Head Tale

Today is the one year anniversary of my starting at RPL (an occasion so auspicious, I commemorated it by posting a link to an album of mellowed-out cover versions of the Footloose soundtrack
on this day one year ago!).  Still, this last year has gone in a flash
and it's hard to believe it's been twelve months already. 



Here are a few random highlights from the past year…

– dressing as a “Human Whiteboard” for Halloween and getting co-workers to sign the whiteboard (a white t-shirt) with their favourite books and/or authors.



– taking the initiative to create a staff directory for our Intranet
that had photos of all staff members on it (partly out of selfish
reasons – I knew I'd be working with lots of different staff members
throughout the year and it was a quick way to familiarize myself with
everyone.  I've had lots of compliments on it from others who find it
equally useful – almost as many as the number of complaints I initially
got from people nervous about having their photo anywhere near the
Internet.  Interestingly, those two groups have on at least one
occasion been the same person!) 



– I'm not sure if this had to do more with my blogging, my connections
from library school or my new job which *is* an HR job (probably a bit
of all three!) but being asked to participate as one of the “youth bloggers” at the Canadian Library HR Summit in Ottawa last October was very cool!



– it wasn't as much about my current job as my other online activities
and connections from library school that got me another invite to a
conference but RPL did fund me to attend so I'll include it here as
well – being asked to present to the Emerging Technologies group at their CLA pre-conference was awesome!



– writing a weekly column along with a couple colleagues for our internal newsletter
during the past ten months which alternately talked about innovative
practices at other libraries or things that were happening at RPL was
great fun and a nice throwback to the days when I did a lot more
freelance writing than I do now.



– I did some pretty heavy lobbying for the Ryan Meili campaign at work
(you don't have to work too hard to read between the lines of a column I wrote for the Sask Library Association's journal about advocacy in the workplace),
especially within our union, and that often got some big pushback (from
co-workers rather than my boss or other managers thankfully) but also
got lots of quiet support (having a few co-workers bring me cheques to
support the Meili Money Bomb was particularly gratifying.)  I don't
think I ever told the story of the one event that made me realise,
perhaps more than anything else, that Ryan's result against Link was
going to be a lot closer than most people suspected!  I won't tell that
here but promise that I will someday…



– Betting a co-worker one dollar that I wouldn't have to switch offices
during a recent reorganization that happened at RPL.  I lost and moved
into my new location almost exactly a week ago.

– The RPL Kid's Christmas Party was a highlight of the year for getting to know my co-workers not just in their work roles but as parents and grandparents too.



– Realising my job title could be shortened to “OD Specialist”



– Asking if that could be printed on my business cards. 



– Again, not exactly work-related but deciding to take the bus instead
of driving and paying for downtown parking seemed like a big decision at
the time but has turned out to be a great choice.  I get so much
reading and other work done on the bus each day that the commute
(roughly half an hour each way) sails by.  (Shea asked me the other
day:  “You don't look up?  Ever?”  “Nope.  Because if you do, there
will be a bus person who wants to talk to you!”   I defer to Michelle L. who is the master of the librarian-on-the-bus anecdote.) 



– oh, and since I'm the master of cheese and sentimentality on this
blog, I will also say that I'm looking forward to the next year to come
and some of the exciting projects the upcoming months will bring!