Its Day 5 of the 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge, its Saturday and I worked today, so I thought I’d share a bit about working a weekend shift in a public library.

It seems to be a habit of ours to start work on a Saturday, trying to predict what sort of day its going to be. Is it going to busy or quiet? This is not just dependent on numbers, you can have low numbers on a day, but still be very busy because of the type of interactions you have with users.  They could be lengthy inquiries, long interactions, complaints or problems or everything could run as smooth as silk.

I’ve worked one Saturday where it felt like twice the number of people had beent through, because just about everyone needed that extra time. And I’ve worked other Saturdays where it felt quiet, but was extra busy, because everything went so smoothly with very little demand.

So each Saturday morning we try to predict what sort of day it will be. We try to take into account factors such as weather, other events on either locally, city-wide or national, whether’s its holidays or a long weekend and more.

Today, we wondered if it would be quiet as the weather was very chilly and dreary. It did start quiet and stretched beyond what we usually thought of as a slow Saturday morning start. Then briefly the sun came out and all of sudden, everyone was streaming through our doors.

So it was weather, we thought. No. A few hours later, it starting bucketing down with rain and it didn’t get any quieter, people just kept coming in (and not for the shelter). We ended up with numbers reflecting a busy Saturday which meant that with the slower start in the morning, we ended with more people over the course of the afternoon.

So do I want a job predicting use patterns for our library? Considering the dedication of our library users in the face of such weather and our record for predicting such use patterns, I think not. I’ll stick with managing the branch and providing the best user service we can, regardless of how busy it is.