Work was an absolute sod this morning. It was my penultimate shift of the year and thankfully most of the students have gone home for Xmas otherwise I'd have given up and gone home early. When we got in first thing this morning there were strange messages on out computers saying something about the programmes having to shut down so I clicked OK and restarted them... and they shut down. We rebooted the computers and as we were trying to get our system online I noticed that our machines for the online catalogue were all off as well so I went into the office and saw the computer that controls the networking and possibly the server for our building had been switched off despite a huge note on it saying not to. I went up to the department's computer room to get the out of hours ITS number only to find that all the computers there were buggered too.

I rang Main Library and, of course, everything was peachy there so I rang the only ITS number I had, which thankfully gave me two other numbers (for the same person, it turned out) to ring. I ended up talking to some bloke called Robert who is responsible for university systems across the whole of the North East (he thought I was at Northumbria uni) and eventually he said that he'd put us on priority status and someone should be coming out to fix the problem. That someone never came so we had to tell all the library users that any books they returned wouldn't come off their accounts until Monday although they would then be backdated so that no fines would be incurred and that any books they took out today would also not go onto their accounts until Monday but that they were OK to have them once we'd filled in the emergency back-up forms *rolleyes*

As I said before, thankfully we didn't have many people in and we hadn't been left a great deal to do so we ended up sat in the back room drinking tea and opening our Xmas pressies to each other for about an hour. We still got everything done that we had to do though and got out on time for once. So, it could have been better but it so easily could have been worse. Let's hope that my last shift next Thursday goes a bit more smoothly.