I’m off work today and was so yesterday as well, but Sunday I worked and it was madness. Apparently, the library building was added onto some time ago, creating a seam between the old building and the newer juvenile wing. The roof of the entire structure is flat, and that’s where Sunday’s problems entered in. Sunday was warm and the sun was out. That meant the snow and ice were melting. That meant the water had to go somewhere, and where some of it went was through the building’s seam and down into the drop ceiling where it pooled until finally dripping on the floor right in the entrance to the children’s section. A girl pointed it out to me just as it started to drip as I was passing by with a cart of books to put away. I grabbed the nearest container–a trashcan–and stuck that under it and went to tell the other two librarians there. What ensued for the rest of the afternoon was a circus. First, we tried to remove plastic ceiling tiles so the leak would just drop straight through only to find that the drip splashed right against the metal supports. Some finagling and we got it to drip into the trashcan. Leaks aren’t new to this old building, so one of the librarians ran and grabbed a tarp to put down and to cover the books-on-CD rack next to the leak.

Of course, that could only do so much. The day got warmer and the leak got worse, dripping in two places now. A couple administrators were called, but neither were home to help us figure out what to do. Another trashcan got propped up against a wall where we taped garbage bags over the light switches and a file cabinet. Then we removed all the CDs from the rack so we could move it and make more room for people to walk through. We even removed all the books from one bookshelf just in case the leak got worse. Then while one of the librarians and I were still juggling books and CDs and waste baskets, our director walked in with her husband. She was just stopping by–she hadn’t gotten the message–but since she was there, she called our maintenance guy who came over quickly to shovel snow off the roof and then hang some buckets up in the rafters to catch the water there. It’s a wonder that after all this putzing around with leaks and tarps and hauling book trucks around that I managed to catch up with all the books/DVDs/CDs to shelve by the end of the day.

I bet Monday was a nightmare for the pages. Provided the leaks were taken care of, that meant they had to put the rack back in place as well as putting all the CDs back, in addition to replacing all the books on the shelf. We kept the books in order when we moved them to the cart, but the CDs were out of order to begin with, so those will take some time to put back. Today, it’s snowing (though the sun’s out periodically), and it clearly snowed some last night, though I suspect much of what is covering the road is actually drift from the snow banked up on the sidewalks. At least today’s snow appears to be more of a dusting, but still, when it melts, that water has to go somewhere. In the library’s case, that “somewhere” appears to be through the roof rather than off its edges. That library really needs a new building. Anyone know any really rich philanthropists who like books?