I just cleaned this place up! Can we keep it clean for oh I dunno maybe five minutes? ~ The Incredibles
It seems that every ship that I come to (with the exception of the flagship) I end up running an inventory. And it’s usually voluntary. Back in the day we used to have to run inventory every quarter, but the practice has gradually fallen by the wayside and on this particular ship the computer check out system had been in complete disarray for I really have no idea how long. The look on my supervisor’s face when I told him I’d managed to fix it was actually almost funny…
Can we just have one of you on every ship?
Anyway, so now that the system is up and running again, I have to actually get the lay of the land as to what’s in the collection, as it hasn’t really been managed for a long time, and the catalogue is incomplete in most cases – entries with only half of author’s names, incomplete titles, abbreviations that probably only make sense to the person who entered them. It’s a massive job, a full manual inventory can take the entire length of a contract; and it’s a one person job. While in the past I have run inventory with a co-librarian, it’s always a bit of a challenge to figure out where one person has left off and the other can pick up, plus everyone has their own system for doing it. So it’s one of those things where much as you might want help, you kind of are stuck doing it on your own.
That said, I might rope my Big Brother in to help me carry stuff…except I don’t know if I want to owe him that huge a favour 
Thankfully we only have one sea day on this itinerary, so there’s only one 10 ¼ hour day of total insanity, the rest of the days are all port days which usually have some blissfully quiet stretches that allow me to get some work done. Not that I don’t always find ways to get work done.
It’s a toss-up at the moment whether I’ll actually finish it. It might be that I don’t get the whole thing done until after September…but at least for now it gives me something to work on at the quiet stretches in the evenings.