Two experienced library workers

Oh man, there's no telling what two experienced library workers can do!

Under the right conditions, that is. The conditions have to be perfect.

The conditions were perfect!

There were six carts of requests to shelve, plus the curbside pickup routine we're running here at our pandemic closed library. But by 6:30 in the evening the curbside pickup dies to nearly nothing. So those six carts of requests were all that stood between us and having nothing to do a little later.

Nothing to do. Aye, the promised land. 

Neither of us likes working in particular, but we occasionally see the rightness in working, sometimes, especially if it can be done efficiently. So we are both capable of working as hard and efficiently as possible. And we do it all in the hopes that we can make it all be over as soon as possible. Or sometimes to prove a point, though I'm never quite sure what point, but we tend to have a lot of points to prove.

So we shelved, splitting along rough halves of the alphabet, handling the phones, which were still ringing, on the fly.

Total concentration.

Tireless dedication.

No movement wasted.

Mastery of the alphabet.

You think you know the alphabet?

Well, no offense, but you are not a professional. I mean you are probably very good with the alphabet and do a fine job with the layman's 26 letters. I mean no disrespect.

We were using the professional 112 letter standard alphabet.

No, I can't explain it.

Plus we were fueling our shelving not just on a desire to be finished shelving, and with the dream of nothing to do, but we were also fueling on anger. The phone kept ringing and interrupting us. People would call and tell us the wrong things. They would misspell their names. They would say they were here to pick up books that weren't here for them to pick up. Our back up person disappeared and we had to take care of everything, just the two of us. The table out our front door needed to be dried from an afternoon snow storm. Someone had put a book for pick up on a cart under the patron's first name!

And we had only our shelving to take out our anger on. 

So we did.

We shelved like madmen! Pages flew into the air. Empty carts crashed ferociously together. Minutes passed in a fever of wild activity.

And then before you know it, we were done.

It took like 20 minutes or something.

And now we have about three hours to just sit here.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Eh, I'm not complaining.