I really need a holiday. Proof: I was ready for bed at 7:30pm last night (8:30pm felt like 11:30pm, ie I felt like I should have been asleep for at least a couple of hours by then), and this morning I woke up and thought it was Monday. I was so relieved when I realised it’s Wednesday. Although the fact of it being Wednesday really means that the deadline is drawing closer and I’m not done yet!
And let me tell you, having a dummy spit at 5:30 in the morning is NOT pleasant. What happened, you might ask? Well I was writing an email on gmail and attempting to catch up with all the posts that were created overnight when there was a small glitch in the broadband somewhere – bloglines stopped loading, and the most brilliant sentence I have ever written in email, disappeared. *&^%$#@!!
Of course, spitting the dummy at 5:30am when the rest of the world is asleep, means that you can’t really rant and rave. So I’m afraid my poor keyboard bore the brunt of my displeasure. Typing gibberish very forcefully can be quite satisfying. Baubles the Cat decided to leave the room – she must have been able to feel the angst emanating from my corner.
And at work yesterday I got rather peeved when I realised that for some reason my EndNote library on my thumbdrive was an old version, so all my references for the wiki article I am trying to write at the moment were at home. That lead to a few minutes wasted, with me pondering the benefits of having a web-based bibliographic manager like RefWorks over an application like EndNote which is machine-bound. Not in such pleasant terms, of course.
But lest you think the whole past 24 hours or so has been stressful, I did have a moment of amusement yesterday, when I was It on Instant Messaging reference:
Student: Where can I find info on the appendix please
Librarian (moi): Do you mean what appears at the end of a book or journal article, or do you mean the bit at the end of your gut that some people have to go to hospital to get out?
Student: LOL
Librarian: 🙂
Student: The book kind
Librarian: (rolls up sleeves and starts typing)
Pity that was the only query I had in the two and a half hour shift. Or maybe that was a good thing, as I was trying to write in between answering phone calls and stray emails and feeling a tad short tempered. Being on the verge of having a hissy fit at the next question anyone asks me is a sure sign I need a holiday. To my credit, I have not had any observable temper tantrums. Yet. Wish me strength to get through today. And tomorrow. And the day after.
Categories: annoyance, gripes
4 Comments
hope things are going better now! 🙂
Love the ref Q… we’ve yet to get a question on our IM reference service!
Our favourite local ref Q was “Have you got the cat amount?” Librarian heard it as “catamount”. What the student wanted was census info on how many people had cats for pets! LOL!
Then there was the librarian who asked a student looking for info on STDs – “Do you want gonorrhea?”
The strangest one was a student asking “What course am I doing?”. Hmmmm
Great questions!!!
My personal favourite is: “Where can I live?” It was a serious question, the person asking it having just been kicked out of home. They literally didn’t know what to do next. We talked, I offered a cup of tea, recommended the university counsellor (which they gratefully accepted!) and showed them a range of options around campus and around the university. They came and thanked me again some months later 🙂
What are you using for IM? Our IM is really really popular now that we are using Jabber which allows MSN and Yahoo chat…
Go spit big! Spit large!
My recent best double meaning question was:
Student: I want to find something on icebreakers
Me: Did you want a picture? Or statistics? Or information about about their construction? (Ready to find something on Antarctic transpost)
Student: No, ones you can use in an organization or in training.
Me: (thoughts of ships frittering away) Ah, games and activities to start a group session
We use MSN Messenger at Murdoch Uni. Took us a year but we just discovered that the “allow list” (not the contact list but the list of people who can see us) holds only 600. The list is stored at Microsoft and we cannot delete people from it (unless they delete us from their contacts first) Anyone who tries to join is being bounced away. Still no solution after 4 days.
Haha icebreakers! 🙂 The cold kind are more fun than the warm and fuzzy ones, IMHO..
Didn’t know that about MSN – I wonder if we are going to have a problem. Might have to let the IT guys know about that limit…