We're taking a bit of a breather while the world rearranges its underpants. Meanwhile, the other blog is here.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Penny plain but damned all the same

Noreen's up to her eyes in boxes of kids books (this might be the last gasps of Booked Up or it could be Boys Into Books, or else the Team Read collections, we've all lost the will to live). Suddenly she gasps, groans and grinds to a halt. Fearing sand in the gearbox, or else a potato in the exhaust pipe, I shout over.

"What's up?"

"I can't pass these invoices. The budget's run out of money."

"What? It's only June."

"Not the Book Fund budget. It's the account for recharged grant expenditure."
[Technically we buy and pay for the books for these projects as usual but pay for them from government grant money, not the Book Fund]

"I thought Mary adjusted that account to pay for this lot."

"You know what she's like. She put in another five hundred pounds."

"But you've got fifteen hundred books...!"

Mary's not in so I did the necessary adjustments so that work could resume. This is a notional budget anyway so I thought bollocks to it and stuck in another twenty grand.

2 comments:

Webrarian said...

You have no idea how nice it is to know that someone else plays exactly the same games as we do.

I reckon it's an example of Best Practice. Shall we tell MLA, do you think it's too much like real life for there to be any interest?

Kevin Musgrove said...

There should be a performance indicator for fiddling notional accounts to solve cock-ups by senior managers.