Jolly

It'll be a relatively quiet day today: most of Management Group has decamped to the LIS in Birmingham. The staff left behind generally fall into two groups: those who see it as a management jolly and those who are annoyed at not being allowed the opportunity to go. Amongst the latter are some people who included this in their wish-lists in their one-to-ones last autumn (the ones that staff had the week before the corporate staff satisfaction survey that asked if they'd had a one-to-one). T.Aldous' explanation as to why nobody else could go varied with the audience...

• "It's not as good as it used to be."
  i.e. it's not full of furniture and freebies from children's book publishers


• "It's very technical these days."
  As every inspection we've had in the past five years has berated us for not having a good grasp of new technologies that's not necessarily a bad thing.


• "We have to go by train, it's a long way to drive."
  Spot the librarian who can't catch a train because he thinks the world should wait for him and who made damned sure we missed the train last time because he had to stop at every stall to tell people who didn't care less that he didn't have time to talk to them.