Elephants drinking to forget

T.Aldous is having his usual end-of-year panic about performance figures again. Those of us who have paid attention to performance figures throughout the year and taken whatever measures are available (officially or unofficially) to address them don't do any of this nonsense: what can be done has been done, what can't be won't be and it's a tad late in the day to be panicking about it all now. This year I resolve to give the idiot only the end figures and none of the working out: he doesn't understand it, makes something up and passes this on to auditors as gospel, which leads them to query the returns.

"What's being done about the stock check at Pottersbury Road? The auditors were very critical of the stock figures there."

The auditors were very critical of the stock figures there because somebody told them that we didn't know that the stock that's "in" on the Catalogue are actually on the shelves because we'd only just put that library onto the system. The auditors neither knew nor cared until the point at which gobby chipped in with that little snippet of information.

"What are you doing about Pottersbury Road?"

I don't ask why the Systems Librarian is responsible for stocktaking in branch libraries, any more than why I'm responsible for stock withdrawals or visitor figures.

"It's all in train."

"Well, what's being done?"

"We're organising a stock take over the next couple of weeks and I'm doing a bit of work there and at Dutch Bend on the lending stock, similar to what we've done at Noddy and Gypsy Cream."

"I don't want problems with auditors like I had last year."

I don't tell him to keep his mouth shut then.