I did my first day of CIP today, 4 days left. 7 hours each for a total of 35 hours. I arrived at 8.30am, then scouted the area for the entrance to the library along with the food court. It's a complicated building, I must say. They just couldn't make a staircase down to the ground floor, could they?

So I was started off with a list of books for withdrawal. Scanning through the shelves, I had to look for books with "codenames" that didn't make any sense to me, but they are codenames for a reason, I guess. It was tiring to kneel down for prolonged periods to look for one particular book, because they could differ in just one letter so it did take quite a while to find them. 3 of the books were missing, 1 was a CD-Rom although there was a book as well. Then there was this Hello Kitty book that had 2 copies, but the barcodes were different. Another huge book that could not fit onto the trolley like the other books had 3 copies, all with different barcodes. Then there was a book about some guy, 3 copies as well. They had different designs, then I looked at the titles again and found that they differed too. In all, I collected about 70 books, I think.

With that done in 2 hours, my next job consisted of three steps. With a trolley full of books, I had to run the same process through everyone of them. Pull out the barcode, scratch the label and stamp "Withdrawn" between the covers. It was quite fun, but my first attempt did not successfully scratch the label the way it was meant to be, so I had to run through the shelf again to re-scratch them all with the penknife as it had to cut through the label. Pulling out the barcode resulted in constant pinching of my own fingers and it started to hurt after a while, so I didn't exactly enjoy pulling out the barcodes, but I realized after a while that it could be eased by pulling up a little of the barcode with the penknife. And stamping was my favourite part because it's so easy, but I had a hard time getting a nice chop on it. It was visible, but not clear as I would like it to be. With repeated stamps, it got better, but still not clear enough.

I did this until 1pm, where it was my lunch break. I took McDonald's again, and I think I was ripped off on Saturday's dinner. That meal cost $6.60 while this was $4.90, and both are the exact same thing. I was looking for more game labels since we had collected quite a number last Saturday, but they didn't give it this time. Whatever, I finished lunch in half an hour and spent 15 minutes loitering around the area, then went back to continue the remaining 3 hours. I was tasked with the same thing, which I did all the way till 5pm and I managed to clear 1 whole trolley (about 60 books) in that period. I will be hoping to do the same thing tomorrow, but probably not.