If you think students spend all their spare time avoiding studying, going out with their mates and having a good time then you'd be right. Well our student bloggers do anyway. While they assure us they don't slack on the study, they've got a lot to answer for when it comes to enjoying themselves while volunteering.

All | Emma | Oli | Daniel | Carrie | Olivia | Fiona | Sammy | Ashley | Rochelle | Natalie | Tom | TomG | Harry

Saturday Mar 06, 2010

Actual work detail... Important?

Well, it's been a slow week at the shop, so I thought I should maybe take this opportunity to explain what I actually get up to in the bookshop on a regular shift - perhaps an important detail?

During each shift, there will be between 1 and 3 volunteers around, taking turns to tidy the bookshelves and displays; operate the till; and help customers search for specific books. This is the basic jist of what we do, though of course there's sometimes random other things (ie giving out free fairtrade fruit, advertising Charities Campaign events). Unfortunately we're often also left completely to our own devices with nothing to do in a spotless, organised, and completely deserted shop!

At the moment I also spend a fair bit of my time in the shop searching through our paper-based system of records and then contacting the people who we owe money to. As the seller gets their two thirds of the book selling price only once their book/books have sold, it can often be months before they receive any money back and so it is important for us to contact them as quickly as we can.

However, this is a bit difficult at the moment because, as I said before, everything's on bits of paper! Having been promised a shiny new database which should have been installed back in September for us to keep our records all tidy and up-to-date, we have been relying on a stop-gap paper system the whole year so far! By this system, we need to write down the code of every book we sell in a folder (and no, it is NOT helpful if we forget...) so that we can later look for these codes on the list of books we have from each seller and mark them as sold, at which point we can send out an email to inform the seller and offer them a cheque or cash payout.

As you can imagine, this leads to a bit of a backlog which we are really only just beginning to tackle properly, having resigned ourselves to the idea that the shiny new database may well not be operational until Septemer... (damned techies). 

Yes - I just wanted a jab at the dude who messed us around with this database.

Thankfully I've rounded up 6 other volunteers who are interested in helping me properly with Torchers, so I've named them as my lovely Torchers Team 2010! Next week should bring the first of our theme ideas following a pub meeting - you know that alcohol-fueled ideas are the best sort. Fi.

Posted by Fiona ( 11:30 AM )
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