A Typical Day at Work

I've realized that my typical day at work is full of little cultural nuances that I, at this point, take wholly for granted. Here's a little exposition for those interested. I had a student today looking for "a typical day in the life of a Sudanese child" as a topic, and I thought, usually our typical days don't seem very eventful to ourselves, only to other people far away.

This morning I got to work at around 8am, filled my water bottle from one of the free water dispensers, and sat down at the reference desk for my two hour shift. During my shift, I was asked questions such as, "Miss, can you help me scan this pile of receipts?" And, "Miss, I need information about transactional leadership for a 30-minute oral presentation." That one was fun. We went through the electronic databases, did some article searching, found a few books on leadership, ordered a few more books from other colleges, and photocopied a few pages from some of the business encyclopedias and dictionaries in the reference collection.

During the morning lulls, I flipped through the recent editions of New York Times Book Review looking for new and exciting titles to buy. I found a few, including some fantastic-looking full-color photographic volumes on the sea creatures of the deep and Islamic gardens.

After that, I left the reference desk and read some e-mail before having a bi-weekly meeting with the boss. We talked about collection development, philosophy, information literacy initiatives, future actions, and my failure to properly clean up the magazine area last time I closed at night.

Then it was straight on to the bake sale. I was trying to get to the cafeteria for lunch, but I couldn't get through the mob of bake-sale tables and students gang-rushing me to buy their baked goods. In the end, I lunched on weenie wraps and fruit juice, all for the good cause of supporting student activities.

After lunch I did a bit of cruising the stacks for biographies that need to be in the biographies area and not in the general stacks, weeded some relevant collection areas, and started gathering materials together for our "Eid Read" promotion - a big display of beautiful books that people need to borrow to read during the Eid holiday (Dec 2-14.) Mmmm.... holiday.

The bulk of my afternoon was spent in an English class observing teaching to better improve my own teaching. A joyous way to spend time, it consists of chatting with the students and asking the English teacher useful things like, "How many new vocabulary words can a person reasonably absorb in a week?" She says 20 in a week is what the studies say. This is of utmost importance for my study of Arabic. Everytime I exceed 20 new words in a week, I can feel like a genius. The whole thing is very nice for teaching practice though, if you're a learn-by-example person like me.

The end of the day is following up on e-mail, consulting with colleagues on pressing issues like who will drive us to the conference next week and what kinds of books we must buy and when we will meet to develop a presentation to the management team, and working on my own piece for cross-system projects like our big reading promotion program next year. It's sort of in the strategic panning/development stage at this point, lots of gathering input and compiling documents and formulating goals, et cetera.

The walk home from work is more and more pleasant these days with the temperature nice and breezy. Our streets are all paved now in our neighborhood so I didn't even have to get dusty, and there's plenty of juice in the fridge for after-work libations to go with language study. I've got about 2 hours or more to myself after work before Dan-O gets home, so I'm spending that learning Arabic and Spanish and writing home and reading the news. My next exposition will be on the presence or absence of Christmas paraphernalia in malls.