The Berkeley Public Library has been having computer troubles for three weeks now. Sometimes just the internet is down. Sometimes everything's fine. Other times all the computers are kaput and when you go to the check-out desk the desk clerks have to write down the barcodes of the books you want to check out; when the computer comes up they'll rush to enter as many barcodes into the system as they can before the computer goes down. This also means the library catalog is down most the time so you can't look up anything. More than one patron has said, "Don't you wish you'd kept the card catalog?"
I guess in Technical Services where I work (no, Tech Services has nothing to do with keeping the computers running, it's where books are ordered, received, cataloged and those nice plastic covers put on) the computers have been up more often than the ones at the public service desks, so I've been (ugh) relatively lucky. Supposedly the problems plaguing the network for the last two weeks got fixed; then on the Monday holiday a power outage burned out a couple hard drives (or something). Though the computers were up today they weren't up to much. The later the day got the slower the computer on my desk got. And the back-up disk only captured activity up to Thursday night, thus everything entered into the computers on Friday was lost. That didn't affect me, but my supervisor was sure moanin'.
It's been seriously unfun, y'know?
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