DAY 20: The Penultimate Shift

“And now, the end is near and so I face the final curtain.” For some reason I couldn’t stop singing and humming Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” as I go through the events of today. Maybe it’s because of the fact that the first lines seem to mirror what would be happening tomorrow too perfectly. Today is the first among the many lasts. It would be our final full day shift as tomorrow, we could opt to leave at 2:00 PM as we would already have fulfilled the requirement by that time. Just two more days to go, I can definitely power through these. 

JULY 13, 2017 – THURSDAY

We began our shift with the usual routine, we sign in and prepare ourselves for the hours to come. At the beginning of the day, I was tasked to continue indexing the book of poems I mentioned yesterday. It was quite tedious to go through all of them but it was also fun at the same time as I could get to look at the works of Filipino overseas workers. I was able to finish this after two hours and then I picked up another book to index. 

To my surprise, it was also a book of poems. As I begin to input data, I noticed that there were continuous error messages being displayed by the iLib because my accession number have “already been used”. I was confident that it wasn’t because those numbers were assigned to me but upon looking back at the list, I noticed that there have been some sort of mix-up because Edward read the number wrong. We decided to settle this by assigning ranges of number to each other. By the end of the day shift, I was not able to finish my second book. 

They See Me Rollin'

By the time our afternoon shift began, we all knew we wouldn’t be doing the same thing we did before as our coordinators in the PM sessions like to keep us moving and avoid doing the same thing for hours. I was tasked to process books by removing preservation copies of resources to be added to the shelves. Afterwards, Tricia and I have covered books with plastic while we chatted to entertain ourselves. It was fun to be able to talk while working, it was also very reminiscent of our first task in our first station. 

Ma’am Reslyn also asked me to move the books from the back shelves to the ones across the hall and inside the room. I made four rounds of going back and forth, picking up books and placing them on a shelf inside. While I was waiting for the rest of her requests, I was also shelving books and very rarely, take page requests. I think today was the most I have shelved books as I have returned almost 70 books to their original shelves. This is what I continued doing for the last hour while Edward and I talked about how we both wouldn’t be in the library that time tomorrow. It was satisfying to imagine.

We've Got Work To Do

I am very fortunate that my final full day of shift went swimmingly. It wasn’t the best day I ever had in our OJT days but it sure wasn’t a bad way to end my almost fulfilled requirement. As we leave the Filipiniana for the afternoon, we leave with laughter, memories, skills and most importantly, a greater appreciation for Filipino-published creations. 

Let’s just see if I can borrow a book here in the near future. 

- Sam, That New Librarian