General joy

I'm up to my ears in CIPFA stats; People's Network's going tits-up; I've got a thousand orders to roll over with no Procurement Librarian to share the burden and no possibility of using a batch rollover because of the way we do standing orders (my, they were fun, thank God Jimmy Huddersfield came in for a day gratis!)(I think he's crackers); Dutch Bend Library re-opened today after six weeks' closure (don't ask why re-open in a mad rush on a Thursday instead of letting staff do things properly and opening the following Monday); I'm climbing over boxes to get into my office because 20% of the year's new stock arrived in the past three weeks; I've been badgered about details of the moving of two libraries to new (crap) locations; we may or may not be moving to a new regional library system in the next month depending on somebody staying still for one moment and making a decision; and I'm trying to take up some of the MLA online reference offers by the deadlines despite not knowing whether or not there's any money for doing it. T.Aldous walks in and says:

"I've been worrying about Tench Road [closed since the beginning of January for repairs and it now turns out it'll be closed until the end of June]. If somebody was due to bring a book back the week the library closed and they brought it back to Tench Road when it re-opens then they'll just get four days' fines. If they bring it back to any other library then they'll get weeks' worth of fines. What will we do?"

"If they could bring the book back to any other library they could have done so any time since January. If they couldn't then there's not an issue."

"I'm just thinking: what would happen at the other libraries?"

We've only been doing things this way for sixteen years. We don't have enough problems as it is so he's casting about to invent some new ones.

I think my poker face must have deserted me. He left the office.