One of the more valuable things that volunteers at my library do for us is empty our bins. Theoretically.
Our bins are robust, wheeled carts that automatically load and unload, and hook up to our giant automated check in machine. We have 26 of these sorting bins hooked up to the machine at all times, each one receiving a particular kind of material. For instance, one of the bins might accept all of our juvenile fiction. And when it fills up it gets pushed over to sit with other full bins. Those bins are all emptied onto shelving carts, allowing us to make use of the often in short supply empty bins once again.
It is that part of the process I am here to talk about today.
It takes anywhere from two minutes to two hours to empty one of these bins onto a shelving cart.
This is not a function of what is being emptied. The bins are all roughly the same effort to empty. It is a function of how they are being emptied. I would not normally imagine that emptying one of these bins could take more than ten minutes tops to empty. But alas that none of our volunteers who are capable of emptying these bins in an effective manner are at all interested in doing so. Bin emptying, for some odd reason, is our station of last resort. Only a volunteer or library helper of so little capability or ambition ends up emptying these bins and it
is
a
study
in
slowness.
Today one of our volunteers was emptying a bin for an hour, but they hadn't quite cleared the bin yet. I was loading things onto the machine and had just completely run out of empty bins. So I dashed over and desperately emptied two of the full bins as quickly as I could.
The volunteer was still putting the same book on the cart when I finished as they were when I started.
Surprisingly, this wasn't all that bad.
In a way I prefer it.
If I can just travel far enough beyond irritation...
...I find myself...
fascinated.
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