caerula's Diaryland Diary

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jobhood

I very rarely complain about work. And I don't think I've whined about it at all here, so I'm going to now.

First I need to get my bag of Sour Skittles open...

Ok. You know, I think sour skittles are the greatest candy innovation ever. Then they had to go and replace the lime with sour apple. Yuck, who wants that? But I found a bag at Krogers last night left over from before, so it still has lime. Yay.

Anyway, work. I work at an "information company." If you've ever written a thesis or dissertation and fretted about getting the margins right because the stupid company microfilming it is so damn specific about it...that's who pays my bills. But I'm not in the dissertation department, so don't yell at me.

I'm a cataloger in Research Collections. That means that generally I sit and look at microfilm all day and create OCLC catalog records for it. And if you don't know what OCLC is, then you're lucky. Lately, instead of cataloging, we've been reviewing old records for mistakes and correcting them. At least in theory. We (the 3 other catalogers and I) are not exactly clear on what we're supposed to be doing at any given time, as Grandma Boss keeps changing our priorities, since she keeps getting contradictory dictums from the higher ups.

The latest is a project which involves printing out prooflists for a bazillion records in our inhouse database, which theoretically are linked to the text and image files and which the whole point is for universities and whoever else wants 50,000 records of early english books, pamphlets, etc, to buy and upload into their systems. So, and here I quote, "the records have to be perfect." Now if you know anything about library cataloging, you know the records are NEVER perfect. Cataloging is surprisingly subjective, considering it's the only thing that provides access to specific books. So anyway, we've been working feverishly this week to get these corrections in. We're talking tens of thousands of records here, divided between 4 people.

This is why my updates have been infrequent and short this week.

Then late yesterday, we discovered that Tech has to go and do an update of the database. This involves clearing EVERY RECORD and uploading them all back in. You got it: all the work we've done will be completely erased, and we have to DO IT ALL AGAIN. So I spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out the best way to create a report of only the records that have been changed, so that we have a saved copy and at least have something to refer to. And no, they can't be uploaded back in after the update, because all of the changes are in the development database, which is then saved and uploaded to the product database. They aren't permanant until they are saved in production, and they haven't been saved because of the pending update. Erghh.

And now we get to futz around for two days because nothing can be done on the database while the update is going on. So theoretically we're working from the hard copy prooflists, trying to figure out what records have errors without access to the actual complete record.

All this is because the women in charge of our department, although a lovely soul, knows next to nothing about cataloging, and told us to begin with that it would be much easier to do the corrections inhouse than online in OCLC. That would have been true, had Tech not needed to update. If we'd done the corrections online, however, they would now be saved in a datebase somewhere in Ohio, to be safely sent to us. Oh well.

It's annoying. It really is. But I'm not one to get too upset about stuff like this. I get pissed at first, and then I get over it. One of my coworkers has a similar attitude. It'll get done, it's our job to do it, and if it takes longer than anticipated, well, that's managements problem. We have job security, and we'll get paid whatever happens.

The other two catalogers have done nothing but whine and bitch, and make Grandma Boss feel bad about it, and talk about how this could have been avoided and how inept everyone is around here. Well, I don't think that's necessarily true, although there is a noticable lack of communication between departments, and yes it probably could have been avoided but it wasn't, so we have to deal with it.

Huh. I guess I'm not as frustrated about this as I was yesterday, since I ended up defending instead of ranting as I'd planned. When it comes to work, I think I'm pretty much a roll with the punches sort of person, happy to do what's expected of me and occasionally a bit more. I do like my job, most of the time, and since it's the highest paying job I've ever had, and has the most relaxed atmosphere I've ever worked in, I don't have much to complain about. After the nightmare that was last fall, it's such a relief to come here, do my job, and go home. I spend entirely too much time in between on the Internet, but I've noticed that despite that I get as much done if not more than my coworkers. Makes me wonder what I could do if I actually applied myself, but not enough to find out.

8:58 a.m. - 2001-07-19

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