Head Tale

So tomorrow is RPL’s annual staff conference and I’ll be receiving my five year pin which officially marks this as the job I’ve held the longest in my adult life since convocating with an undergrad degree in 1996 (although to be fair, I’ve been in four different positions over five years so I’m keeping up my Gen X reputation for frequently changing jobs!)

Here’s the summary: (hard to believe how easy it is to reduce 15 years of your life to a few lines of text.)

1997-2001 – Sask Publishers Group (3.5 years)
2001-2004 – Writers Guild of Alberta (3 years)
2004-2005 – Sask Publishers Group (1 year, 4.5 cumulative)
2006 – (Return to School at University of Western Ontario)
2007-2008 – Southeast Regional Library (18 month contract)
2008-2013 – Regina Public Library (5 years)

Anyhow, to celebrate the big milestone, I thought I’d make a list of…

5 Memorable Moments from My Time at RPL

1. April Fool’s “In the Loop” – RPL has a weekly internal e-newsletter called “In the Loop”.  A few years ago, a former colleague came up with the idea to do a fake version for April Fool’s Day.  I can’t remember the exact joke but I do know there was a photo of me huddled under my desk, curled in a ball to illustrate whatever joke we were making! 😉   Too bad that idea didn’t continue – it was a lot of fun.
2. Canadian Library HR Summit – less than a month after starting at RPL, via a recommendation of a former prof, I got invited to be a “youth blogger” at a summit of various top managers, professors and consultants from libraries across Canada.  That was pretty cool to be in a room where it felt like you were part of charting the future of libraries in Canada.
3. Chair Races – Here’s a recent one.  A bunch of new office chairs were received by various units at Central Library a few months ago and someone suggested that we “break them in” by holding chair races on the linoleum in front of the main circulation desk.  I have photos and videos of the races but won’t post them to protect the innocent! 😉
4. Midnight Swim – I attended the CLA conference a couple times during my first few years at RPL.  These conferences were always full of memorable moments – professional, personal and otherwise.  One that stands out is deciding to go for a midnight swim with a few colleagues in the middle of the night after an evening of “socializing”.
5. “Conversations are where the real work happens” – I can’t name one particular example over any other but I’ve had so many fun and memorable interactions with patrons and other staff over the years which has been a real highlight.  A former manager once told me “Conversations are where the real work happens” and I thought that was pretty insightful and has proven to be true over the past five years.

Anyhow, those are the first few that popped into my head.  Here’s to the next five years and further memorable moments!