Piece Five

There are many memories of time spent behind that desk. Most are fragments. Like, one day someone left their ID card. We tossed it over to the morning announcement folks (who we saw *live* every day, like it was special?) who then said, "...Um, someone left their ID in the library?"

Us: "It's an ID card. It has a name on it."

Them: "Oh, yeah! -----, please come down to the library!"

Ehhh...you're supposed to sent lost articles with names to the main office. Oops. All the announcements are tapped and saved. Double oops.

Another time, we attempted to speed up our work by scanning the ID card (which was required at time of checking out materials) in hopes that it would sort of cross reference. [I can't remember exactly which key combos to hit, but there was one to get into the Check Out. Then the last name must be entered, enough of it to find the somewhat-correct area of the thousand or so names.*] It didn't work. Turns out, the computer system was pretty--sadly, sadly, sadly--basic. If you weren't entered at registration, you were screwed. They also NEVER took out people who left before 8th grade/during 8th grade. (Yes, our fun was accessing files of people who left! Which pretty much meant we knew their advisory room. Which they were no longer in.)

More tomorrow.

* I had numerous incidents because of this feature. People spell last names weird. Oh, how many hours have I spent asking, "Can you spell that? First name again? Uhh, who is your advisory teacher?" (Which also came up along with grade level. Thank God. We had some triple occurrences of names.) Also, there was this one time that I could not spell this guy/girl's last name for crap. The possible first name to this mangled bunch of consonants was completely asexual in my opinion. He/she did not has his/her ID, either. That. Was. Awkward.