student teaching week nine a

Clearly, the week is not over yet, but I am going to go ahead and start my posting for this week because I have a good story. Here is the sequence of events:

1) About a week ago, maintenance people came into the library, told us they had finally gotten around to putting in the security cameras they'd started planning after the shooting at Central, and asked if they could put one right above the circulation desk. We said that would be fine.

2) They worked on the cameras all week, stringing cables all up and down the sprawling school campus behind the ceiling tiles and other hard-to-reach places, getting things finished up Friday afternoon.

3) Just before time to leave on Friday, the catalog got cranky and decided it couldn't find the server. No worries, it'll rest over the weekend and feel better; technology does that sometimes.

4) First thing monday morning, not only does the catalog not work, but neither does anything else on the network. No catalog searches, no checking books in or out, no AR tests, no internet access.

5) After not being able to figure out where there's a loose connection or something that needs rebooted, Carole calls the school's techie guy. He hems and haws all over it for a while, then calls for backup. They hem and haw over it for a while, then call for more backup. More hemming and hawing occur, stretched over several hours and several rounds of backup.

6) Turns out they're able to determine that the camera installation guys cut a fiber optic cable somewhere in the ceiling while stringing their own cables. But they are NOT able to determine where the cut is. They go home, perhaps to think about it some more, perhaps just to take care of other requests. We keep having no network.

7) All day tuesday, various piles of maintenance men with various blunt instruments stream in and out of the library while our book fair is going on. They finally find the cut and get rid of the old stuff, then work for a long time getting new cables strung. The last step is to "terminate" the cables, which we believe means to plug the ends into all the places they should go, but apparently another pile of maintenance men does that. We keep having no network.

To be continued?! We're hoping they can finish it tomorrow, but in the meantime, GMS circulates like 150 books a day. We can check out by having them write down names and barcodes on paper, which is no big deal to them because Carole has them do that with every checkout anyway to avoid the "I never checked that out" argument (though it'll be a big deal when we have to go back and enter every one of those by hand), but our book drop is about to burst because we can check nothing in, nor shelve it for others to use. It's just fortunate that book fair is this week, because without catalog, circulation, AR, or internet, the library is relatively crippled for normal use.

Good times.