Happy Social Distancing Staycation, Everyone!

[the_other_sandy]

After first closing to the public, then cutting staff down to half days, my library finally decided to close completely for the next two weeks.

Part of me wants to be all responsible and do dishes and stuff, but the rest of me really just wants to make a dent in my Netflix queue.

Comments

[bibliofran]

We didn't go through all of the steps -- straight from extra cleaning and "maybe we should be planning for more" to closed for three weeks. They were originally thinking about two weeks, but the deep-cleaning company can't come until March 31.

I have some work that I can do from home to keep from getting too far behind, so I'm planning to work a little each day. I also made a list of stuff I want to get done at home and fun stuff I want to do, so I can try to do a mix. I don't want to spend the whole time cleaning the house and Being Responsible, but I also don't want to do nothing the whole time.

That said, you have two weeks. You can spend a day relaxing with Netflix and still have plenty of time to be responsible.

[the_other_sandy]

I mean, it sounds like we went through a lot of steps, but it was very time-compressed. Early last week, we canceled all of our upcoming programs through next month. On Friday, we were told we would be closed to the public for two weeks starting Monday. On Saturday, I got a call from my manager to say we would be working half our regular hours. On Monday morning, we were told our schedules would be split by desk location so that every other person would work mornings and the rest afternoons to maintain social distance. About an hour later, we were told we would still be working half our regular hours, but we'd be working from home.

The thing is, I can't work from home. When we migrated, we moved from Horizon to Polaris. Polaris has a web-based client that you can do almost everything with, but you can't merge or edit bib records. For that you need the desktop client, which IT said they couldn't give me on a laptop for site licensing reasons. Without the desktop client, there is no part of my job I can do. Then I was told that we'd be watching training videos at home. I can't watch 19 hours of training videos a week for two weeks, so I asked about personal time--which I have in spades--and I was allowed to take vacation days instead, so I'm a free bird until the end of March. No decisions yet on what we're doing for April. Our managers are supposed to call us closer to the 31st.

[bibliofran]

Oh, yikes! I thought we were bad. On Wednesday, the Safety Committee talked about making some sort of infectious diseases procedure and set up a special meeting for this coming Wednesday. On Thursday, I was looking at all of the libraries talking about closing and pushed to meet the next day instead. Friday morning, our Board vice-president asked the acting director what he thought about closing for two weeks, starting Monday, and the managers began frantically planning everything we would need to do to make that happen. Friday afternoon, the Board president finally got back to us and said that the library would close at our usual time that night and not re-open until April 6. Of course, by the time we heard that, almost everyone in my department had already left for the day, so I had to call around and make sure they all got the message. The managers are scheduled to have a conference call follow-up on March 30 to discuss the situation at that point. Whee!

We talked about having people work from home, but there are so many people who can't that it would be ridiculous. Leaving aside the problem of setting up computer access, what are the shelvers and circulation clerks going to do? For people who need/want to work from home, our IT set up a VPN so we can connect to our work computers rather than trying to deal with installing all the relevant software at home.

I could handle an hour or two of training videos, but four hours a day for two weeks?? [shudder] I'd be ready to gnaw off a limb. I'm glad they let you use vacation time instead.

[the_other_sandy]

With our IT guy, I'm never sure how much of 'it can't done' means it can't be done and how much means it can be done but he doesn't want to. I can't bring stuff home to catalog (I'm not carrying all those books up two flights of stairs), but I have a lot of database maintenance projects I could do if I had access to the client module. But hey, cross stitching to Netflix works too.