My last split Friday

I've been leading a double life on Fridays here at Widener - by morning I'm a mild-mannered cataloger in the Modern Greek division, ordering books, paying invoices, and cleaning up serials records wherever and whenever they may go astray (which is often in the case of Greek publications); but in the afternoon and evenings, I'm Circulation Guy, starting precisely at 3:30 p.m.

Therein of course lies the rub, because on account of the big clock at Circulation running ever faster there is now close to a ten-minute differential between the Modern Greek office's and the Circ Desk's "official time". Since the scheduling of the latter is a veritable house of cards - especially now that the end of the semester has come, and with it massive student employee defections in the name of finishing term papers and cramming for finals - I usually short the former the ten minutes or so in order to be up at the desk and ready to roll a few minutes before their 3:30. This usually works just fine, except for the instances where I'm deep in the middle of something cataloging-related that I don't quite want to leave unfinished over the weekend, lest I forget what the hell it was I was doing and have to start from scratch the following Tuesday.

Today was one of those days - we had gotten a box full of gift books from one of our publishers, and having only just learned how to process gifts today I thought I'd try and knock them all off while the training was still fresh. Big mistake. Although I did my best to get to the bottom of the pile, as the clock neared 3:30 I still had one to go and a couple of problem items I had set aside for later. Out of time! I had done my best, right? But now I was ten minutes "late" for my shift upstairs, and I didn't even have anything to show for it.

Oh, well. It is perhaps fitting that I went overtime for the Modern Greek job this week, as this is my last Friday that will be split thus between the two positions - and seeing that it was the cataloging position that was the impetus for me to take my Big Leap from working at the Med School Library to coming over here to Cambridge, I owed the Greeks that much, if not much, much more.