Oh! If only these stones could talk!

Somebody lobbed a stone through one of the windows at Dutch Bend last night and they rang in to report it. Unfortunately, Tilly's not in today to take the call, Mary's on leave and T.Aldous was late in ("there are buses on Pardendale Road" -- don't ask) so it was left to New Boy Jim to take the message. Unfortunately he had no idea what to do about it and neither did any of the rest of us so he had to wait until Himself came in. Having explained the problem Jim then had to endure an hour -- literally -- of T.Aldous explaining that

• ordinarily the call would have been taken by Tilly to report and that in her absence it would have been taken by the finance clerk (another vacancy);


• the notes on who to contact should be somewhere on Tilly's desk but they're not there because Tilly must have put them somewhere;


• Mary's usually in at this time in the morning if Tilly's not here;


• the procedures for reporting repairs have changed recently;


• T.Aldous knows who to contact so he'll deal with it;


• the procedures keep changing, you used to just give Norman in admin a ring but the admin team's been reorganised and Norman's doing something else these days;


• Tilly really should have been in today.

and more besides. The rest of us (both of us) tried not to listen or watch as Jim lost the will to live. Eventually the explanations subsided and calm was restored. I wouldn't like to swear that the repair got reported.

Of course none of this would have been necessary if "how to report a repair at a library" wasn't a state secret. Or if libraries could report the repairs themselves instead of having to report them to Tilly or T.Aldous.