Yesterday I had to work for 12 hours, and I admit I was very whiny about it going in. I know some of you have jobs where working that many hours is par for the course. I am happy I don’t have your jobs. I usually put in my 8 hours and am out. I like it that way. Anyway as per my normal Thursday night schedule on the reference desk I had to work until 9:30 last night, but that usually means that I don’t come in to work until 1:30. However, a committee I’m on scheduled a meeting from 10-1 yesterday morning pretty last minute so there was no way for me to get out of my Thursday night shift. I was really not looking forward to the day and was annoyed by the whole thing. However, the day turned out better than I ever could have expected and didn’t feel that long at all. I’ve certainly had much shorter work days that felt like they dragged on way longer than this one.

My morning meeting went very well. I think we got a lot of accomplished and I’m happy with what we came up with. I also got a nice surprise at that meeting when they provided us lunch. No one said anything about us having lunch, so that was a very pleasant surprise that meant I didn’t have to scrounge for lunch somewhere on my drive between the meeting and my library. When I got to the library I was also really happy that there was an actual parking spot for me to park in. I was worried because we suspend our pay parking during finals, which means students immediately start parking in every legal and semi-legal spot. Thus when I don’t come in to work until the afternoon on the day I work the evening shift during finals week it is often extremely difficult to find a space to park. It sort of stresses me out every semester, but yesterday was no problem shockingly.

I also got to turn in a big report that I’ve been working on with an internal library committee, so it was nice to get that off my plate at least for the time being. And I got asked if I would accept a 3 year appointment to a committee for the Association of College and Research Libraries, so that was nice little ego boost as well and something I’m happy to do. During finals it’s usually not that busy on the reference desk. There may be lots of students in the library, but generally they are studying or working on papers they’ve already done the research for. People must be slacking this semester because last night was by far the busiest night I’ve ever had on the reference desk during finals. I had lots of research questions, so it helped the time pass quickly at the end of the day and made me feel like there was a point to being there.

And really given my previous comments this is going to make it sound like I obsess over parking a lot, which I really don’t but I was happy to get home last night and get a spot on the street right in front of my house. Usually when I come home at 9:45 on Thursday nights I have to park a couple blocks away from my house. It’s not a big deal, but I won’t lie that I always love the rare occasions when I can snag a spot right by my house.

And now today I got to leave work at noon since I worked long yesterday. It’s a gorgeous day out and it’s Friday, so all in all yesterday was a great day that lead to a happy day today.