After a three-day vacation (and, for me? That really is a vacation!), I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I went into the Bookstore this morning. We’re in the middle of a massive store re-organization, which essentially can be described as “shifting sections.” Unfortunately, “shifting sections” means shifting books, and bookcases, and neither is something that can be done “quickly.”

(And, yes, I was looking forward to going back to work.)

This, for example, is why half of our Mystery/Thriller books have migrated to their new shelves. The rest, however, are waiting to move until we can move our Erotic section. Essentially, you go from a bunch of James Patterson font-20 triple-spaced paint-by-numbers, to some novel that’s all about boobs and penises and ridiculous orgies. Er, not that I read those.

Coming in, I was tasked to move our Study Guides/Career books downstairs. A shelving unit had already been moved opposite the south wall of our Reference section. I grabbed a library cart from the backroom and began loading it with books. Unfortunately, the cart — as most are — was pretty wobbly, and it nearly toppled over a few times as I pushed it from the elevator to the new section. As it was, I did destroy most every display in Paperchase which trying to maneuver the large, unwieldy, wobbly cart through the tight alleys of that section.

Look, it’s not like it’s a difficult assignment: take books off shelf, place on cart. Repeat until cart is full. Move cart downstairs via elevator. Take books off cart, place on shelf. Repeat until original section is empty and new section is full.

Okay, first of all: after my first trip, I grabbed another sturdier library cart. It was still pretty unwieldy (when full, it was unwieldy and heavy), but at least it wasn’t trying to topple over when loaded up with GRE and GMAT and LSAT and SAT books.

Oh — but! Oh! So I load it up, and I take it into the elevator, and the elevator goes down a floor, and the door opens, and I’m pushing it out, and — oh! It’s not moving forward. So I try to pull it back, only its not going anywhere. So I sort of slide around, and the front left wheel has fallen into the gap between the elevator and the floor. I pull up on the cart, hoping the wheel will come with it. Sadly, the cart lifted … but the wheel stayed put. So here I am, holding up the cart with one hand, tugging on the wheel with another. Fortunately, a couple coworkers saw my predicament and hurried over to help. It was pretty awkward getting the cart out of the elevator with only three wheels, but we managed to reattach the wheel and get the damn thing over to section.

By this time, however, it was pretty clear we weren’t going to have enough bookshelves. The original section consisted of two bookshelves: the first was a five-bay double-sided bookcase, with eight shelves per bay, and the second a two-bay double-sided bookcase, with the same shelves per bay. The new section was four double-sided bookcases, with twelve shelves per bay. Long story short, I was trying to fit 56 shelves worth of books onto 48 shelves.

Let’s do the math on this, shall we?

Long story short: it wasn’t going to work, and I called our merch supervisor over to explain this. His response was pretty much to tell me to “make it work.” So, I did. I dug some free-standing display stands from the detritus of bookcases and displays taking up room by the music room, and stacked them thick with various study guides. I dragged a bench over to the other side of the case, and loaded it up with more assorted study guides. And you know what? I made it work.

And then our multi-media supervisor came in, saw the section, and pulled a similarly sized bookcase from the abandoned and empty former Gardening section. After all, the master blueprints showed five (not four) bookcases, after all.

“All I know,” I told both of them, “is that I am not re-shifting those books!”

That’s fine, they told me, and I spent the rest of the day shifting our computer books. In fact, after we closed? I stayed in the store for an extra hour and a half pulling computer books off of library carts and putting them onto bookcases. As a matter of fact, I was putting them back on the exact same bookcases — as we emptied the cases, our supes were manhandling the bookcases into their new positions, bolting them together, and allowing us time to reload them.

I am, to put it simply, exhausted. My feet hurt, my legs hurt, my fingers will scream in pain if I so much as touch a book again today.