The last few weeks.
The two weeks before exams and the two during are the most hectic at work. They were last semester, and they seem even worse so far this semester (maybe I just repressed it). Printers run out of paper and jam about once every thirty minutes or so in different intervals, and there are plenty of people who use the Commons who have never stepped foot in here before. This leads to a lot of confusion on the part of many of the other student assistants, who I’m pretty sure are not really used to answering questions.
I get my knowledge of Word, Excel, the printers, Adobe, the Macs, and the PCs in general tested all the time now. It’s sort of exciting in some ways, actually doing my job (I’ve gone entire weeks before without so much as a single Help question from anyone, or without a single printer jam to wrangle). You know that you’re bored when you get giddy to see the printer is out of paper and skip to go fix it…
I get really upset when I can’t help someone. Last week someone lost their entire Spanish final paper an hour before it was due, for no reason. They were even saving to the right spot, but it just disappeared. I spent 30 minutes trying to recover it for them, but all they got back was the first paragraph. A couple hours ago a girl came over with her Thesis because she couldn’t figure out how to create separate page numbers (two different sets of roman numerals and then later regular numbers). I spent about 45 minutes working on that, and looking at every page Microsoft’s help site offered on the subject of page breaks and numbers with no result, and even trying to fix it in 2003 and 2007. Nothing really helped, but luckily after she left she managed to discover that if you did something illogical it made it work (not sure what it was but she did tell me, I’m kinda haggard right now).
I’m trying to pick up a lot of extra hours because I’m losing some at the end of next weekend from going home, and most of my classes are practically over. I sent in my availability sheet for the 1st half of summer and requested 40 hours (I basically made myself available all times every day except Sunday). Hopefully I’ll end up with 30 or more.