Work Frustration

I'm sure that I am not the only one who is rather upset by the small amout of progress that the construction crews on campus are showing. For those involved in theater, God only knows when that will be finished, and if they would get their butts out of the Field House, we may have a few less internet problems since they won't be there to cut the cord with their back hoe. And of course, if they would hurry up and finish, everyone would be able to get into the library again rather than sharing the circulation room with everybody and their cousin.

But the problems with the library construction are causing me particular problems, such as, because the construction crews were so incompentent this summer, we of the library staff are forced to do part of their job for them. I can tell you right now that this is not what I signed up for when I applied for the job. On the nights that we work, we are downstairs in the basement shifting books from one shelf to another for at least an hour. Keep in mind that the basement is not air conditioned and those books are extremely heavy.

Tonight we started moving the last of the books that were upstairs to the basement. While I was just pushing carts from the upstairs into the elevator and then into the basement it wasn't too bad, but then I started emptying the carts in the basement. I can tell you right now that a short person and a very tall bookshelf do not go together, but I filled at least twenty bookshelves tonight, and I probably sweat off five pounds. Three separate times I had a number of heavy books nearly fall on my head, I fell off the stool about ten times, and all and all nearly passed out from heat after an hour.

The thing is, it wouldn't be so bad if we had known that we would be doing all this. If we had been informed that moving books was a garuntee for when we came back, then I wouldn't have liked it, but I would have accepted it. But that is not the case here. Thanks to the construction crew deciding to take a whole month off without informing anybody, and also screwing several things up because they weren't communicating with everybody else, we are three monthes behind schedule and the whole staff is doing work that we weren't supposed to do in the first place. To be perfectly frank, it pisses me off. And it's not my bosses fault at all, and I don't blame her in the least. I blame the construction crew entirely, and I also blame the other construction crews for all the other problems on campus this year. Whether it's right or not doesn't really matter at this point.