New Job

I realise it’s been ages since I threw up a blog post, and since I’ve now been working for a month, this post is running late enough to satisfy even First Great Western, but there you go.

So, yes. JTA now works from 8-4, Monday to Friday, and now earns [%Maths_Result] an hour!

It’s quite fun. I work in a warehouse, which is strangely reminiscent of the temp job I had working the night shift over at Halo Foods in Tywyn, except that there are rather fewer vats of lo-fat chocolate, and rather more books. But I see about the same amount of natural light, so it’s not as different as perhaps it might be.

The work itself is pretty good, and I’ve got into a nice workflow pattern in which I catalogue* a book, stick it into a pile, and get it given back to me to fix because I left out the author affiliation note and forgot to correct the publishing date to 2011. It’s demoralising to have that sort of mistake pointed out (especially after the way Gail used to bully me into the ground for missing out semicolons back in 2006), but it does help to know which bits I need to be double-checking, and the more consistent errors do seem to be changing, so I think I’m getting back into the swing of things well enough.

The people that I’m working with are nice; last week I started one day with a discussion about Brief Encounter (General consensus: it’s a good film but hard to overlook the fact that Alec is an unprincipled shit trying to knacker everything for Laura) had a mid-morning chat about typefaces (I am still in a minority in liking serifed fonts; I blame my lousy eyes), and a last-thing-on-Friday lecture about How To Be Topp In Rome (Answer: it helps to be Augustus, it really does not help to be someone who is a rival to Augustus). So that is all quite fun.

The other thing worth mentioning is that I work on an AS-400 system. It is awesome. Green-on-black interface with no curves. It reminds me a bit of Heritage III, only clunkier. Mostly this is awesome, because I like that kind of interface [Ibid.] but it does present a reccuring problem where I only have space for one subject heading, which always bugs me, because I actually like hunting down oddly specific subject headings (my favourite was the time in Aber when I catalogued a thesis on the development of wet plate collodion photography between 1850 and 1900, and was able to mine Authorities for “Collodion process–History–19th century” which was tremendous fun…

…Yeah, takes a special brain, this stuff. Anyway, it’s going nicely, far as I can tell. Which is good, because everything else is going mental…

*Sort of. It is like cataloguing, and yet unlike cataloguing. “Sloppy Cataloguing” would be a good way to describe it; I keep wanting to put in extra notes and perfectly describe the book in hand but I am 1) Not supposed to, and 2) Not able to because of the crummy computer system we use.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments

  1. On October 01, 2010 Stattosdad says:

    Good god, they still have AS 400’s? They were well past their sell-by all those years ago when I had a proper job (our systems analysts were often to be found crying into their beer ‘cos they knew they were going to have to re-train onto windows platforms). Maybe they won’t have had to after all.

  2. On October 03, 2010 Mister JTA says:

    Mainly I use a Windows platform, to be fair: the AS-400 is accessed through an emulator. I guess your tech guys complained just enough!

  3. On October 03, 2010 Ele says:

    I like the part of this post about wet plate collodion photography :)