Fun Times in the Supply Closet

Friends, you may remember from my last post that the library I work in is moving to a new location. Predictably, we have been doing a lot of cleaning, sorting, packing and throwing away.  Today a brave coworker and I tackled the monstrosity that is the main supply closet.

I honestly do not think that thing had been cleaned out since the library moved into the building about 24 years ago.  The amount of dust was amazing -- like an entire dust bunny ecosystem had set up shop in there.

I'm talking serious dust people!  Almost the entirety of the closet looked like this!

Pictured above, beneath the dust crust, is a box of unused catalog cards for the old-school, cards-in-drawers, card catalog.  You know what I'm talking about.  Think Ghostbusters.  We have not had one of those systems in the building in years.  The catalog has been computerized for quite some time.  

That's the kind of insanity that was found in this supply closet.  I felt the need to document some of the treasures we unearthed for posterity.  

Circa 1990, or earlier!

The above is the base for a desk calendar.  We have never used these.  The "ROM"?  That's the name of the previous branch -- the location from 24 years ago.  It was brought over, put into the closet, and never saw the light of day again.  Today it also saw the inside of a garbage bag.

Do you remember the joys of typewriters and word processors?

These typewriter accessories are older than some of our staff members!  We have this newfangled technology called computers.  Why do we still have this shit?!

A pointy implement/pencil hybrid

To me it looks like some kind of a stitch remover, for sewing.  I really don't know why it was in a box with the staples.  My best guess is that maybe it was used for book repair at some point, back when books were actually sewn together.

WTF

This is a tape dispenser that is so broken it is literally being held together by tape.  Why in the name of all that is holy was this kept?  Was there a master plan to get it repaired at some point?  It's gone bye-bye now.

Unopened box of adhesive

Okay, this was actually a pretty cool find.  I have no idea what it is, but I'm guessing from the cover art that it is older than I am.  According to this Ebay listing it is "vintage", and apparently worth $10. Too bad I threw it out.

Do we still use this?  If so, for what?

S'gone!  Everything s'gone!  I just liked the name.  I have no idea if we still use this or how old it may be.  It has gone into my special pile of "Things For Maintenance".

Giant Golden Bouncy Paperclip of Awesome!

Is this just a giant golden bouncy paperclip to hold files?  Does it hold some secret meaning?  I like to think it is some secret library award -- like an Oscar or a Grammy.  "You have won the prestigious Giant Golden Bouncy Paperclip of Awesome!"  I did not throw this out.  How could I throw out something so amazing?  That shit is totally coming to the new branch with me, where it shall reside on my desk and be awesome.  I'm never putting files in it.  It will be my shiny trophy as a reward for cleaning out the supply closet.

Let this be a reminder to us all of the dangers of keeping everything and just stuffing it into the supply closet.  Love your supply closet.  Clean it out regularly.  Do not leave a gigantic job for some poor person in the future.  Do your part to keep the dust bunny armies from rising and taking over the world!!

These poor paper rolls lost the battle with the dust bunnies.  Don't be these paper rolls!

Good-bye, Library

The library branch that I work in officially closed at 5pm today.  Next month we will re-open in a fancy new building.  I will still see all of the staff (no one is getting laid off),  but there are a few patrons I will miss who will not be able to get to the new location.  This post, however, is to say good-bye to the building itself.

Dear Building,

You are a wreck.  I was absolutely astonished to make it through the last week without some catastrophe happening as a final farewell from you to the staff.  Please allow me to enumerate the things that I will not miss about you when we leave.

1)  The Dodgy Heating/Air-Conditioning System.  Every year the same game: don't turn off the heat unless you really mean it as it may never come on again.  Ditto for the AC in the fall.  Even when it runs, you best have a sweater at work.  In the winter you will freeze your ass off in the offices, but be okay in the main part of the building.  In the summer you will freeze while on desk, but swelter in the offices.  I look forward to being in a building where, hopefully, there are actually vents that bring the heat and AC into every room.

2) The Program Room.  You are small, and always too cold or too hot.  A recent addition to your awesomeness is the broken window.  It's been that way all winter, and I expect it will remain that way for several more months.

3) The Carpets. 

Here's a fun game!  Guess where, until very recently, there used to be a floor mat!

 You can tell by the ground-in dirt trails where the patron traffic flows most heavily.  While the carpeting in the main part of the building is newer, that in the circ workroom is original to when the library moved in to this building, circa 1991 according to my sources.  I will not miss the hole in the carpet that my desk chair gets stuck in on a regular basis.  

3) The Windows.

Windows that don't open - except when smashed.

None of the windows open.  The windows pictured above have both been smashed, in two separate events, when the library got burglarized.  Last time the thief stole the entire cash register.  You read that correctly -- took the entire damn cash register.  They also leaked and let in so much water that the entire wall had to be redone because there was mold growing in it.

4) The Men's Room.

The Men's Room aka The Vortex of Doom

First, I stand by my opinion that people seem to lose their damn minds in public restrooms.  It doesn't matter if it is the Men's room or the Women's room.  That being said,  WTF is wrong with you guys?! I have seen more disgusting stuff in this bathroom that you can imagine.  The best story, and the reason for the picture of the ceiling, was the morning I walked in after the library had been closed for a holiday (I think it might have been Memorial Day Weekend), and found water gushing out of the ceiling in the Men's room.  A toilet upstairs had broken, and it leaked all weekend, soaking the ceiling tiles and sending them crashing down, along with all of the water.  That was a fun discovery.

5) The Handicap Stall in the Women's Room.

The bathrooms in this building are evil!!

I hate the bathrooms in this building, but this stall in particular.  I found pants that someone forgot in this stall.  Another time it was someone's undergarments.  One fine Saturday a patron quickly exited the ladies' room and told us the toilet wouldn't stop running.  By the time I got in there the water was overflowing and already reaching the carpeted area.  A coworker and I got to spend quality time in there trying to stop the flow, unable to turn off the water, waiting for maintenance to come and save us.  It leaked all over and a huge swath of the carpet in the main part of the building had to be removed and replaced.  

I hate these bathrooms so, so much.

6) The Electrical Room.

Pretty blanket!  

The Electrical Room is protected by the great Deer Blanket.  It really is just a big metal box of a room, and beyond it is another big metal box of a room.  They let all of the cold air in during the winter, even with the doors shut and locked.  That's why we have the protective deer blanket.  

That second room I mentioned?  We found a homeless guy living in there at one point.  There is still a random shopping cart full of stuff in there, although no one has been living in there for quite some time.

Sorry for the bad picture -- there is no lighting in this area.

7) The Lights.

They don't look evil, do they?

These lights are supposed to have plastic covers over the bulbs.  Several have fallen out over time.  One fell out while we were open and almost hit a patron.  Thankfully no one was ever hurt.  Silver lining, I guess, would be that we at least do not have to see the dead bug bodies that always seem to collect in these types of lights.  Hopefully we have different lights in the new building.  Fluorescent lighting always reminds me of the movie Joe Vs. the Volcano.  

In closing, dear building, I will not miss you.  I think you have secretly been trying to destroy us all along.  I'm happy to move on to a newer building that will hopefully treat us much better.

Hope your new tenants have a sense of humor and a flair for repair!

The Shamrock Shake Tried to Kill Me

First things first:  I realize that fast food is not good for you.  I go to McDonalds literally one time per year, and that is to get my Shamrock Shake.  I realize it is full of crap and contains precious little (if any) nutritional value.  It is, however, a bright green cup of deliciousness.  I think an annual trip is allowable.

So, so green.  It is pictured on the roof of my car, which is light green, for comparison.

Yesterday I decided to make my annual trip to get my Shamrock Shake.  I'd already been outside on a 3 mile walk in the cold, so I felt like that was as good a time as any to splurge out on the insane amount of calories that were going to be in that shake.  I got a salad also to try to make it a marginally nutritious meal.

I finished running my errands and went home to savor my shake in peace.  It was minty and delicious as always, but much greener than I remember.

About an hour later my stomach starts making horrible gurgling noises.  It feels like a lead brick is just sitting in my stomach.  WTF.

I have to assume it was the Shamrock Shake.  I eat salad all of the time so that really shouldn't be a factor.  I assume even McDonalds cannot screw up lettuce too badly.

I got on my treadmill for a mile, hoping that would speed up whatever horrible digestive atrocity was going on in my stomach.  Maybe I'm weird, but that sometimes makes me feel better.

It helped a tiny bit.  The noises stopped at least.

I was still feeling bad enough an couple hours later that I went out to get a Coke.  I got a really bad stomach bug in college one semester, and the health center recommended drinking a flat Coke as a good remedy.  I'm serious.  I don't know if that was a total placebo that they sold me on or if there is actual wisdom behind it, but it seems to work.  It might also mean I am gullible and will try anything to feel better.

Flat Coke be damned, it was still a good 18 hours before I remotely felt like trying to eat anything again.  Maybe the high crap factor in the shake was having a war with the healthy veggies in the salad.  Maybe I should know better than to ingest anything that is fluorescent green.  Maybe I was already destined to have a 24 hour stomach bug regardless of what I ate yesterday.  I don't know.

I do know that I will not be making my annual pilgrimage next year.  Not to hate on McDonalds, but I'm not lovin' it.  

Fast food bad.  

The Joys of Homeownership

I woke up this morning, and it was cold in the house -- much colder than it should  be.  I knew it had been cold outside (about -2 I learned later), but it still shouldn't have felt that chilly in the house.  I was not amused, to say the least.

There are 3 main things I should never be asked to deal with in the morning before I have my coffee:

1) Pondering any issue that is going to require deep, weighty thought
2) Emotional issues
3) Critical problem solving

I'm not saying that I can't, haven't, or outright refuse to handle those matters before having coffee -- I'm just saying that I am not going to be happy about it  most likely going to be cranky, or less pleasant than usual.  Waking up to the possibility that my furnace was not working pretty much tapped into all of those areas.

I should probably give you a little background on my furnace.

I love you furnace!  You're not old, you are aging like a fine wine.

 It normally does a superb job of keeping the house nice and toasty in the winter.  It is an older model, and I'm always afraid that it is going to give up on me or break and cost a small fortune to repair.  When I say "older model", I mean it is older than I am.  I'm not sure they even make them any more.  To put it another way, the top two Google search results are from newspaper archives:

1963.  I think that qualifies as not being the latest technology.

The first winter that I owned my house the heat stopped working.  I called a local company to come fix it, clean it, etc.  They had to make one little repair, and taught me how to re-light the pilot.  I had never had natural gas heat before and had no idea what to do.  The technician was awesome, and he told me to just keep this furnace and run it until the day it is no longer able to be fixed.  He said the older models are great because there are fewer parts that can break.  I took his advice to heart.

That does not make me worry any less when, on occasions like this morning, the heat stops functioning.  I'm always worried that I will have to re-light the pilot and manage to blow up myself and the house in the process.  This is a particularly daunting task to face first thing without coffee.

The first thing I decided to do, hoping to avoid the drama with the pilot lighting, was to check the thermostat.  It was completely blank.  I have never seen it do that before.  The thermostat has its quirks -- about a year ago it randomly decided to switch from registering the temperature in Fahrenheit and decided to display it in Celsius instead.  I have no idea how to switch it back.  I have learned to just go with it.  

A blank display was an entirely new quirk.  My pre-coffee brain decided that the best way to investigate this problem was to give the thermostat a good tap with my hand and see if anything happened.  I'm going to call this the Cave Woman Method of problem solving.  Me Hit!  Me Fix! Coffee Now!

Turns out the Cave Woman Method actually works!  The display came up flashing "lo bat" and registering that the house was a balmy 12 degrees Celsius.  For those of you unfamiliar with metric conversions, that's about 53 degrees Fahrenheit.  (I had to Google that on my phone this morning.  Math is not my strong suit at the best and most coffee-filled of moments.)

Thank heavens the thermostat does not take some spectacularly weird type of battery!  2 AAs would solve my problem.  I'm not a "prepper" by any means, but I do keep a supply of AA batteries in the house.  Okay, so I have those particular batteries because I need them for very important things like the television remotes, and the mouse for the laptop.  But hey -- looks like they come in handy for the thermostat too, so bonus points to me for being accidentally prepared for this little emergency!

I might have started praying to any and all deities that would listen that new batteries were going to fix my problem.  I cannot stress enough how much I did not want to have to go try to restart the furnace.  On top of the whole "I-Might-Blow-Myself-Up" worry, it also would require a trip to the cellar.  The cellar is also known as The Realm of the Spiders.  I do not go down there unless it is an absolute necessity, and it requires Spider Protective Clothing (a hoodie).  I f*^king hate spiders.  They creep me the hell out.  I want as little contact with them as possible, and I absolutely do not want to them or their webs touching me.  

I put the new batteries in, turned up the heat, and literally held my breath while listening to see it the furnace was going to kick on.  It took a few very stress-inducing moments, but then the rumble kicked in and a swoosh of warm air followed shortly thereafter.

VICTORY!!!!  

I'm happy to report that this evening my house is nice and toasty at its normal temperature.

Now, the thermostat had been normal when I turned it down before going to bed last night.  My best guess is that the batteries started to register as "low" at some point shortly after I went to bed.  Once they were too low the thermostat stopped running, therefore never triggering the furnace to kick on again.  I could be wrong -- all I know is that new batteries seem to have solved the problem.

Maybe this will be of use to fellow homeowners out there.  I'd like to think someone could benefit from my pre-coffee stress.  

1) Don't jump to the conclusion that the furnace is broken. 

2) Check the thermostat.  

3) Use the Cave Woman Method of problem solving.  

4) Avoid the Realm of the Spiders if at all possible

5) Always have extra batteries 

** Friends:  did you enjoy reading about my small victory in this great adventure that is being a homeowner?  Are you just dying to know what other fantastic obstacles I have overcome with such highly technical feats of reasoning?  Please allow me to refer you to the time I thought my mouthwash was eating my sink, and my midnight explorations in the field of toilet plumbing.