1 post tagged “fridays”

I don't blog much about work.  I find that when I leave work, I want to focus on other things.  This doesn't mean I don't do professional reading and prep and work from home, it just means that I want to forget about the politics, the personalities, the general sitting behind my desk for most of the time I'm not there. 

However, I did something good today.  My desk is in the circulation workroom with my staff.  I generally listen to my iPod hooked up to speakers on my desk.  It's low and I'm in a corner so most can't hear it, but it allows me to focus on what I'm doing as well as keeps staff from thinking I'm listening to them.  Sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not.  But I digress. 

A couple Saturdays ago that I worked, I started asking my staff what song they wanted to hear in the 30 minutes before we open as we're getting ready and played their requests if I had them on my iPod.  Songs have ranged from "Welcome to the Jungle" to "Memories" and that's fine.

This afternoon, one of my staff asked if I had a particular song on my iPod because one of the others hadn't heard it.  "More Than A Woman" by the Bee Gees if you must know.  I didn't have it, but youtube does, so I hooked the speakers up to my laptop and played the clip.  This morphed into all-request hour.  I played Patsy Cline, Nancy Sinatra, Prince, The Beatles, Abba, Neil Diamond and others.  It was much fun (though some were very painful for me to play), and I think I'm going to do it every Friday that I'm there (I have off the Fridays after the Saturdays I work).  I even put a request bucket on my desk so I can be prepared. 

It's good for morale, it's generally slow on Friday afternoons, and they liked it.  As long as it remains fair and everyone gets to hear what they want (as long as it's generally worksafe), it's all good. I was able to continue to work as the songs played on my laptop.