaborate tool set consists of the following:


1. Work harder.

2. Work less hard.


Luckily, in choosing among my tools I have a simple, inviolable rule I use to guide me:

 
When at all possible, employ tool number 2.