Things I have recently learned

My word! It has been awhile since my last blog post. I guess I have been dragging my feet a bit with this blog. For that I apologize, to no one in particular. The weather has begun to turn wintery here. There is snow on the ground and nip to the air. I might even need to put on my boots to walk to work soon.

The fact that it is cold and snowy can mean only one thing: The fall semester is nearly over. In fact next week is finals week. This semester has gone incredibly fast and I believe it was only a bit less stressful than it was when I was a student. I am guessing this is due to my newness to the profession. In the last 15 weeks I taught 20 information literacy classes, placed my first book orders for the English and Communication, History, and Business departments, and spent a fair amount of time at the reference desk.

Some of the realities of librarianship I learned while at the reference desk: There simply aren't as many true reference queries as I wished there to be. I also learned that due to proximity of the reference desk to the computers we are the frontline computer help desk and also the refillers of staplers. All of these things I seem to be able to do adequately, though I must say I excel in refilling the stapler.

One phenomenon that I have noticed since the weather has cooled is the dragging of feet. The reference desk, in a way, is sandwiched (maybe hot-dogged is a better term) between the computers and the printers. As a result there tends to be a good deal of foot traffic passing before the reference desk. Overall, most foot-draggers happen to be female and usually the culprits are wearing some form of boot. This leads me to believe that either these girls are so out of shape they cannot properly lift their booted foot or that the boots are purposely weighted down in order to build tone up and build muscle. At this point I cannot be certain as to which it is; this investigation remains open.

Once this mystery is solved perhaps I will devise a way to harness the static electricity from the foot-dragging to power a printer or two.