Friday, September 27, 2013

Miss Information is annoyed away from work

Miss Information is having the most annoying vacation ever. She wanted to have a little time away from the library, read books in coffee shops, go to the gym and generally regroup.

 Here's what she did instead.

 Monday: spent the day waiting for the phone company guy to come and fix her phone so it can receive, not just make, calls. At one point the phone company guy needed to go into the basement and look for wires, which turned out to be inaccessibly buried in the ceiling. While they were looking, Miss Information noticed that the hose-thing that attaches the hot water tap to the washing machine was leaking so...

 Tuesday: Miss Information spent the day trying to remove a very corroded nut from the end of the hose-thing. The nut, which has probably been there since the Salem witch hunts, has a crack (hence the leak), but resists any effort to remove it. 

 Wednesday: see Tuesday but with added swearing and more toxic material

 Thursday: Miss Information is woken up by the dudes who are going to waterproof her basement. After they'd dug everything possible to dig, they packed off and Miss Information headed to the cafe to do some reading. It went well. She did notice a wasp flying around where she was sitting and wondered briefly about capturing it and taking it to freedom. Then she thought briefly about it maybe not being a good idea to leave her bag open on the window ledge. Then she read her book and forgot about the wasp and the bag. Eventually all good things come to an end and she decided to leave the coffee shop and head to the grocery store. She reached into her bag for her car keys and, don't say you didn't see this coming, was stung by a wasp. Miss Information has been bitten by many things but this was her first wasp and it really hurt. By the time she finished her grocery shopping (because a little insect bite isn't going to slow her down), her finger was swollen up like a cigar. Oh, and because Miss Information had felt like going to her favourite out-of-town coffee shop she was now way far from home and in pain. She did manage to get home where she spent the rest of the day with a baking soda paste on her finger. Fortunately, there was a Breaking Bad marathon on so it wasn't like she wasn't entertained. 

 Friday: Finger is no longer swollen but still hurts. Oh, and good news! The construction guys have found some other places to dig! Unfortunately one of those places was a bee-home. Bees have been living under Miss Information's front yard for years and now their hive (?) has been destroyed. Miss Information feels terrible about this. She worries quite a lot about colony collapse disorder but never thought she'd be directly responsible for homeless bees. Although Miss Information knows that bees don't usually sting, they do seem to be quite annoyed about this development and are flying around looking menacing.

Fortunately, Miss Information returns to work on Tuesday and gets away from all this peaceful home stuff.

posted by Miss Information @ 2:08 PM 1 comments

Monday, September 09, 2013

Miss Information is annoyed by bad directions

Miss Information works in a complicated library. Before she came here and she worked at branches that only had one floor, she used to discourage people from coming here. If they insisted, she gave them quite specific instructions about how to find what they needed but given the way people come into the branch, she now realizes that those instructions were a complete waste of breath and that she should have spent her energy trying to become psychic instead. 

 Miss Information has a line of customers and is in the middle of something. A young and impatient woman tosses a question at her as she passes. 

"Where do I pick up my hold?" she asks.
"Over there," Miss Information replies, pointing in the general direction of the pick up shelf. The reality is that picking up a hold is far more complicated than that, but the woman didn't seem to want to wait her turn, so let her figure that out. 

 She does figure it out pretty quickly and comes back. Fortunately, Miss Information is now free to spend some time working it out. There are many reasons why a hold might be in the building--somewhere--but not on the pick up shelf. It just takes a bit of effort to figure out which reason it is and where the book might be.

"Let's see," Miss Information begins. "Did you get a call from our automated system or an email? Or did you maybe call us today and talk to someone here?"

 The woman, who has the air of someone parked illegally, is impatient. "I was at Colossus Library downtown. They called here. They said it was going to be at the desk! It's probably behind you on that shelf! Look on that shelf!" 

 It's true, Miss Information has a pick up shelf right behind her. The books on this shelf are usually the ones that have been left by people who have forgotten their library cards. Still, Miss Information looks. Nope. The only books here are picture books.

Miss Information explains that the book might still be on the originating floor and if the woman might give her a tiny hint about what the book is, she will direct her to the correct part of the library.  What sort of book is it?

 "Computers," the woman snarls. 
"Oh, ok, most of the computer related books are on the 3rd floor but some are not. Was it a particular software or program?"

 The woman seems really incensed now. 

 "Jeez!" she says. "Autocad! It's autocad for Christ sakes!"

 Miss Information knows that autocad books are, in fact, on the 2nd floor but she is annoyed with the woman's attitude and decides to look it up in the library catalogue just for fun. As she is typing, the woman speaks again.

"Oh, for God's sake! They told me it would be at the desk on the second floor! Isn't this the second floor?"

 Um. No. The floor with the entrance is rarely, in Miss Information's experience, the second floor. She directs the woman to the stairs and she returns to her other customers. 

 See, there's a lesson here. If you are told to pick up your book on the second floor, the only question you should have when you enter the building is: how do I get to the second floor? This would have saved the woman so much time and would have ended up being way less annoying for Miss Information, too.




posted by Miss Information @ 11:52 AM 2 comments

Miss Information is annoyed

Miss Information returned from vacation last week. Her first day back was the day after Labour Day, so it was a complete disaster. Many of Miss Information's co-workers had taken the day off because they had bothered to look at the calendar and realized that no one should work on the day after a Monday closure. Clever bastards.

The next day, Miss Information was almost killed on the commute by a psychopathic taxi driver who thought it would be a smart move to change lanes on top of her. When she got to work she learned that much of the surrounding areas were without water which meant there was no coffee at the coffee shop. Miss Information has a supply of tea bags but she was stuck on the desk until 11 am and the entire day was a write-off by that point.

posted by Miss Information @ 11:25 AM 0 comments