I haven't blogged about my work situation in a while, which is a shame, because there have been some real changes, and there are going to be many more in the next couple of weeks. I've become a lot more independent in the last couple of months, and I'm about to be given a lot more independence, because Meg, my boss, is leaving at the end of the month.
I was shocked when I heard, and I couldn't believe it, but it's true. Right now they're either interviewing candidates for her replacement or trying to make up their mind; I don't know what's happening, and frankly I'm a little bit scared. It'll be strange and scary to have a new Meg, even though the new person won't be my supervisor. I'll be reporting directly to Meg's boss, Jed, who's a wonderful manager and very nice but of whom I am a little bit intimidated nevertheless.
As Meg approaches the end of her time at KCLS, she has been asking me to transform certain functions that she performs into scripts that make it easier for other people to do them. For example, there are fairly standard reports that Meg occasionally gets asked to prepare for branch managers; these reports are things like dusty books
(holdings that haven't circulated since a certain date), holdings with a certain status or collection code, things like that. So I created a whole bunch of scripts (what Dynix calls VOCs—I don't know what it stands for) that automatically run the Recall to prepare these reports. I've figured out how to output the data into a comma-delimited format that Excel can read, so that people can reformat it how they like. I've figured out how to run shell commands from Recall. I've figured out how to write dictionaries and I-descriptors (don't ask). Meg says I know more Recall than she does, and she might even be right.
Next week Meg wants to talk to me about all the things that have to be done periodically, weekly or biweekly or monthly or yearly, all the things that she says are going to fall to me once she is gone. I guess the Replacement will pick up these tasks in the next couple of months before I leave, but this stuff still has to be done in the interim, and I'm the one who knows enough to do it right now. It's kind of scary, but it's also exciting in a way, and it gives me reassurance that I'm going to have a purpose there when Meg is gone.
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