Head Tale

Freedom to Read Week is coming up from February 26 to March 3 and I volunteered to create the relevant display at Central for the next few weeks leading up to FTRW.  (One co-worker was impressed and said “Don’t do too good of a job or they’ll make you do all the displays!”)

Anyhow, that made me think of a list:

MY FIVE FAVOURITE MEMORIES FROM MY FIRST THREE YEARS AT RPL (er, of the ones I can publicly write about.  Misadventures at CLA 2010 and other fun times will remain undocumented until my memoirs come out!)

1.  The daily morning staff meetings we had each day when I was in HR.  These informal get-togethers with my HR colleagues where we talked, not only about work but about what was going on in our lives, the movies we’d watched, the trips we’d taken, etc. – did more for team-building than anything I’d experienced previously in any workplace and taught me a lot about how to be a successful manager.  I suspect some people saw us chatting about stuff like our favourite comedians or a new recipe and thought we were wasting times but we liked to say we were the only unit in the entire library who had open-door staff meetings – another useful learning!
2. Wearing a white t-shirt as my “Human White Board” costume for Halloween 2008 and asking staff to write their favourite books on it!
3. Planning the 2011 RPL Staff Conference.  Even though it had some challenges with a completely new planning committee and some struggles in terms of defining our overall purpose, it felt like the culmination of the previous three years’ experience into a staff day that was pretty seamless and successful for the most part.  The day was capped by one of my single most memorable moments as well:  At the end of the day, we were going to do a staff photo on the stairs at Queensbury Convention Centre.  With all staff waiting, the ladder for our photographer didn’t show up.  I raced to find a maintenance guy and a ladder and we quickly carried it out, only to find the regular stairs blocked by ~200 RPL staff.  “Does the escalator switch to down?” I asked.  “No, we only have an up escalator,” he replied then gestured at the escalator “You wanna try it?”  Our Library Director overheard this exchange and I heard him say “I’m not sure that’s safe…”  “Don’t worry, Jeff.  I’m off the clock!” I replied then me and the maintenance guy sprinted down the up escalator, the ladder held under our arms, in what I was told looked like a slow motion silent movie to the people on the stairs.  We made it down without serious injury (and to a round of cheers!) though our momentum nearly propelled us through the glass door at the bottom of the escalator when we hit solid ground! 😉
4. It’s funny but one of the silliest, smallest things I take the most pride in is leading a push to make our staff directory have photos rather than just names.  That’s also led to an ability for our Marketing unit to post photos of new or departing staff in our weekly internal e-newsletter and the photos have also been useful for other purposes as well – slideshows for new and long-term staff at our annual staff conference is the one that springs to mind.
5. And as mentioned above, creating a display of some of my favourite books, DVD’s and CD’s for Freedom to Read Week 2012…