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Showing posts from January 30, 2006

Comment: Ivy Leaguers & Amateurs; Reviews #5 and 6

So we've truly come out on the other side of Spring Coursebook Rush. It seemed to happen too fast to be able to talk about it at the time, but now that the hordes of students have retreated and we've started to bring the store back to normalcy, it's time for a little commentary. Getting ready for the beginning of the semester is like preparing an army to march: we plan for months the order of operations (though now we've got it down pretty well), hire new staff and train them, and then at the last possible moment tear down our remainder and new release tables and replace them with coursebooks arranged by department and tense-a-barriers for handling the lines downstairs. It can be a very stressful time -- there are a bunch of inexperienced staffers doing their best, professors place their orders late (or not at all), and hundreds of students with individual demands pass through the place every hour. But there's a camaraderie from all this intensity, not unlike the