Saturday, September 03, 2005

A day in the life of an AV librarian

     Two days after posting about upgrading our library system, it crashed!  nA sign from the heavens?  I suppose so.  Our circulation assistant was supposed to do some maintenance work on the system first thing in the morning when he told me of an error message: System unavailable.  Since I was out for a meeting Wednesday afternoon, I asked if something went wrong when I was away and there wasn't.  It was the first time I encountered the error message so I told our secretary to contact the vendor's tech support.

      To make a long story short, I was on and off the phone with the vendor's systems programmer for a good two and a half hours trying to patch the problem but was unsuccessful in restoring the database.  And by the end of the two and a half hours, I had already spent most of my energy walking from one work station to another and then to the server and then back to the work stations.

     But what has got this to do with AV work?  Nothing really but since I'm the unofficial systems librarian, I'm tasked outside my work as AV librarian to monitor our library system and do troubleshooting.  And they say librarians do not need to study database management system!

     However, what made my day was the feedback I got from a fellow librarian that a faculty member was complaining about the level of service of the AV Center.  Knowing the faculty who made the feedback, I just shrugged my shoulders and brushed off the complaints.  In this line of work, no matter how much effort you put into serving your clients, you just can't please everybody.  I'm thankful, though, to the students who are more understanding of our limitations and who appreciate our efforts. 

     I felt I was hit by a double whammy last Thursday but whatever negative vibes I had that day disappeared when I met up with my girlfriends for dinner.  There's no better way to relieve stress than spending time with friends and sharing some good laugh, even if it were at our own expense.  Laughter is indeed the best medicine.     

 

Behold God is my helper (Ps54:4)

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