Monday Night

A few strange occurences happened tonight while I was on the desk. First, a little while into the first hour, the electricity flickered off for a split second. This was followed by almost every computer in the basement level shutting off and starting back up. There were a few in the center of the per room that did not shut off, but they seized up for a few minutes. However, all the computers that shut off in the per room would not allow anyone to log in for three or four minutes. An error message would pop up when the patron entered their username and password. The printer had shut off right in the middle of a print job. So there was a rush of patron frenzy, where people were worried about how to print and use the computers and get back to their documents. This thankfully cleared up after a few minutes, and most things seem to be back to working order.

Then, a few minutes after this whole situation, Becky and I finally figured that the strange buzzing noise we were hearing every so often was coming from the tunnel, so I went to investigate. Sure enough, the fire door back by the vending machines and study room was going off, so I called upstairs to get security to take care of it.

And a little later on in the evening, a patron came up to tell me that the printer wasn't working. I checked it out, and sure enough there's an error message on the display. I'm not a whiz with the printers, so I did what troubleshooting I felt comfortable with and couldn't find the source of the jam. I didn't want to go pressing buttons and taking apart things that I wasn't positive I could put back together, so I left it at that and just referred patrons to the reference printer. If someone wants to show me how to fix the printer when these issues pop up, I'd be happy to learn.

As far as other things, the desk was pretty quiet tonight.