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

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Digging in

Bronwyn's trying to avoid the usual last-minute panic buy of any old stock that's on the shelves at the suppliers at the end of the financial year. She reckons, sensibly, that the targets that have been set are pretty irrelevant as they're arbitary numbers decided upon by Policy Team without taking into account how many libraries would be closed for months on end. If we hit the government's targets we'll be OK, she says.

This is a brave stance to take in the face of an irrational Policy Team. At some stage one, other or both of us will point out that we don't issue hundreds of books in a panic to each of our borrowers in the last two weeks of March, nor less frog march tens of thousands of people past our visitor counters. If we don't take action about the statutory targets we don't meet, why spend lots of money on stock that we don't want to over-achieve one of the ones that we do?

4 comments:

Unknown said...

An 'irrational policy team'? That sounds rather exciting, are they like the spanish inquisition.. 'no-one expects the irrational policy team', they arrive do something completely unpredictable then make a quick disorganised exit.

Kevin Musgrove said...

Sadly not, Wendy. They are profoundly irrational but annoyingly predictable. I think that's why I end up shouting at them so often.

Gadjo Dilo said...

Surely the money would be better spent on setting up Free £5 Note counters in the libraries, then you'd meet your visitor targets.

Kevin Musgrove said...

Gadjo: Back a few years, when things were even worse and we were also being required to subsidise a couple of sports centres to the tune of half a million, a Director of Leisure & Recreation pointed out that at £7.20 a visit we would be better off doing precisely that.