I’ve worked on Sundays ever since starting work at the library. While in the reference department, I worked Sundays to compensate for never working Saturdays. However, I grew to like the schedule. While I liked working Sundays, it was difficult finding a good weekday to take off. Originally, I tried taking Fridays off. This had the advantage of my two days off being side by side. Unfortunately, the library district likes having meetings on Friday since we open later that day. So, I was showing up on about 1/3 of my days off anyway.
Initially when I moved to IT, I had a normal Monday through Friday work week. However, I had gotten use to having a weekday off. Also, there are certain maintenance tasks I have to do on a routine basis that take the system down for several hours. My normal practice was to do this Friday morning. However, we have one library that opens at 7 AM on Fridays. So, I decided to change back to working on Sundays. The library doesn’t open till 1 PM on Sundays so I have 5 hours in which to tinker with the system before everything has to be working again. This time, I decided to try to take Monday as my day off. While I no longer have two days off in a row, meetings are rarely scheduled for Monday (too tired from the weekend?).
I’ve had this schedule for several years now and have been quite happy with it. However, working on Sundays means that Jaeger and I have only 1 common day off. To rectify this deficiency, I have decided to start taking the second Sunday of every month off (and work the following Monday instead). I considered celebrating this change of schedule by Jaeger and I going out and eating brunch on Sunday (I try to avoid commerce on Saturday so we very rarely eat brunch together). However, it just occurred to me that this Sunday is Mother’s Day so the restaurants will probably be mobbed. Hm, maybe next month . . .
You end up “working” many Saturdays as well, which means you have some responsibility at church (leaving at some absurdly early hour) and don’t get home until early afternoon. This means we often have no common days off.
Kiesa, I had no clue you moved to IT. How are you liking it? Also, what hardware, OS, and software are your servers and clients running at the Libraries, if you don’t mind? iBistro?
My job within IT is great. I work almost exclusively with the library catalog. It’s helpful to have worked as a reference librarian because I have a better idea of how the software should work in real life :) I’m not sure I would like any other IT job, but this one is ideal.
Hm, I don’t remember our server specs off the top of my head. Our ILS is SirsiDynix’s Horizon-HIP software. The Horizon (staff interface) server is Sun-Solaris and our DBMS is Sybase. It’s wonderful to work with, so far we’ve never had unexpected downtime on it. The HIP (public interface) software is a little temperamental. It runs on a Dell Windows server. However, I don’t think the difference in stability is due to the OS at all. I think the HIP software itself is just more innately unstable.
Nice set up. I am more of a Sun-Solaris kind of person, although I deal with Linux more often than Solaris (and, of course, enjoy Linux as well). I was going to ask you what database engine you ran and you answered it before I could ask. Cool. The libraries in my locale could use a better public intereface, IMO, also. And I agree, I bet the stability is not a Windows issue, although you can never rule that out altogther, though, huh?
I am also an IT person, and enjoy it. Coding would be cool if I ever got more time (or dedicated more time, more appropriately) to actually learning more and honing my skills better in that department. But I digress….
Anyway, server administration and network support is fun even if I still have to do Desktop Support.
Nice to see you like what you do and good luck with it in the future.