The Ticket Queue and the Shelf Look the Same Lately

I do IT support for a university library system, which sounds more exciting than it is most days. Password resets, a printer that eats the third floor’s interlibrary loan slips, occasionally an actual real problem like a catalog server hiccup that takes the whole search function down for an afternoon. Last month the failover on our backup system got tested during a scheduled maintenance window and just did not work the way it was supposed to, and I spent four hours watching a progress bar that wasn’t moving while somebody upstairs kept asking when the catalog would be back.

Here’s the thing I didn’t expect going into this job. The mental motion of triaging a ticket queue, deciding what’s actually urgent versus what just feels urgent because someone’s yelling about it, is basically identical to how I sort my own backlog of unplayed games and unread books. I’ve got a spreadsheet, not fancy, just rows and columns, tracking what I own, what I’ve finished, what I rated it. When my laptop died last spring I lost about half that history and had to rebuild it from memory, which is its own kind of archival problem, ironic given where I work.

I keep waiting for the day these two halves of my life stop bleeding into each other and I don’t think it’s coming. I triage tickets by urgency and impact, I triage my shelf the exact same way, what am I actually going to get to this month versus what’s just sitting there making me feel guilty every time I walk past it. The grey plastic minis from a Kickstarter two years back are still unpainted. I know exactly which ticket that is in shelf terms. Low urgency, sitting in the queue, never quite gets picked up.

Mara asked me once if I ever actually relax, given that my day job and my hobby are both, structurally, the same spreadsheet with different column headers. I didn’t have a good answer. I think the honest one is that sorting things into columns is just how my brain likes to spend its time, at work or off the clock, and I’ve stopped fighting it.

There’s one difference that actually matters between the two systems, though, and it took me a while to name it. At work, urgency gets decided for me, by whoever’s yelling, by whatever’s actually breaking. On the shelf, I’m the one deciding what counts as urgent, and I keep quietly reranking things based on nothing more objective than what I feel like doing that particular evening. A ticket doesn’t care how I feel about it. A backlog absolutely does, and I think that’s the part of this hobby that actually functions as a break from the job, not the reading or the playing itself, just the fact that for once I get to be unreasonable about what goes to the top of the list.