This semester, I had the opportunity to work long shifts on my own. It was challenging at times to deal with some of the larger issues on my own, especially during the weekend shifts, but I am now confident enough with procedures and policies to handle even these problems. This semester I believe I went above and beyond by making more of an effort to treat the commons space as my own. I spent a lot of time not just helping clients, but trying to improve the space by ensuring maintenance. I spent a lot fo my long shifts cleaning up the cabinets, going through the safe and finding old student cards and emailing the students to pick up their cards, returning items that had been laying around on the desk for over two weeks to the help desk. I think at a job with a lot of employees that come and go in shifts, maintenance of the area can often be neglected and forgotten because people assume someone else will take care of it. Filling in the staplers, emptying out hole punchers are all small tasks that we often forget to tend to, and this semester I made it my task to ensure that I completed these small tasks that can be neglected during each shift.

Of my client interactions, I am extremely proud of one interaction in particular this semester. During one of my monday evening shifts, a client came to the deks needing help scanning but was on a bit of a time crunch. I grabbed a loaner USB from the desk that I always loan for scanning jobs and took the client to the photocopy machine and showed him how to scan using the copier. For some reason, one of his pages got stuck in the feeder so we had to pull it out. After that the copier was no longer responding. I restarted the copier, apologized to him for the technical difficulty and took him to the second copier. I find that the second copier is generally very slow at scanning and so I normally shy away from using it and suggesting clients to use it. As I expected, the second scanner was taking very long to begin scanning, so I took the client to the desk and tried scanning using the flatbed. To our dismay, as soon as we had scanned 4 pages (the flatbed at the desk is much slower), the program stopped responding and suddenly shut down. The client did not display any frustration but his disappointment was pretty obvious. I made it a task to engage him and keep the situation light so that he wouldn’t get frustrated and I stayed with him the whole time instead of showing him and leaving. We went back to the first copier which had restarted and was ready to be used. We scanned using the copier onto the USB and everything worked fine this time. The client then logged in to a computer to get the documents, and to his dismay, the USB required formatting. I again stayed with him and helped him scane everything on to a second USB drive and ensured that this USB worked prior to using it and ensured he was able to successfully get all his documents. Even though he was on a time crunch, the client came to me at the desk and spent about 5 mins thanking me and asking about how we develop the knowledge we have at the commons. I felt really good that I stayed with him and helped him enough, and talked to him throughout the whole process, and helping him throughout a series of bad situations, and through this experience I really learned the importance of customer service.