Using My Brain

It's no secret that the job I've settled for does not challenge me intellectually. On a bright note, it was recently decided that the dozens of boxes of weeded items coming in from thirteen branches each Thursday, needing to be unboxed, taken out of inventory, and schlepped over on wheeled carts to the book sale area, will be handled in a more efficient way after the move back to our renovated main branch. They will be taken out of inventory at the branches and delivered directly to the book sale area, skipping me! This means that a job that had been about half grunt work and half office manager with a touch of graphic designer thrown in will now be only about ten percent getting dirty with boxes of books and heavy lifting. Hooray!

In this job, there are many perks. For one, public library positions are historically pretty secure and stable. I love my team of four managers; I assist each of the collection managers (our collection is divided among them into adult fiction, adult non-fiction, audiovisual/music/graphic novels, and items for youth). I enjoy wearing many hats, and I like the fact that when I moved down a rung or two or three on the career ladder after the pandemic and my international move, I left behind the stress that goes with high pay and great responsibilities.

This week, though, I had an opportunity to remember how I come alive when given a chance to use my advanced technical and problem-solving skills.

My department has chosen to take responsibility for putting the entire collection, which has been in storage for two years, back on the shelves on all four floors plus the special closed stacks on the lower level (this is basement rebranded). For each of the top four floors, a manager has taken it upon herself to create a report that lets her know exactly how many thousands of items need to be re-shelved along with a breakdown into how many As, Bs, Cs, or 100s, 200s, 300s, or JUV Fiction, JUV Non-Fiction, Easy, Young Adult, and so forth. With schematics of the new shelving layout provided by the architect, each manager then plotted where the As would start, the Bs, etc., and then printed out hundreds of slips of paper to tape to the shelves to guide our ranks of helper elves so that each floor can quickly be put back in public-facing condition in one week per floor, a massive undertaking without German train schedule level organization. This preparatory work was done on every floor except the lower level. Why? Because that is a special closed stacks collection that is not organized by Dewey spine label. Those items have been given a special label slapped over the Dewey sticker; those numbers are in our database but NOT in a field of its own. Instead, the database company and my employer at some point decided that it would be fine to stick that number at the END of the call number in our inventory system...where it cannot be spit out into its own field (column) on a report or spreadsheet. You see the problem coming, don't you?

Another problem is that because I don't USE my advanced Excel, VBA, programming, business analysis, or database admin skills in my job, nobody remembers that I have them.

Call it intuition or call it boredom, by some stroke of genius or luck, I asked my manager to send me the list of all the items we would be shelving on the lower level Monday. She sent it to me in MS Word, with no consistent pattern in terms of how many lines each item took up on the page. I asked if I could have it in the raw form, in its original form, such as a CSV file or whatever. Glory be, she trusts me and isn't threatened by me, so she told me where the original report was waiting to be exported in whatever format struck my fancy.

From my days as an Excel wizard 19 years ago came back a vague recollection of a formula that will pull the last x digits or characters from one column into another. =right(A1,5). Zip that baby down all 35,000 rows and Bob's your uncle! I then sorted on that new column and had the beginnings of a reference sheet of all the items to be shelved--should we need it. But it couldn't be printed. Who would print 35,000 rows of one single column? That would waste so much paper. A little googling resulted in just the formula I needed: =IF(OFFSET(Sheet1!$A$!, (COLUMN()-1*44+ROW()-1,0="","",  OFFSET(Sheet1!$A$1, (COLUMN()-1)*44+ROW()-1,0)). I just popped that baby into cell A1 on a new sheet, dragged it over to fill columns A through N and then down to fill rows 1 through 44 and instead of numbers in one column next to a bunch of wasted empty space, I had five-digit numbers filling the entire page. With about thirty pages of numbers rolled up in my apron pocket, I joined my team in marching over to the new building, hardhats in hand. The mandate was to find box number one and hope that box number two was close to that so that we could just start shelving in one area, on the heels of a crew of noisy construction workers wielding mallets, joking with each other, and singing to R & B that reverberated through the concrete dungeon as they stayed a few aisles ahead of us in the building of shelves we were to begin filling with books and DVDs.

But, alas, all did not go as dreamed. I overheard my manager, not usually one to push back or give anyone a hard time, saying to the crew boss, "Harvey, this is not what you promised me." The architectural firm had contracted out the box moving, and the box moving company had hired temps, and the temps had absolutely no skin in the game. They would not be around in two years when those boxes were unpacked, and if they did a very slipshod job of packing or labeling them, nobody would be the wiser. Until this week. The boxes were a holy mess, a dog's breakfast. Many were mislabeled. With mountains of boxes four high, seven wide, and twenty deep, it took hours of backbreaking work to try to find box number one. This was proving to be a fool's errand.

Eventually we did excavate a few boxes toward the beginning of the range, so with my manager's approval, I started to do a sort of inventory by checking off the ranges of items that had been unearthed, circling them on my 30-page partial list and marking that box with a green check mark. After an hour we realized that wasn't going to work either. There were still too many gaps; we still hadn't found the first items to go onto the shelves.

So we regrouped. Might it be possible to start numbering the shelves, assigning, say, 30 items to a shelf? You might ask why we couldn't just number 1-30, 31-40 without my list? You see, one cannot assume the items are numbered 00001, 00002, 00003, etc., because over the years, this collection has been WEEDED, meaning there are many gaps in the numbering. For example, when we discontinued audio books, entire batches of ten or twenty audio books were swept off those shelves, taken out of inventory, and donated to the book sale. Five extra copies of Where the Crawdads Sing were weeded down to one backup copy, and so forth. My spreadsheet and little 3.5" lengths of masking tape were suddenly golden. With my boss' blessing, I began labeling the shelves so that--by the end--no matter which box someone pulled off the mountain, its contents would have a home--allowing that box to be emptied, broken down, and tossed onto the recycling pile. So I disappeared with masking tape and Sharpie into the compact shelving while the others started loading books onto wheeled carts. It was a slow process for me to write ten digits on my roll of masking tape, tear that off and stick it on one of five shelves in a bay before moving two feet to my right to repeat the process, but it was way more efficient than trying to find the beginning of 2,000 boxes that had been moved into storage then back out of storage to another floor then down to the lower level, each move scrambling them a bit more.

When we finally took a break after lunch, I couldn't wait to get back to my computer to finish identifying every 30th item, this time getting Excel to filter out all but the start and stop numbers I needed for the strips of tape. At quitting time, I couldn't go home. I was so close to having the next day's numbers ready. Gosh, with a couple of days' warning, I could have done a merge onto Avery labels. Oh, well.

Here we are at the long weekend, and I've spent three hours sticking rows of masking tape onto sheets of wax paper then numbering them so that on Monday morning, we can hit the ground running. As my boss said in a team message, 'once those labels are up, we'll be cooking with gas.'

All day yesterday and today I've been able to think of nothing else but how good it feels to use my brain again.

Oh, and I got a very nice message from my boss: "Thank you for working your Excel wizardry on this project. I can't imagine where we would be without you being able to pivot and work it out so quickly for us."