Putting on the vanities

A visitor, known to me, is being given the Cook's Tour of the premises...

"And what do you do?" she asked me.

"Essentially, I'm just here as eye candy," I explained, truthfully.

"Don't kid yourself sugarbutty," muttered Sybil, unkindly.

A thousand things to make with matchsticks

The question was: Mary is retiring at the end of this week. What plans have been made in preparation?

The options were:

• "Something will come up"
• "We'll have to have a think about this"
• "We'll need to prioritise"
• "There's plenty of time yet"
• "We'll have to sort out an arrangement for that"
• "We can't say anything at the moment"
• All of the above

The 81% of you who said: "All of the above" were, sadly, exactly right. The rest of you were too optimistic for words.

Hemlock all round, kids!

Full and fair ones, come and buy!

Our corridor full of boxes is put into context. A colleague reveals:

"I have an office and corridor full of PCs and monitors that are no good to anyone, their current function is to upset the Health and Safety militia by being "hazards", which in the grand scheme of things rates as rather comfortably functional.

"There are only so many as our IT Section have been "renegotiating" the contract with disposal companies. This has taken six months during which time we have not been able to get rid of anything. Previously we would ring up, arrange a collection date and big wagon would appear with two hefty lads to shift mountains of defunct People's Network PCs. However we seem to have reduced in our expectation, as instead of wagon, two hefty bodies and capacity to remove up to ten palettes of stuff, we now have the ability to move five PCs at a time! So this is going to become a race, can we stop replacing PCs quicker than they can dispose of them?

"In order to try and assist matters the Council have introduced their annual spending freeze as we again have overspent on such as bookmarks with pictures of Councillors on them, so I can't spend more than £100 on anything without Chief Officer permission."

Oh. My. God.

It's Mary's last day at the farmstead and so far it's proving... no, I won't, I need to get a bit of perspective on this and the day is not yet over and may yet be capable of redemption.

The good news is that a lot of people have put in a lot of effort to give her a bit of a send-off and have personally wished her the best of luck, so she won't feel abandoned. And for all that she could be hard work to deal with as a manager she is a genuinely nice person so I'm sure people will keep in touch with her. And there's an evening leaving do for her in a couple of weeks' time. So that's all nice.

And even the bad news is the result of well-meaning utter wrong-headedness. Let's have sleeping dogs lie, eh?

Glass-blowing for the over-eighties

There's been a bit of discussion about Margaret Hodge's speech to the Public Library Association the other week, wherein she posited a clutch of innovative blue skies ideas that the public library world could do well to consider. Most of the discussion has been along the lines of "but we already do that!"

"Which of you are going to be the first to provide libraries in shopping centres?" she asked. Well, we have for the best part of two decades and we were by no means the first. The day we're innovative leaders in this particular context the Pope will be baring his bum at the Vatican.

She then went on to suggest that we should try and attract young male readers by stocking comics and Manga books. Again, old news. We were very late into this game, only starting stocking graphic novels (which are mostly, but not exclusively, comics collected into book form) and Manga as part of a project aimed at young adult males just before the Millennium. (I'd be happy for us not to stock Manga, too much of which I find to be quite misogynistic, but the market's there right enough.)

She'll be telling us next that we might like to have a few computers about the place and do story times for pre-school children.

I could understand the minister responsible for the nuclear industry not being up to speed on the latest technological developments but you'd like to think that the minister responsible for libraries would have at least the educated lay person's idea of what's happening in a service that is provided most every day to most every community. (I can say that with some confidence seeing as we're all required to have at least one service point within a mile's radius of 95% of the population).

We keep wittering on about the lack of national leadership. Is it any wonder...

It's not much of a life if you're just a pretty face

How to propagate fear and paranoia without really trying:

"Hello Lippy, you're looking very nice
today."

"What do you want?"

"Nothing. I thought I'd just tell you that you looked very nice today."

"Go away! I can't cope with this!"

Sigh... ning

"Is Mary's card around? I've not signed it yet," I said to Maisie.

"No one except me and Maudie have signed it. We bought it weeks ago and thought it would be best to give it to T.Aldous straight away to sign so that we'd get the usual delay over and done with first and then get it round the libraries in time for her retirement. Just this once we wanted to avoid getting everyone to sign it, give it to T.Aldous and then not get it back till a week after the event."

"I don't need to ask the next question, do I?"

"Better not. I'd only cry."

All day long the sky is blue and everyone agrees with you in Shangri-La

The Catty Examiner has never been a Paper Of Record. But as local rags go, it has pootled along and so long as you knew the personal and political jealousies underpinning the editorial bias it generally got enough of the facts right for you to know what was going on.

Unfortunately, The Catty Examiner, like many other local papers, is owned by the Grauniad Media group. The Grauniad's steady decline over the past five decades from being The Manchester Guardian to becoming The Islington Boulevardier's Gazette has been a sad one but only of limited interest due to its affecting just the one newspaper. Alas, expensive experiments in Berliner format, Huge Foaming-Witterings and staff charabanc trips to exotic locations like Battersea, Borough Market and Brixton have chastened the coffers and Economies Must Be Made. Which translates into "continue to spend money like water in metropolitan pursuits and sack lots of journalists in local papers and close down offices." Something to bear in mind next time a Grauniad columnist bangs on about the importance of localism and community empowerment. What this means for us locally is that our three local papers have shut up shop and now run from a desk somewhere in a back office in Manchester (until the Evening News gets its legs cut off from under it, in which case they'll all be run from the Colonial Desk at Farringdon Lane).

We're already seeing the results, with "news stories" that even the greenest local cub reporter would pick holes in. Today we have an entirely artificial kerfuffle caused by a report that there's apparently a row about Social Services moving out of Milkbeck Library.

Social Services have never been in Milkbeck Library.

Doreen has had a pile of work on her hands caused by the Housing Advice Team moving into Milkbeck Library after a cock-up over office accommodation elsewhere in the community. This could have quite a lot of benefits to both services and to their customers, but like everything else in Helminthdale Council it's been an unplanned last-minute fiasco. Luckily, we could jiggle things round rather a lot to make enough space for a new advice desk, but not without taking the local audiovisual collection out of service in the process.

Which would have been a truer, and more interesting, story for the newspaper.

One hand clapping

Every so often we get spiritual succour.

We passed upon the stair

The good news is that we've lot of new books coming in for our libraries, particularly for Carbootsale Library, which may be opening very soon.

The bad news is that we've got seventy-two boxes of books in the fire escape corridor.

The good news is that after a fire inspection report we'll start storing incoming boxes in the dispatch room, where they should have been going for the past two decades.

The bad news is that it's all a bit academic really: the book fund's been frozen 'cos the council's skint.

Ninja butterfly collectors

Mary retires for good at the end of this week. I wonder if you can guess what preparations have been made for transferring her workload and line management responsibilities...

I think that's an excuse for a poll.

I probably would have kept on guessing but about that time we crashed into that truck

We get word of the new corporate vision for Helminthdale Council...

Helminthdale Council will work to put service to the customer at the forefront of its activities.

It doesn't seem to occur to anybody to be embrassed that a local authority actually has to say this. Nor that it's taken the Council's Bobbing Up And Down Team eighteen months to come up with it.

An everything shortage and the traffic lights don't work

At any given moment this week there will have been four meetings going on in council buildings wherein a bunch of highly-paid people will have been gathered together to be told that the council is skint. Over the past three weeks some of these highly-paid people will have been to four or five meetings for to be told that the council is skint.

At current rates of pay you wouldn't be getting any change from £250 from any of these meetings.

Slaves of Freedom

The council's decided to save money on equipment, furniture and office space by requiring all staff to hot-desk.

This isn't yet part of the operating realities of the Library Service, thank God! The IT Section has embraced the concept of hot-desking such that whenever you log onto a PC for the first time you have to:

• Reset your password. Your password must be at least eight character long; must contain at least one number and/or "special character;" and cannot be similar to any of the last twenty-one passwords you have used in the past.
• Create an Outlook profile for your email.
• Wait for your new Outlook Inbox to populate.
• Wait for your new Outlook Inbox to synchronise with I know not what.
• Map all the network drives you need to have access to (assuming that you carry around a note of the addresses of all the appropriate servers).
• Add any and all appropriate printers to both the PC and your profile.
• Install your printer password and password permissions in the appropriate printer properties so that you'll be able to actually print some of the things that you send to the printer.
• Get the Helpdesk to enable your Internet permissions on this PC.
• Set up the shortcuts for anything that isn't Microsoft Office or Internet Explorer.
• Set up the permissions to use any peripheral devices.

This council isn't big on productivity.

Misdirection

Oh that's just mean!

A coach has just pulled out of Helminthdale Bus Station with "Poole Harbour" on the destination board.

It's actually going to Burnley.

Victims of the awful habit

If I hear: "what we must learn from this is that we need to start planning things and prioritise" one more time today I swear that I shall scream...