Ron Chaney, Helminthdale's Principal Cultural Officer, will be leaving us this week for pastures new. He's the boss at Sheep City and will be sodly massed. So much so that his staff envy us for having T.Aldous as a boss.
Ron's finest hour, perhaps, was his meeting with T.Aldous and Henry Irving last autumn where they were discussing the Archives Service, which we part-fund. Ron wasn't getting what he wanted out of the meeting (which was "we will give you unlimited funds to do as you damned well please") and once that became apparent he did no more than turn his back on T.Aldous and Henry and start working on his PC, completely ignoring the meeting that he'd called as an urgent priority. His visitors pointedly carried on with the meeting, literally talking to Ron's back and making — and minuting — a bunch of decisions that Ron wouldn't ordinarily countenance in a million years but which he agreed to by default because of his utter ignorance.
He once sent Shagger Noakes an email, copied to me and T.Aldous saying:
"It is disgraceful that the archives are not catalogued on a computer system. I will ask Kevin why this is not the case."
I replied:
"You didn't want the archives on the Library Management System when we first installed it fifteen years ago and you have done nothing about getting the archives catalogued since. What are you doing about this disgraceful state of affairs?"
It all went quiet after that.
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