His own white leather toilet seat

It wouldn't be March without a few dozen new chairs in the fire escape corridor...

No round envelopes for me!

I've behaved more professionally than this in my time. Daisy Dormouse rings up from Umpty Reference Library:

"We're having a bit of a tidy up. We've got lots of Windows 95 CD-ROMs here."

"Congratulations," I reply.

Some marigolds on my pillow

Incoming bits and bobs. A few old, knackered PCs that the reference library at Dutch Bend have foisted on us. Some broken keyboards. A box of cable ends for old dumb terminals we threw away a decade ago. Some metal boxes. A dozen Windows 97 system CD-ROMs.

"Christmas comes early," I mutter.

"Yes, we can't just throw shit away, can we?" replies Maudie.

Not so much as a tartiflette

Kevin the van driver has thrown a wobbly (there was one hanging round in the dispatch room).

It was presented as a kick-off about taking a pile of summer reading game stuff over to Grimley Community Centre but really it's a reaction to his having spent the whole of Friday taking vanloads of assorted tat and breakages over to the old Roadkill Library (which should have been demolished this time last year BTW) only to come back here to be asked where he'd been all afternoon because there was something needing going over to the new Roadkill Library.

Maudie and Brownyn can usually filter nonsense like that out of his work schedule but every so often one of other brighter sparks goes direct to the delivery.

Changing rooms

There are times when Eileen baffles me. She is not unintelligent and can be quite industrious and has a good understanding of electronic information issues. She just isn't especially productive and is astonishingly conservative and set in her ways.

They're playing musical chairs up in the reference library at the moment, shifting all the shelving round and making some space for group learning. The most difficult parts of the process are the moving of the enquiry desk, so that it's actually easy for the customers to get to, and the daily newspapers (they've been told that they should let the customers read them).

Seth's scheduled to move the desk this morning, ready for the usual Friday afternoon rush (unless they're both watching the tennis).

"I'm just going to move your desk," he told Eileen.

"Right-o, I'll get out of your way then."

"Erm... Aren't you moving all the crap off the top of the desk first?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, there's all that scrap paper. And the newspapers you've put there this morning. And all them boxes you were supposed to be getting shut of last month. And why is there a pile of pencils?"

"Customers might ask for a pencil."

"Can you move it please?"

"I'm busy at the moment, can it wait a bit?"

"Busy doing what?"

"I've got to stamp these newspapers."

Bumper crop of mushrooms pleases the army

Librarians Being Busy...

The librarians at a library which will go nameless (Catty Library) are forever telling us that they are far, far too busy to do near enough anything they're asked to do.

Henry was over there this morning and noticed that a pile of books in the Local History Collection had been missed in last year's attempt to make this collection onto the catalogue. He suggested that they should be boxed up and sent over to Sheep City and he'd do the honours and then get them returned. Had they any boxes?

"I can't box them up," said Mimsie, "I'm too busy. You'll have to ask Annie."

Henry had a chat with Annie, who was willing to box them up because she's Not A Professional, but couldn't get into the cellar to get the boxes. Mimsie had the key.

Mimsie couldn't open the cellar door so's Annie could get the boxes as the caretaker's been made redundant on the grounds that the caretaker in the Housing Office next door could do both buildings. So she went next door, found the caretaker, got him to accompany her down to the cellar, opened up, showed him where the boxes were, watched him take them upstairs, locked the doors and went back up to tell Annie where the boxes could be found.

"Next time, I'll remember to take my own fucking boxes," muttered Henry.

A Watteau fairyland

I'm attending a meeting at the community centre in Milkbeck. While we're getting ourselves ready to go in there's a visitation by The Business-Changing Solutions Team.

This turns out to be three blokes moving desks into a pantechnicon.

One hundred years ago today

How times change...

Insured for a vast sum in Green Shield stamps

Like some glacier retreating from the warmth of summer T.Aldous has left the following deposits around the library:

• Assorted copies of the Library Association Record featuring mobile libraries and trailer library services, none of them younger than 1994, on Nancy's desk.
• Three copies of The Rose Grower's Annual that were issued to him in 1998 and never renewed, left on the lending library trolley.
• Assorted pictures of the old Umpty Library, double-exposed with photos of a story time event at Castlebury Avenue Play Centre, left on the photocopier.
• Almost-mint copies of Books For Keeps dating from the early 1990s, left on Frog's desk.
• A bag of perished rubber bands left on Maudie's desk.
• Assorted, mostly rusty, paper clips, drawing pins, and bulldog clips, left on top of the stationery cupboard.
• Staple removers; the plastic spirals from a few dozen spiral-bound volumes; some springs; plastic crystal tab file tabs; umpteen boxes of cardboard labels for crystal tab file tabs; some wire, we know not why; fifteen bashed-about but now empty lever arch files; and a box of ballpoint pens that don't work, all on Maisie's desk.
• A copy of the Library Association's proposal to the Major Government for a new library network providing free Internet access to the masses and Pardendale Council's Telematic Strategy 1994, both left in Milton's in-tray.
• A filing cabinet full of God-knows-what, wished upon Julia.
• The keys to the old reference library store cupboard that was thrown away in 1999, bequeathed to Doreen.
• The Helminthdale Edition of the Dewey Decimal System, now with Noreen.
• A box of 1980s mind exercise paperbacks that were property of Catty General Hospital, found by the confidential waste bins.

"There's no point in hanging onto things for the sake of it," T.Aldous tells Maisie.

Cancel the milk and you're away!

News from Year Fifty of the Time Team dig of T.Aldous' office. The man himself brings a crystal file to the recycling bin.

"This is taking forever. I mean: you'd be surprised at the rubbish that people hoard for no apparent reason. Look at all this: Arthur Pemberton [T.Aldous' predecessor-but-one who retired in 1986] even kept a receipt for every car mileage claim his staff made, he never threw them away. Look at them all here! What anyone would want to keep that for I do not know."

I sent you a letter a long time ago...

T.Aldous flourishes the latest finds from the dig:

"Do you know, there's stuff in my files that Reggie Clockwatcher had kept since 1997! What's the point of his hoarding stuff like that?"

Reggie Clockwatcher has been retired four years.

I shall send over a couple of pet beavers to romp with you

A bunch of paperback spinners have appeared in the dispatch room. Despite there being no money about. Seth is heaving to, moving boxes and wheelie bins out of the way so that the spinners may be accommodated.

"Where are these for?" I ask.

"I've no idea, and neither has anybody else," he replies.

"Nobody else?"

"'T.Aldous has got the list,' that's what they told me."

"Does it matter if T.Aldous has got the list? They're in charge now so they can go wherever they decide."

"Oh no. They can't go anywhere until somebody gets the list off T.Aldous, just in case they get it wrong."

T.Aldous is retired. He doesn't work here any more. He is a member of the public.

Chairs XVII

With there being no money about and our not buying much in the way of new books we've actually been able to see an uncluttered corridor to the fire escape for only the third time in human memory.

Even those damned chairs have gone. I'd assumed that they'd gone out to their intended destinations.

How wrong could I be?

As I discovered when I had to go and check on the status of the network box in the utility room.

Chairs XVI

"You see them chairs?" asks Seth, flourishing towards the contents of the fire escape corridor. "Them chairs were only going to be there for a day or two."

"And do we know where they're going?"

"They're replacements for the new ones that arrived damaged."

"And where are they?"

"They're at Carbootsale, Roadkill, Spadespit and Umpty."

"So they've not come back here?"

"No."

"So that's why these are not going out there yet?"

"Correct. There's not the room at them libraries. Like we've got a lot of room here."

"So... How many chairs actually were damaged on arrival?"

"We don't know."

"So how do we know how many replacements should have arrived?"

"Correct again."

"Oh shit... Are you going to run a charity sweepstake on it?"

"I might do. It depends. We might want to be having one about whether or not he actually does retire before Christmas."

Chairs XV

Is it that time of year already? A pile of new chairs have arrived and are stacked up in the fire exit corridor.


But there's no money about.


Ah... these are replacements for the chairs that arrived in November, which are apparently faulty. The fault being that they arrived and were accepted when T.Aldous was on holiday. Seth's been given the job of retrieving the faulty chairs so that a like-for-like swap can take place once the new new chairs have been accepted.

Famous for dropping pre-packed bacon

T.Aldous appears to be clearing his office.

Leastways, he is removing paperwork from his office and depositing it in the confidential waste bins.

One piece of paper at a time.

Seth offered to move one of the bins to his office. Oh no, it would get in the way of things.

Seth offered to give him a box to hold the paperwork in so that it could be carried en masse to the bins. Oh no, it would get too heavy.

Seth offered to bring one of the bins over, empty the very heavy box into it and then take it away, once or twice a day as necessary. Oh no, that would never do.

So T.Aldous is clearing his office one piece of paper at a time.

Exfoliating

Bronwyn is feeling cleansed.

"I've got rid of all of those Larry Grayson bookmarks in Mary's office. And the box of leaflets about the Millennium Book Festival. And the "Jimmy and Alfie go to The Reading Room" leaflets. And I've collected up all the spare stickers from all the reading games, Reading Agency promotions and the Pussycat Willum postcards so that we can start giving them out as freebies to the children who come in for class visits or special events."

Full and fair ones, come and buy!

Our corridor full of boxes is put into context. A colleague reveals:

"I have an office and corridor full of PCs and monitors that are no good to anyone, their current function is to upset the Health and Safety militia by being "hazards", which in the grand scheme of things rates as rather comfortably functional.

"There are only so many as our IT Section have been "renegotiating" the contract with disposal companies. This has taken six months during which time we have not been able to get rid of anything. Previously we would ring up, arrange a collection date and big wagon would appear with two hefty lads to shift mountains of defunct People's Network PCs. However we seem to have reduced in our expectation, as instead of wagon, two hefty bodies and capacity to remove up to ten palettes of stuff, we now have the ability to move five PCs at a time! So this is going to become a race, can we stop replacing PCs quicker than they can dispose of them?

"In order to try and assist matters the Council have introduced their annual spending freeze as we again have overspent on such as bookmarks with pictures of Councillors on them, so I can't spend more than £100 on anything without Chief Officer permission."

This is my street and I'm never going to leave it

We've been expecting a delivery of some equipment to Carbootsale Library, ready for its re-opening probably late next month. When Maisie placed the order she stipulated:

Please ring this number beforehand to arrange for somebody to be this library to take delivery. There usually isn't somebody on site so this prior arrangement is essential.

Which lesser mortals may have taken as a hint.

Not one of our well-known national electrical and white goods companies. We got the automatic electronic telephone call yesterday evening to say that the van would be delivering the goods to Helminthdale Library some time between 7am and 1pm.

At five to seven, Alwyn takes a call from the driver asking for directions to Helminthdale Library. Which he gives. At twenty to eight they call again. Maisie takes the call and explains that

1. They should be delivering to Carbootsale Library;
2. The company should have made prior arrangement as requested; and
3. There won't be anybody to take delivery until after nine o'clock.

"That'll muck our schedules about," complains the driver.

"Not my problem," explains Maisie.

For the next four hours the driver, and his mate, did a tour of Catty, Umpty and the bits of Bencup that nobody talks about before finally ringing up to confess that they couldn't find Carbootsale Library. Maisie provided the directions again.

And once again the next time they rang up.

And again.

Finally, they reckoned that they were in the right place but couldn't find the library.

"What road are you on?"

"Algernon Road."

"What can you see when you look out of the window?"

"There's an Oxfam Shop, an Help The Aged Shop and a British Heart Foundation Shop."

"You're close enough. I'll get somebody to find you and guide you in."

Maisie then rang Verity, who'd been waiting on site and asked her to go and find the driver and hold his hand and take him back to the library.

"I'm really sorry about this Verity."

"That's alright, love. It's been nice to be back home, even if it's just for a morning."

Walking in the air

The rather a lot too many boxes, wheelie bins and assorted whatnot in the fire exit corridor have been joined by a couple of dozen chairs.

"Are they for Carbootsale?" I ask Seth.

"No," he says with gritted teeth, "they're for upstairs."

"Where in God's name are they going?" I ask.

Give Seth his due: he's never short of a good suggestion or three.