126 cm long snake in the middle of the road. #blogjune
Managing Volunteers.
Managing a schedule for a team is a pain, I used to have to manage my team while I was working at Woolworths, I didn't make the schedules but I had to adjust them all the time because of people calling in sick or unavailable and it was a struggle. The only carrot I could offer people was the extra money they'd earn if they covered for someone else's shift which was usually enough to get them in. That and the fact that if we had more people working it is less work to do each overall. I would guilt and cajole those guys into showing up with everything I could think of but the key was the money. The money made it happen.
With Volunteers you can't offer money if someone is sick or ill or can't make it. You have to basically ask politely and hope someone can make it. This makes it difficult to account for breakdowns in the system. The only solution to this is to have a lot of volunteers or to put volunteers in positions where them not being there won't cause any loss of service to the regular patrons/clients. Thus my work as a exhibit guide isn't essential as nearly anyone working at SLQ could do it if necessary and my survey work isn't essential at all for day to day operations(it is important for long term things like service budgets, marketing and the like(the bulk of the survey I conduct seems to be tailored to working out what kind of person goes to the library and from that we could extrapolate better marketing campaigns to get their attention)).
This has two consequences: One, volunteers can sometimes feel non-essential to the overall mission of the institution or library as what they can do, while valuable and appreciated, can start to feel pointless in a way. I felt that a bit towards the end of the Cusp exhibition when there were a few shifts with almost no visitors and it started to feel like a waste of time cycling out to just end up standing around doing nothing for two hours.
Two, volunteers can end up not getting much in the way of professional development or skills because their role is so limited and they drop out. I feel that all my volunteer positions have actually provided me with a lot of skills but once developed it is good to have avenues to improve this. The State Library is great at this offering volunteers a chance to do more, like the tour guide work I do, the digitisation programs and others like it.
I don't envy the people who have to manage volunteers. You have people who are volunteering their time for no money and you have to make sure that they are feeling satisfied and fulfilled as well as providing them with stuff to do and to help them develop skills and engage with the public.
My Day.
Yesterday I had to do a phone interview as a pre-interview for an actual interview which was fun. I've spent the subsequent day going over in my head everything I said and trying to work out if I accidentally said something like "Also Stalin was an inspiration for my management techniques." thankfully, as near as I can tell, I didn't.
This morning was the first morning all week that I could sleep in, so I didn't wake up until 7:30. Oh lord that extra hour was just great, it still meant that went I woke up I had nothing to do so I played a little bit of the game FarCry 4 until I got out of the tutorial section. I'm still hoping to play it through with my mate doing the entire game in Co-op but that will likely have to wait a few weeks because he's going up north for the school holidays. After that I remembered that I had to apply for a job at the State Library which I was told about because I'm a volunteer(it is some internal position or something I don't really follow the logistics of HR but I care enough to apply for jobs through them). I had to write 600 words max about why I think I'm good for the position. Really annoying because I don't like talking myself up very much. As grandiose as I am in person I'm pretty humble on the page when it comes to Resumes and job applications. So talking myself up for six hundred words was a struggle. In the middle of all of this I got a knock at the door and had to sign for my lanyards for the Story Bridge 75 afternoon session. I have four right now, one is reserved for a friend of mine and the other two are mostly up for grabs, a friend of mine around the corner wants to go so I might give them to him and his girlfriend.
I got out of the house at around midday to drive over to Browns Plains to get lunch with my mate and on the way there I saw a lady with her car pulled over standing in the middle of the road, turns out there was a giant carpet snake just sitting there and she was worried that someone would kill it driving over it. I grabbed my golf club from the boot(I keep it there for Cane Toad Golf days) and nudged it off the road while the lady from the car had a near conniption when the snake started to move briefly towards us before amping up and away into the bush.
I was thus five minutes late for lunch with my mate. We had Hungry Jacks because he was in a hurry today as there was some group coming into his work to do a OHS tour or something. So we ate and I told him what I thought about the new Jurassic Park movie and some of the quibbles I had about the plot holes here and there. Then afterwards I went back with him to his work and finished up my catalogue work of the last couple of months. The professional development library is now complete, with full documentation, a CDP, a full training manual and a catalogue available on the network for everyone to use if they need it.
Sadly the password to use the account I have is really awkward and hard to type so when I went to print my documents it didn't work and I ended up locking myself completely out of the system which was annoying and after I managed to do some file transfer trickery via USB's and network drives to get it printed through my mates account I left because I couldn't do much more after that.
I ended up going to Mount Ommaney shopping town to hit up the bank for some cash, buy some Lego for my nieces and to check on Electronic Boutique about what I can do about my pre-order for Batman now that Warner Brothers have taken it off the market. Turns out they might be cool with it for the moment. I was tempted to go to the Legacy Tunnel and drive through it but decided not to because getting back to the freeway without taking the tunnel afterwards would be a pain and I didn't want to waste money on it by going through twice.
Once I was done at the shops I went over to my dad's house and made some dinner, Chicken with chips and some pasta salad from Woolies, then went over to my brothers place for the night. Ended up trying to watch The Lord of the Rings:The Two Towers and started to fall asleep just after the banishment of Grima Wormtongue.
YouTube Clip of the Day.
Peter Capaldi talks about surrealist Art while dressed up as The Doctor.
Managing a schedule for a team is a pain, I used to have to manage my team while I was working at Woolworths, I didn't make the schedules but I had to adjust them all the time because of people calling in sick or unavailable and it was a struggle. The only carrot I could offer people was the extra money they'd earn if they covered for someone else's shift which was usually enough to get them in. That and the fact that if we had more people working it is less work to do each overall. I would guilt and cajole those guys into showing up with everything I could think of but the key was the money. The money made it happen.
With Volunteers you can't offer money if someone is sick or ill or can't make it. You have to basically ask politely and hope someone can make it. This makes it difficult to account for breakdowns in the system. The only solution to this is to have a lot of volunteers or to put volunteers in positions where them not being there won't cause any loss of service to the regular patrons/clients. Thus my work as a exhibit guide isn't essential as nearly anyone working at SLQ could do it if necessary and my survey work isn't essential at all for day to day operations(it is important for long term things like service budgets, marketing and the like(the bulk of the survey I conduct seems to be tailored to working out what kind of person goes to the library and from that we could extrapolate better marketing campaigns to get their attention)).
This has two consequences: One, volunteers can sometimes feel non-essential to the overall mission of the institution or library as what they can do, while valuable and appreciated, can start to feel pointless in a way. I felt that a bit towards the end of the Cusp exhibition when there were a few shifts with almost no visitors and it started to feel like a waste of time cycling out to just end up standing around doing nothing for two hours.
Two, volunteers can end up not getting much in the way of professional development or skills because their role is so limited and they drop out. I feel that all my volunteer positions have actually provided me with a lot of skills but once developed it is good to have avenues to improve this. The State Library is great at this offering volunteers a chance to do more, like the tour guide work I do, the digitisation programs and others like it.
I don't envy the people who have to manage volunteers. You have people who are volunteering their time for no money and you have to make sure that they are feeling satisfied and fulfilled as well as providing them with stuff to do and to help them develop skills and engage with the public.
My Day.
Yesterday I had to do a phone interview as a pre-interview for an actual interview which was fun. I've spent the subsequent day going over in my head everything I said and trying to work out if I accidentally said something like "Also Stalin was an inspiration for my management techniques." thankfully, as near as I can tell, I didn't.
This morning was the first morning all week that I could sleep in, so I didn't wake up until 7:30. Oh lord that extra hour was just great, it still meant that went I woke up I had nothing to do so I played a little bit of the game FarCry 4 until I got out of the tutorial section. I'm still hoping to play it through with my mate doing the entire game in Co-op but that will likely have to wait a few weeks because he's going up north for the school holidays. After that I remembered that I had to apply for a job at the State Library which I was told about because I'm a volunteer(it is some internal position or something I don't really follow the logistics of HR but I care enough to apply for jobs through them). I had to write 600 words max about why I think I'm good for the position. Really annoying because I don't like talking myself up very much. As grandiose as I am in person I'm pretty humble on the page when it comes to Resumes and job applications. So talking myself up for six hundred words was a struggle. In the middle of all of this I got a knock at the door and had to sign for my lanyards for the Story Bridge 75 afternoon session. I have four right now, one is reserved for a friend of mine and the other two are mostly up for grabs, a friend of mine around the corner wants to go so I might give them to him and his girlfriend.
I got out of the house at around midday to drive over to Browns Plains to get lunch with my mate and on the way there I saw a lady with her car pulled over standing in the middle of the road, turns out there was a giant carpet snake just sitting there and she was worried that someone would kill it driving over it. I grabbed my golf club from the boot(I keep it there for Cane Toad Golf days) and nudged it off the road while the lady from the car had a near conniption when the snake started to move briefly towards us before amping up and away into the bush.
I was thus five minutes late for lunch with my mate. We had Hungry Jacks because he was in a hurry today as there was some group coming into his work to do a OHS tour or something. So we ate and I told him what I thought about the new Jurassic Park movie and some of the quibbles I had about the plot holes here and there. Then afterwards I went back with him to his work and finished up my catalogue work of the last couple of months. The professional development library is now complete, with full documentation, a CDP, a full training manual and a catalogue available on the network for everyone to use if they need it.
Sadly the password to use the account I have is really awkward and hard to type so when I went to print my documents it didn't work and I ended up locking myself completely out of the system which was annoying and after I managed to do some file transfer trickery via USB's and network drives to get it printed through my mates account I left because I couldn't do much more after that.
I ended up going to Mount Ommaney shopping town to hit up the bank for some cash, buy some Lego for my nieces and to check on Electronic Boutique about what I can do about my pre-order for Batman now that Warner Brothers have taken it off the market. Turns out they might be cool with it for the moment. I was tempted to go to the Legacy Tunnel and drive through it but decided not to because getting back to the freeway without taking the tunnel afterwards would be a pain and I didn't want to waste money on it by going through twice.
Once I was done at the shops I went over to my dad's house and made some dinner, Chicken with chips and some pasta salad from Woolies, then went over to my brothers place for the night. Ended up trying to watch The Lord of the Rings:The Two Towers and started to fall asleep just after the banishment of Grima Wormtongue.
YouTube Clip of the Day.
Peter Capaldi talks about surrealist Art while dressed up as The Doctor.
Click to view