New and improved! (Not!)

We got this new circulation system at work that went live yesterday and like anything, it's rife with numerous bugs. We're finding out just how many and what fixes are going to be needed and I suspect that things are going to be a tad fouled up for a while until everything gets smoothed over. I don't see what was wrong with our previous system other than the fact that we'd been using it probably for at least a decade or so. This new system seems so much more complicated and harder to work with than our previous one. It doesn't strike me as that user-friendly and that's my main beef with it. Too many buttons to push, too many commands, too many complicated procedures that can only serve to slow things down even more than they used to be. I doubt that librarians designed it or sold it and the folks upstairs in what we call "mahogany row" aren't librarians by training (except for our director), so they don't think like librarians. As a result, they buy us equipment that mostly does not work for what we do and they also do not bother to seek the input of the employees who are the end users of what they buy. So once again, it appears that we've been sold a bill of goods, just like our first automated circulation system, "TLM", or, "The Library Machine", which was perfectly awful. Dynix, which we have been using for many years now, has worked quite well and has been good for us, but I understand that the reason they dumped it is that it is no longer supported and they needed a software system that came with full tech support, so they got this thing that so far, no one likes. Maybe if they made it far easier to use and eliminated so many of the redundant commands and other crap, it'd be better, but so far, I can't say that I can find anything positive to say about it. But then again, it's only in its second day of live use, so maybe in time, it will get better. One can only hope.

THE ORTHOPAEDIC WARD

We've jokingly begun calling our department at work "The Orthopaedic Ward". Seems we've got a lot of "walking wounded" these days. One person broke her big toe by dropping something heavy on it and has to wear a special boot on her foot, one person is having her hip replaced in a few weeks and is limping around on a cane, and I had hand surgery last week and I'm still bandaged up from that. My sutures will come out next week and I won't be limited anymore in what I can do, and quite frankly, as long as I don't use the finger that had the operation, I can still use my left hand to do just about any task that I normally do on a day-to-day basis. I also have Achilles tendonitis and am in rehab for that, but it doesn't affect my work each day except for having to leave early twice a week for my rehab appointments and the occasional limp when the ankle stiffens up from sitting too long. Still, it is kind of funny how three of us right now have medical issues that make this department look like sitting in the waiting room of an orthopaedic surgeon's office. At least we're trying to laugh at it and poke fun at ourselves being a bunch of walking wounded. This is what you get when you work with mostly middle aged people 40 and over. Stuff happens when you're our age, and we don't mend as fast as we once did when we were younger. With any luck, by summer's end, we'll all be completely mended from our various problems, back in good shape and at full strength again.