A couple of years ago a kindly benefactor gave us quite a lot of money to buy books for the good of the local people. After a couple of years of the usual from our managers they've decided that they'd quite like to see something for the money, please.
We're still running vacancies in the Acq. Team. There's a special buy next week to get a load of new stock for Catty Library's re-opening (ha ha ha ha ha ha!). There's still the kids' audiobooks hanging over them like the Biscuit of Damocles. After a very slow August, with nobody doing any orders for a fortnight either because nobody could/would sign them or nobody could do stock selection we're now desperately catching up with the pre-Christmas rush. And we're still awaiting decisions on a pile of reference standing orders (me, I'd scrap the lot and work on the basis that any expenditure on this stock needs to be justified on a case-by-case basis)(but then I'm the Fascist systems guy).
Imagine, then, their delight on being told by Mary that on top of all that all the stock for the benefactor's collection needs to be bought, received and ordered urgently in the next few weeks. Especially as this method of purchasing creates twice as much work as doing it properly (I won't bore you with the details but most stock purchasing system prefer the workflow to run select-order-receive-invoice-pay and don't take well to receive-select-pay-order-invoice)(nor do auditors, but that's another story).
"You've waited until now?" asks Noreen.
There's better to come. Apparently there's nowhere for this stock to go yet. Noreen made a suggestion. Time was I was the only person using that sort of figure of speech in this library.
"It's only going to be about sixty boxes of books," says Mary.
Piece of cake. They can go in the fire exit corridor same as usual. Except that that's already full of boxes of children's stock to go to Catty; a huge pile of boxes of leaflets; some new ladders and a couple of things I don't want to go near in case they bite.
"Don't worry," I tell Noreen, "I've got plenty of room."
2 comments:
This urgency sounds depressingly similar to the one we use in school - i.e. make do with next to nothing all year, then order like hell before the end of March (and then store it all so carefully you can't find it next September).
Yes, there is a 'type' that gets to be co-ordinators/managers in this sort of environment. All the kids who did their homework on the bus into school get these jobs by default.
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