Chalet rash

I take a phone call for Milton.

"Sorry, he's on leave this week," I explain.

"That bloke has more holidays than Thomas Cook," mutters the caller who's been trying to talk to him for the past month.

Infinite similarity

I really am sick and tired of this fucking place.

Consecrating an armadillo for St. Swithin's Day

Receive an email with the latest corporate exhortation to man the galleys for the glory of the nation.

"For fuck's sake, do they think I've nothing better to do?" I explode.

It turns out that on reflection no, I don't.

The hand of the world is wounded by its own skill

The council's email servers are struggling because of overcapacity. Which is to say that they're full.

It probably doesn't help that librarians will insist on sending out 15Mb of high-definition photos that they've already put in the library folder on the intranet to 54 colleagues within the library service.

Or that half those colleagues don't check their email...

Hope is a waking dream

"Council leaders to be axed!" cries the Catty Examiner.

Sadly, it turns out that a few of them are taking early retirement.

I'll have a P please, Bob

Today's word is Logorrhoea. Logorrhoea.

Milton has just spent 82 minutes of a meeting saying: "I'm not bovvered."

The crew shot an albatross for luck

Jack Harry has asked Posy to put together some project proposals for some funding he'll decide we can't get anyway so he won't bother. Posy, being young and still almost enthusiastic at times despite everything, has put in a load of work to do the necessary.

"Here you are," she says as she hands the work over to Jack Harry. "But I'm sure I've forgotten something important."

"I shouldn't worry about it," says Jack Harry, "I probably won't read it anyway."

An undisciplined impersonation of Edmundo Ros

"I'm going to have to be more careful," says Bronwyn. "I'm going to be done for insolence."

Ordinarily this would be laughable but these aren't ordinary times. This week, Bronwyn's body language is far more eloquent, and a damned sight ruder, than anything I could ever say.

The point at which the miner is playing the piano like a maniac

Overheard on the way to a meeting:

"You appear to have some anger issues."

"Yes, I'm bleeding annoyed with you, you pillock."

A whiff of goatiness

Noreen gets a 'phone call from the lending library upstairs.

"Where are the floor mats for the yoga session?"

Floor mats?

Yoga session?

The only reason any of us down here know that there are weekly yoga sessions in the community room upstairs is that we get a 'phone call every Tuesday morning asking where the floor mats are.

Hello, I must be going...

Mobile 'phones.

Now, I'm no fan of mobile 'phones but I don't, generally, have an objection to other people having one.

Except when they forget the bit about them being mobile.

One of the horrors of the modern office, which God knows is Hell on Earth to begin with, is the mobile 'phone that somebody has left on their desk while they go away and play with a photocopier, get a butty from the shop down the road, go and gawp at the bloke who's brought in the new literacy group, that sort of thing.

So there we are, stressed out, running round taking telephone calls for people sitting in their offices not taking telephone calls, in between trying to keep at least one wheel left on the wagon. And then you hear something shout: "Answer me you bastard!" And continue to shout "Answer me you bastard!" for the next five minutes until the caller cottons on that nobody's there. Then, just as you settle down after this nonsense, somebody else's 'phone starts playing some bit of (c)rap music. Very loud. And repeat... Then "Answer me you bastard" tries again. And then a cock crows...

Do your workmates a favour before they kill you: either carry your mobile with you so that you can answer it when somebody rings you or else turn down the sound. A lot.

And when the music stops...

It had to happen.

It only takes the merest mischance, what with our poor communication and documentation; chaotic management; and staff so thinly-spread that they spend more time whizzing round the borough to provide emergency cover at libraries than they do seeing family and loved ones.

On the morning that Helminthdale Central Library, our flagship library mind, was being kept open with three staff Kelly and Norma turned up at Windscape Library.

"What are you doing here?" asked Norma.

"I'm covering for you, you're on holiday," said Kelly.

"But I'm not on holiday until next month," replied Norma.

"Could you not take the day off? I'd like to think I didn't get up an hour early to get the bus over here just to waste my time having to go back to Helminthdale."

You'd have to go a long way to beat Anna Neagle

I've been staring at screens a lot this week so on the way into work I popped into the chemist's to get some more aspirin and Optrex. They had a special offer on "New Multifunctional Eyewash" so I bought a bottle of that.

Looking at the latest crop of emails coming from the Chief Executive's office they must have bought a few bottles, too.

Let's not use the "R" word

The Chief Executive sends a message to all staff:

Don't forget to put your clocks back!

Within minutes it is followed by another global message:

If staff must persist in sending hate mail to Mister Ramsay MacDonald please refrain from doing so on council headed paper.

The part of The British Library was played by Norman Shelley and not Shirley Bassey as advertised

"You seem to have a difficult relationship with your management team," says a passing stranger.

It isn't difficult at all. It's rather easy really: they think I'm a gobshite and I think they're irresponsible idiots.

The international language of cramp

The only thing more dispiriting than having your managers refuse to communicate with you is having one of them actually answer a question that you have asked...

Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning

Doreen, sitting in her office downstairs in Helminthdale Central Library, rang upstairs to talk to somebody in the Lending Library.

The Lending Library, being just one person today (in our flagship main library in the borough) was busy serving a queue of customers.

Doreen is in charge of Helminthdale Central Library.

What would you do chums?

...

Doreen rang BT to see if there was a fault on the line.

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one

I've given more diplomatic answers...

Julia's just come back from a meeting of Librarians What Talk At Tables.

"Leamholt's got a really active Facebook page. Why aren't we engaging with social networking like that?" she asks me.

I hear myself say:

"Strictly speaking, you're not even engaging with the World Wide Web."

Kismet has had a hand in it

Frog is dead nosy, which is just as well really as that envelope in the dispatch room addressed "Helminthdale Library" is actually a pile of colouring competition entries from one of our libraries that should have been marked: "Urgent: for attention Frog. Colouring competition."

Pissing on somebody else's chips

One of the higher-ups in the council is having an "on the shop floor" day in one of our libraries.

"What do you see yourself doing in a couple of years' time?" he asked one of the assistants.

"I'd hope I'd have been given a redundancy pay-off by then," she replied.