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04/09/2008: "VENT VENT VENT VENT VENT!"
mood: Annoyed >_<
Ugh. Such a bad start to the day. How much can it go wrong? Let me count the ways...
So even though I've been waking up around 9am every day to return my short loan library books which are due at 10am, I've been sleeping weird hours over the hols, and pretty much wrecked my sleeping schedule. I managed to sleep relatively normal hours the past two days, but oddly enough I've been having rather unrestful sleeps - I keep waking up multiple times in the night and it often takes me a while to get back to sleep. Yesterday night's was especially bad, and I woke up feeling somewhat zombie-fied this morning, such that even though I could hold a conversation with V as we made our daily trek to the library and back to our flats, my brain couldn't process anything much else.
The first bad start came in the form of my room's phone ringing when I was still half alseep. A friend had called to ask me to help her return her library book for her, and while I had no problems with the task itself, I blame that damn phone for making me start the day off in a bad mood. It's got one of the most annoyingly loud rings I've ever heard from a phone, which is NOT a good way to get shocked out of bed, particularly when you're on the way to becoming a zombie.
My bad mood abated somewhat during the walk to the library, since it's always fun chatting with V and the weather was pretty nice and cool without being too cold. But the main irritation of the day came in the form of a librarian.
So first off, I ended up having to take the self-issue machine which had a librarian who happened to be standing next to it, which already signalled a bad start. Why bad start? Because just the day before when I had problems self-borrowing a book for the same friend and had brought the book to the lending desk to be manually issued, I had been told rather coldly by a librarian that it was impossible for me to issue the book for her since there was some stupid rule about not borrowing books on other people's cards. Which I suppose makes sense on a policy basis since they don't want people stealing other people's cards to borrow more books (which would be incredibly lame, by the way), but makes it very inconvenient for students who are helping out their friends. But I digress.
Anyway, the problem was that with this other librarian standing near the machine, I thought I would have to wait for her to go off before I could issue my friend's book in case she cited that damn policy in my face again. To make matters worse, when I started issuing my own books, she she butted in and tried to help me with returning and renewing my library books. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before, but I absolutely HATE it when people meddle with my ways of doing things when I don't ask for their help or I feel that it's uncalled for. Now I know that may be a rather unreasonable trait of mine, so fair enough. BUT she ended up frazzling my nerves by introducing complications when they didn't need to be there and basically making it HARDER for me to do the job.
It was just the little things but they all added up. Such as when I had placed a book with my pen in it on the scanner, and though it showed absolutely NO signs of even BEGINNING to have problems with issuing the book, she made me take out the pen even when I had damn well managed to borrow that book many times before even with the pen in it. And every time I placed my books on the scanner, she kept pushing my books toward the red laser light on the right, which you actually DON'T have to do since the books in the library no longer use barcodes but electronic tags, and the laser is really only to scan the barcode on your student ID (which I had already done). Which actually made things worse since you're NOT supposed to move the book while it's on the scanner - that actually makes it more difficult for the machine to read the information on the electronic tag. So of course she had to try re-issuing my books a couple of times before it actually worked with her hare-brained method.
I finally breathed a sigh of relief when she finally scuttled off after "helping" me with the books, and proceeded to attempt to self-issue my friend's book. But it wouldn't work, so I figured it might be a problem with my friend's card. (Since it did turn out that there was a problem with her card itself the day before) So I lined up to issue the book manually at the lending desk, and as proof that Lady Luck absolutely hated me that day, the next free desk ended up being the very same librarian who had annoyed me earlier. -_-
And it didn't help that when I approached her desk, she had this really off-putting look on her face that made me want to ask what her problem was. Anyway, after a lengthy explanation as to what my problem was because her thick skull didn't seem to be getting what I wanted to do, she finally agreed to help and it turned out that her previous interfering had thrown my zombie-fied brain off track and I had simply forgotten to return my friend's book before attempting to issue it. *facepalm* What really irked me was that she kept giving me this disgusted look as if she was surprised at how moronic I was (even BEFORE the problem came to light, mind you), and it just made me want to reach over and punch her in the face and yell at her that I probably wouldn't have made the stupid mistake in the first place if she hadn't frazzled me with her meddling.
That actually wasn't the end of my bad day, but I can't be bothered to bitch about them further. In any case, I ended up cancelling badminton today with a friend since most of my friends couldn't make it and I wasn't (aren't, actually, since badminton was actually scheduled for later today at the time I'm writing this) in any mood to play. And as you can tell, I'm probably being highly biased and incredibly grouchy in this entry. I'm not even sure I make any SENSE since my brain is in hibernation, and I'm probably doing a weird mix of adding too much details that don't need to be added and omitting details that need to be added. But whatever. I need to VENT, and vent I shall, no matter how incoherently or how childish I may come across. *thinks homicidal thoughts*