Ah, Instant messaging...

Bane of productivity. Source of unintentional drama. Slowly being replaced with "texting" near as I can tell.

I've never liked IMing. Frankly if I'm at my computer it's because I'm doing something and I really don't have time to "chat". I like e-mail, it waits for you and lets you get to it when you have time. Still, I have chatted with friends on occasion and it can be fun and does allow for conversation rather than correspondence.

All that said: Now that it has been brought up I could see a real benefit for the library. We have just gotten Apollo late last year and the ability to have people ask us quickly and directly when they have problems would be good. Except, we only have four people that actually work here and I'm the only one here for any real length of time. Do I really have time to mind IM and E-mail and Phone and Smoke signals?

Hmmm...maybe we could get rid of the phone.

~0ps

Comments

  1. AllanaJanuary 21, 2009 at 10:40 AM

    It was nice chatting with you today. Let me know how that change of getting rid of the phone works out. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. OperationsJanuary 21, 2009 at 11:21 AM

    I tell ya. If I thought I could get away with it I would. We had this gal from Pakistan or India that kept calling about us renewing our yellow pages add. I didn't mind the idea of it but the price seemed exorbitant. In addition i couldn't get a strait answer about which yellow pages she was talking about and I eventually told her that we weren't interested.

    She ended up calling me back 4 or 5 times. She just wouldn't let it go. I sent her over to the city clerk and she agreed that it was a little off and also said no.

    Then the telemarketers supervisor called and i ended up having to send HIM over the the City Clerk to be told no.

    A couple days pass and my assistant gets a call and they claim that I told them to talk to my assistant about it. She of course was well aware this was not true and when she tried to hand it off to me they hung up. I figured that would be the end of it.

    YET just two days ago I received a call from the same gal doing the same speech and finally just told her to remove me from their call list.

    And that among many other reasons is why i hate the phone.

    ~0ps

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

RSS

RSS is great. Of course I normally just use it to keep up with which Webcomics have been updated and I've never used Bloglines before. I just have plug in for Firefox. Which worked pretty well but isn't playing nice with Firefox V 3.0 so I'm going to give Bloglines a deeper run though when I'm not QUITE so rushed. Just so everyone knows you also have the option of clicking the little RSS feed button in the address bar and then selecting Bloglines for the destination. Very quick and very easy. (I'm using Firefox...oh I mentioned that.) Now I just need to figure out how to rearrange my feeds into a slightly more useful format. Still pretty cool from what I've seen. ~0ps
Read more

Ubuntu'ed!

- or - "Oh no! I've got Linux in my Library!" I just downloaded and installed Ubuntu Linux on the catalog computer at my Library. For years we have been using a really old computer with a copy of Windows 2000 on it. It worked ok but had the annoying trait of not shutting down when you told it too. Well I finally got sick of it and since ALL it has to do is run Firefox I thought that Linux might be a good choice if I could figure out the install. I did a little looking around and determined that Ubuntu was among the most user friendly (read "windows like") of the various Linux Flavors. So I followed the instructions on their site and a few hours later I have a Linux box which should do everything I need it to and from what I'm seeing quite a bit more on top of that. More to follow as things develop. ~0ps edit: Oh yeah. We use Apollo Automation at my library, hence the Catalog only needing to run Firefox.
Read more