I was asked the other day, by a former colleague, what I did all day given that book ordering isn't as much my responsibility any more, I don't have formal enquiry desk duties, and I'm not yet teaching as much as some of my colleagues seem to be doing (yet - it may come later).

Well, I'm certainly not sitting here twiddling my thumbs.

But what do I do?

With regard to the above I do have to process the book orders from academics and many of my computing faculty like to submit electronic requests which unfortunately have to be put onto physical cards as there's no system yet for e-requests (they had a go at it I'm told but it didn't work - I think because they still wanted a physical record and couldn't get the e-cards to print properly. Something's not right somewhere?!). And while I don't have formal enquiry desk duties, I do sit immediately behind the ground floor enquiry point in a goldfish bowl that means if whoever's out there has stepped away for a minute or a while, then it's really down to me. And the teaching I'm doing does require some preparation given that I'm still unfamiliar with my new surroundings and have yet to get to grips with the depths of some databases and the like.

At present of course, I can easily fill days by learning things and exploring (physically or electronically). For example, I spent an hour last week taking a bus out to another campus across the city and seeing what/where that was. I also dropped in at our reprographics unit to ask for a student welcome pack and they introduced me to the uni web design people as well.

I spent half an hour on Monday visiting the local public library. Should get a formal tour at some point but thought I'd drop in. I know someone who works there but they'd taken off for the afternoon. Most inconsiderate.

I spend an afternoon a week in the teaching induction programme I'm going through (which also requires 'homework' - not that it's terribly onerous).

There's the usual paperwork and emails you'd expect. Some of which takes me much longer than it might do to deal with because either I need to learn something to make sense of the local detail or I'm just not familiar with the systems here. Meetings of course don't go away.

In short, I'm really not sitting here idling away the days. I almost wish I were. It hasn't taken long before even my (much reduced) email is stacking up faster than I'm dealing with it.