10 Hour Day

I confess to being grumbly pots when I realized that I’d be at work for 10 hours today (vs. the usual 8.5). Since 40+% of the town was still out of power, the decision was made to be open 90 minutes longer four days this week and show two films a day (I had to learn how to set up the second film). By the time I started seeing the tweets stating that the cops were allowing people to mark on the main road next to the library, I realized how much people really needed the library and warmed up to my surprise!long day. Later, people were tweeting and telling us in person how grateful they were that we were here. One interesting comment was someone who said that it was good we were staying late since we owed them for the hours we were closed for the hurricane. I understand on one level what they mean, but at the same time… very strange. Their tone reminded me of retail though which gave me pause.

The best/worst part of today was that the library’s internal email system was down. This meant that I got to work mostly undisturbed as I tried to finish the technology class plans up on the website. When I needed to communicate with someone, I’d tweet them or go see them. I then made probably the bad short-term decision to ask my boss for advice on how to accomplish a PHP trick. He gave me some marching orders that took me away from the mostly done scheduling to go to work trying to tweak the appearance/functions via PHP or by writing a module. Cue me looking up how different pages on the website were done (PHP $print from the database vs. tables written as tpl.php files and then called in by a $print command), how to write a custom module, dealing with the super slow real website server (a 4.0 kb file takes two minutes to copy), and then me checking out PHP books to try figuring out the correct code when online searching gets me no where. I tried to work on this when I went to the computer lab, but we were so hopping that I couldn’t get any further on it. Plus that computer hates trying to connect to the library’s website servers. I was really hoping that the Webform Events module creator would have fixed the event registration limit issue so I could just use that instead.

I also got to spend sometime today exchanging information with my coworkers which was fun. Yay for foraging relationships! The fun task for tomorrow will be registering for Internet Librarian.