How efficiency works

Telephones.

We have refined the current arrangements.

Instead of the bad old days when we spent half our lives answering the 'phone for T.Aldous we spend at least half our lives answering every beggar's 'phone.

• Some people put their 'phones through to Maisie's 'phone. They don't tell her, of course until after she's spent hours fielding their calls.
• The 'phones upstairs are set so that if they aren't answered within four rings they come downstairs to Maisie's 'phone. If that's not available they go to Maudie's 'phone.
• The 'phones down here are set so that if they aren't answered within four rings they get sent into a hunt group.

This last is a barrel of laughs. If you're not paying attention your incoming 'phone call automatically gets switched to somebody else's 'phone. So you try to retrieve your call by trying to pick it up. And pick up the call that rang just the once on somebody else's 'phone.

Say, just as an example of course, that somebody upstairs rings downstairs to tell somebody down here there's a 'phone call from a relative. And that somebody decides to ignore their 'phone because they want to hear more about somebody's holiday. And that it the comes to your 'phone. And you try to put the call through to the person who's been ignoring it. But their 'phone has been put through to the lending office 'phone...

Hilarious consequences.

This morning's capper? Noreen gets a 'phone call. It's somebody ringing somebody in the library, they don't know who as they've just picked up the telephone number from their answerphone. Noreen does a tour of the floor asking if anybody knows him. Nobody in our office has heard of him so we're baffled. An attempt to ring upstairs to see if anyone up there wants this chappie leads to that call coming back down here. In the end, all Noreen can do is take his name and number and apologise for wasting his time.

I look forward to somebody apologising for wasting ours.

Walking through an empty house

The office is like the Mary Celeste without the crowd scenes.

• Maudie and Maisie are attending a meeting about the future of their jobs
• Library Policy & Strategic Management Team (this week) are wherever they are today. Somebody rather tactlessly wrote "Missing In Action" on the staff notice board and there was a bit of a to-do as to whether or not there was a space between n and A.
• The Acquisitions Team (both of them) are in a meeting with Bronwyn to try and work out what on earth is going on with one of the new collections that somebody higher up is supposed to have sorted out.
• Frog is out doing a summer story session with some blind children in Umpty.

So it looks like I'm in charge. That being the case, I wonder if it would be an abuse of executive power to tell the lending library to stop diverting all their 'phones down here.

Hats and rabbits

I've just had a long chat with Maybelle at the end of which she said:

"I'm puzzled by this meeting. You asked for a chat to go through something you wanted me to help you with but as far as I can see you're the one who's taken on all the work."

I was a bit puzzled too. And a little nervous: had she decided that I had really designs on her body she would have kicked my head in. As it was, we decided to give up and stalk the kettle without getting to the bottom of the puzzle.

Of course, I can leave no scab unpicked so I've been mulling this over. Actually, it turns out to be key to the way that Maybelle and I work together. Milton reckons its a good partnership because we both plan ahead and that while I'm good at seeing how best to do things she's good at getting them done. There's a lot to that but I think there's something else in the mix, too.

The bit of my job that's not explicitly in my job description is talking and listening to people. You need to know what people want to do and why before you can try to apply a systemic solution to it. (A systemic solution may be: "it works as it is, why monkey with it?") Very broadly, we have three groups of people I need to talk to:

• The lacking in confidence. I have to go into sheepdog mode: "I know you don't think you're capable of doing this but look at this, that and that: you're doing it all the time and doing a good job of it. What do you mean, you can't do that? Just look at this that you've done. Honestly, come on you can do it!"
• The lacking in will. I go into sheepdog mode again: "We both know you can do this; and we both know that you want me to do this for you so that you don't have to and you can bitch about it afterwards if anything goes wrong. Now we both know that where are you going to go now?"
• The lacking in restraint. I go into sheepdog mode yet again: "Yes, they're all brilliant ideas and we could do that, that, that, that, that, that and that but we haven't yet worked out how to do this, which is what we got together to decide in the first place."

This is all well and good, and I can do this to a lesser or greater extent. But I am not a natural sheepdog. By all that is natural I am one of those elderly, plodding, golden retrievers that can spend hours staring at Belisha beacons. I've trained myself so that I can do all that mental running around and chasing and chivvying to help other people get started with a piece of work or to help them marshal their thoughts. Unfortunately, I can't do it very well for myself and just lately I've been running myself ragged trying to help other people deal with an explosion of Stuff To Deal With.

It used to work quite well back when I shared an office with Jimmy Huddersfield because he, being resolutely not a theorist and being very practically-minded, was an ideal sounding board for me to get my thoughts in order. I've really missed that since he retired. Thinking it through, I think this is what I'm getting out of chatting with Maybelle. The dynamic's different because they're different thinkers but the function's the same.

It'll probably be safer if I tell her I'm after her body.

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.

And some of the children's librarians even remember Ted Ray

OK. The good news is that Helminthdale Central Library is running a regular Monday morning Tiny Tots Tales Time throughout the school holidays so we that keep on supporting pre-school children and their families during the usual frenetics.

The bad news is that the librarians of Helminthdale Central Library have decided that their weekly team meeting is going to be every Monday morning. So once a week, five minutes before the doors open, one or other of them will go up to Frog and say:

"Frog, we're struggling a bit this morning. Can you do Tiny Tots for us, just for this morning?"

It's taken him a month to realise what they're doing and he isn't overly impressed.

The loofah snapped but the rubber duck came out unscathed

"I think I'm a jaguar," says Maybelle.

"Eh?" asks Frog.

"I think it's a jaguar. Or a puma or something."

"A cougar?"

"That's it! I think I'm turning in a cougar!"

"Oh yes?"

Apparently she'd spent all yesterday afternoon overlooking a gym and struggling not to be distracted by hunky young men.

A field of frozen lettuce

The lists, twits and inboxes are full of talk of this, that or another bit of proposed reorganisation, rejigging, reconfiguring, etc. etc. etc. of the public library service at one level or another.

There's talk of wholesale cuts; replacing staff with volunteers and sundry other scaries. Will we stay as we are? Will we be chopped to bits? Will we be hived off to a charitable trust? Will we be scrunched together with the library services of Pardendale or Bencup, or even embroiled in whatever is to go on in Greater Manchester or the North-West Region, or the whole North of England?

And on top of that, of course, no sensible person would put five bob on Helminthdale Council still existing in five years' time (we're due another bout of municipal reorganisations nationally).

Latest news is that the soon-to-be-defunct MLA is funding feasibility studies for very large scale joint-authority efficiency programmes across the country. I mentioned this in passing to Ken Barmy as we chatted on the 'phone about a problem with a bibliographic database we both use.

"There's already a lot of unseemly jostling for position amongst the Chief Librarians," I observed.

"Mensheviks fighting over the window seat in the back rooms of the Duma," he replied.

Don't blow it too much or it'll look like Jimmy Edwards

Posy's a bit wound up by things, convinced that "they" (she's already picked up that habit) know more than they're letting on about cuts, reorganisations, efficiencies and sundry gremlins, hobgoblins and calamities of moment.

I've tried to explain:

"It's much, much worse than that: they seriously don't have an idea from one day to the next. It's all being made up on backs of fag packets one daft decision at a time, each with no reference to the last decision or the next, and managers too often finding out what's going on from their underlings."

The truly awful thing is that we both find this a comforting thought.

A million and one maybes

That's depressing: travelling through a neighbouring borough to a meeting we pass what used to be a nice little community library. It's now a "Prime Regeneration Site."

Helpfully, the road sign still says "Library."

I'll have none of that language, not even through a brown paper parcel

A strange day. For once I've been crosser with the staff than the managers. To explain I must make something clear from the onset:

No job cuts have been announced yet in the library service; council has said they want to keep all the libraries open and none of our staff has yet been told they will be being made redundant.

I'll repeat that:

No job cuts have been announced yet in the library service; council has said they want to keep all the libraries open and none of our staff has yet been told they will be being made redundant.

The scythes are flashing round parts of Helminthdale Council and have been doing for months but

No job cuts have been announced yet in the library service; council has said they want to keep all the libraries open and none of our staff has yet been told they will be being made redundant.

So we have a touch of the dooms. Not helped by what few words filter out from The Bunker: nothing can be done because "they" (it's always "they") will "probably decide to cut" whatever is under discussion. And Doreen has spent the past two months telling anyone who'll listen (and many who won't) that she's not long for this world.

Milton, to his credit, is at least going out and about trying to start new things going and encouraging staff to take any opportunities going for personal or professional development. He drives me barmy because we're supposed to be working as a team and I'm finding out too much of this as an afterthought but at least he's doing something constructive most of the time. Other than that, the word is that we are doomed.

Staff are naturally dismayed and worried. Which is fair enough. I'm not, which is also fair enough. It could be my Quixotic nature, it could be sheer bloody-mindedness or it could be that I think if something's worth fighting for when the things are relatively easy it's worth fighting for when the shit hits the fan. But I entirely accept that people are going to be dismayed and worried, especially when what passes for leadership is as feckless and supine as ours as been lately. T.Aldous, and to a far lesser extent Mary, would at least have been arguing the case for the library service long and loud, however ill-advisedly or ineptly. Even dear old Reggie Clockwatcher, who was a lovely man but a shockingly weak manager, would have been making the effort. But... But... And so staff are dismayed and worried.

I do draw the line when they decide that despite the lack of objective evidence they are actually doomed and there is nothing that anybody will or can say that they will listen to that will contradict this.

No. We're not doing that. We don't have the spare time, space or energy for that.

So I got cross. And pinned their ears back. Which they didn't like. Nor would I have done in their shoes if I'm being honest but I'm not letting them do it. If senior managers decide that they are doomed, that's up to them. If senior managers try to sell staff down the river to buy their own safety, that's despicable and I'll say so and I'll fight it. But I am not having staff undermining themselves and their colleagues and, effectively, selling themselves down the river.

And I said so.

We'll all calm down, because we do in the end, and we'll see what we can do despite the organisational culture, because that's also what we do. And if things do get really bloody we'll do what we can and we'll care and we'll support and we'll hope for the best because that's what we would want to do if it came to that. But if it really does come to that I don't want people compounding their injuries by already having undervalued themselves and their contribution to the service.

A serious bit

I was sorry to hear of the death of Bob McKee, the Chief Executive of CILIP, over the weekend. I never met him but we'd exchanged emails a few times and during his time in charge he'd managed to turn CILIP away from its prissy navel-gazing and into an organisation I've recently been seriously tempted to join (you'd have put good money on my never writing that sentence!)

A serious loss to the national public library service at a time when too many of the people we rely on locally for advocacy have decided that we're all already doomed and we should be turning customers away from the doors in case we get too busy.

The turnip: it's place in nudism

I bump into Ken Barmy. To say that he is disconsolate is to understate immensely. He has just emerged, blinking, from a meeting with his management board.

"How goes it old fruit," say I.

"It's all rotifers and Volvox," he replied, which bode ill.

"As bad as that?"

"We were discussing staffing our libraries..."

"Yes..." this is currently The Discussion That Anybody In The Public Sector Would Prefer To Sidle Away From.

"One of our senior managers reckoned that we have too many staff in our libraries."

I know for a fact they're even worse placed than us for being able to open the doors each morning.

"How do they reckon that?"

"She reckons that they only need so many staff because the libraries get busy with customers."

"Oh Hell. She's not decided that you can dispense with staff and do it all online has she?"

"Oh no. She's dead against online because we must get our visitor figures up."

My brain was already starting to hurt. I asked a question I shouldn't.

"So what does she mean then."

"She reckons that we need to manage customer throughput. She suggested that we give customers red bracelets, like they do in busy nightclubs, and ask them to come back later."

"Kenneth, please tell me you are taking the piss."

He wasn't.

"You poor dear fellow."

It was all I could do not to put a white fiver in his hand and tell him to buy himself a cup of tea.

We look after your circle of water

Not another bloody project without aims, resources, priorities, success factors or exit strategy.

Can you hear me, mother?

News of Bronwyn's Digby Moment has spread around the more irreverent pastures of the library service.

"I don't see why you couldn't get Rudyard Kipling, or W.E. Johns," says Frog.

"Or Enid Blyton," suggests Sybil.

"We could have a dead authors' evening at Dutch Bend Library!"

"I'm getting a message from the other side... Does the name Biggles mean anything to anybody? Ginger? Algy?"

"Mrs. Johnstone... I'm getting a message from Robert Louis Stevenson... He says that your cat Tiddles is happy on the other side..."

"You can laugh!" muttered Bronwyn. "You watch: he'll try to stop you putting on the puppet show in Spadespit because it's not David Blaine."

"That's alright. We can put a big box in the library and tell them that that's him."

"Now then, Mrs. Johnstone, it's up to you now. Are you going to take the money or will you open the box?"

Never trust a plumber who turns up wearing armbands

Digby's playing a blinder this week; someone will have to put something into his coffee. Or at least remind him that he is the council's Press Officer, not God.

Bronwyn's arranged an author visit for Glass Road Library. Said chappy writes gritty, very noir thrillers with enough of a body count to satisfy even the blood lusts of that library's pensionable ladies. So it's quite a coup and needs a bit of publicity in celebration.

"Oh, we can't publicise that," says Digby, "it's so gloomy. Can't she get Dan Brown instead?"

Jack Harry passes the news on to Bronwyn.

"Oh yes," she says, "is he paying for him then?"

"You don't sound very impressed with the idea," says Jack Harry.

"Oh, I'm very impressed," lied Bronwyn.

Over Pascagoula by the sea

"It's strangely liberating," says Bronwyn.

"What is?" I ask, suspiciously.

"That feeling that you don't give a flying fuck any more because they've stamped your card regardless."

"Welcome to my world," I replied.

Hob-nobbing with the stars

A Celebrity We All Know And Love has been and gone, in less time than was planned but still successfully. The girls in lending managed the class of kids and the schedule such that nobody felt short-changed. The Celebrity was a delight, not a diva and Digby didn't get too much underfoot.

A nice experience for the library and its customers.

Supermarket trolley by a keep-left sign

We, and a classful of kids, eagerly await the arrival of A Celebrity Most Of Us Have Actually Heard Of. They are running late because Digby Deadpan gave them the wrong directions and the poor devil has been driving round the town centre twice trying to find the library.

Actual, real and proper directions have been issued and we are all hopeful of a speedy arrival.

Victorious failures and successful suicides

Helminthdale, like other councils across the country, are pulling together cuts packages to try and pre-empt the inevitable horrors to come with the government's autumn spending plans. This evening's news doesn't bode well.

The staff in the works department have been fighting a four-year battle with the council over the consequences of the equal pay evaluation fiasco. Just before m'learned friends got involved in earnest the council owned up that they'd screwed up on a couple of key measures and that the team leaders were entitled to remain at grade six. Last week they received their first pay packet at the re-established grade.

Today they were told that as part of the council's efficiency savings the works department posts at this grade are to be scrapped. They're well impressed at the news.

The land that time put in a safe place

"I think this counts as a stock-editing fail," says Sammi as she emerges from the technology section of the non-fiction shelves.

"Oh dear, yes," agrees Frog.

The book was: 'Drive The Jim Clark Way.'

Just a debate to say they can start talking about these things

Doreen is the lead officer on the new reading project. She controls the budget; it's to be delivered in one of her libraries and her staff will be doing the necessary.

Bronwyn's job is to buy the books selected for the reading project and pass them on to the library.

"What's going on with the project?" asks Bronwyn.

"I assumed you were sorting it out," replied Doreen.

"Well. I'd best get on with it, hadn't I?" retorted Bronwyn, tartly.

Tiny, oak-beamed suppositories

Every day, Posy gets a flurry of electronic missives or epistles from Digby Deadpan concerning the visit of A Celebrity Some Of Us Have Heard Of. We didn't have this much fuss when royalty came to visit (Ex-King Zog of Albania came in to use the reference library, for old times' sake).

Posy explodes at the latest one.

"He wants to know if the library's got a nice table The Celebrity can sit at!"

"If he shifted his arse rather than talking through it he might come over the road and have a look for himself," suggests Maybelle.

Europe's largest domestic herd of bald badgers

There are days when I think I'm in training for the care home. This is a transcript of what passed for a conversation over the staff room table. I've not embellished it any, I hope I've managed to get most of it written down. I dare say I'll have to explain why I've run into the gents with a notebook.

Sybil: "So how's wha'zname doing?"

Frog: "Which one?"

Sybil: "You know, the one with the doo-dah."

Frog: "Oh! That wha'sname. Ooh, well... Luckily I had me little drum with me."

Sybil: "Did you beat a retreat?"

Frog: "Beat! Retreat! Peat!"

Sybil: "Feet!"

Frog: "Ooh, now I'm all of a doo-dah."

Sybil: "You'll just have to let it dangle like the rest of them."

Frog: "Is that a chocolate biscuit?"

Sybil: "It was."

Posy: "If I cut my boyfriend's head off, do you think he'd grow another one?"

Sybil: "Hey, think on: it could be a whatsit."

Frog: "We had fish pie for supper last night."

Sybil: "Talk about braces..."

Frog "One of them's a donkey."

Sybil: "Hey! Hey! You know what? Talking about donkeys..."

Frog: "You'll have to lie back and think of England."

Posy: "Kenneth Williams?"

All these people have the vote. Ain't democracy grand?

Attractive property gains for meek forecast

You can tell the success of a town's regeneration strategy by the charity shops that shut down due to lack of trade.

Using your puckish epigrams to their best advantage

It occurred to me the other day that this blog's lost half its material since T.Aldous finally let go and retired properly. There are reasons for this:

• Most of what's going on I've written about before ad nauseam. There are only so many ways that a stream of water can pour through the roof at Catty Library before the story wears thin.
• There are quite a lot of personnel issues that ethically I can't write about, astonishing though one or two are.
• There are some things so very, very particular to our place that it would blow my anonymity were I to write about them. This is a dangerous time for anybody's anonymity to be blown so I'll save them all up for after I get the axe. Like as not there'll be five or six years' worth of stories to pass on if they make me redundant.
• Except as alluded to above our managers are being very boring. Well, not boring so much as tiresome. Since T.Aldous officially retired the top table have been closeted in their bunker, coming out periodically to throw a hissy fit then scuttle back again. It's beyond my literary powers to make half a year's sulking sound remotely interesting.

Anyway, we're getting by, thanks for asking, on a diet of uncertainty and gloom. We're surviving thanks to large doses of rank insolence sugared with hoots of derision. I'm enjoying every minute.

Drive-by soft furnishing

There's no money about. Two new, expensive-looking velvet sofas have appeared in the fire exit corridor.

"What are those sofas for?"

I asked Seth. Hopefully. (I had visions of us being able to spend the day sitting comfortably in the corridor waiting for the fire alarm to go off).

"It's for that new reading thing," he said.

We've got funding for a reading programme. So we've bought two sofas.

The next contestant will now do her mime

Frog points towards one of the customers in the library.

"What do you think that lady does for a living?" he asks me.

This is Helminthdale, I daren't guess. Least of all in public.

"She drives a thirty-six ton truck," he tells me.

I look at her again. She's a small bird-like creature. I'm astonished that she can climb up into the cabin, let alone drive one.

"She used to come into Spadespit Library at first. That's when her first three were still young enough to come to under-fives'. Let's see... That was Eoin, Calum and... Timothy?"

"No, Timothy was the fifth one. It was Eoin, Callum and Arthur. Then she had Pat and then Timothy," said Bronwyn.

"So is that Pat and Timothy with her now?" I asked.

"No... Pat was a little girl," said Bronwyn.

"That's Brian and Donal," said Frog.

"How many are there?" I asked.

"Is it eight?" asked Bronwyn.

"No, it's nine. Her sister's looking after the baby."

I'm astonished she can find the time to drive a truck, let alone the energy.

Watch the birdie

We're looking at some photos of children's library events.

"Who's that?" asks Frog.

"That's Dagmar," I reply.

"That's terrible," he said.

"What is?"

"I didn't recognise her because she's smiling."

Stains on my notebook

I bump into an old colleague from another life. We've not seen each other for years; I have the sense not to tell her she looks stunning. We got talking and I asked after her family. She was extremely worried about her eldest:

"He's dropped out of uni. and become a beach bum. He's spending all his time windsurfing. We're at our wits end."

"Is he happy?" I asked.

"Deliriously so," she replied bitterly.

"The world's full of sad middle-aged men who were going to change the world," I reminded her.

I'm glad I didn't give her a hug.

A-Ha-Ho Ho-A-Ho

(after Shelley)

Sitting here at my desk, all unknowing

Of anything going on

Within the library.

Communication's heavy going

We're feeling woebegone

Within the library.

We may break out the Ouija,

Tap a table or two,

Consult the runes

Or other misbehaviour.

If any were there to ask

It might not be such a task;

But outside the bunker

We're in the library.

Undetectable in normal everyday use

The staff gents' toilet hasn't had a working extractor fan for the past fourteen years. With the current round of cuts and austerity measures it's unlikely that it's going to be fixed any time soon.

Even the cleanest bathroom hangs onto its devils, which is how we've discovered that the combination of Glade Fresh and Glade Apple & Cinnamon sprayed in a 2:1 ratio creates exactly the smell of Bazooka Joe bubble gum.

We are investigating the possibilities of tapping into the nostalgia wave as an income generator.

Ask not what your Capital can do for you...

Like most everyone else, we've received a missive or epistle telling us that we want to join in with the London Olympics' volunteer programme.

There's pages and pages of it, most of it so much gabble. It took three readings for it to dawn on me that the "games-makers" we were being exhorted to recruit were, in fact, volunteer workers. This annoys me: back when Manchester did the Commonwealth Games the volunteers did a splendid job and I've every hope and expectation that they'll do the same for the Olympics in London. Why The Committee ("Can we have order please? There's a tray of meat pies just come in as need paying for.") needs to piss on their chips by dubbing them "games-makers" is beyond me. Ask any passer-by if they would want to be a "games-maker" and I'm not sure you'd get many appropriate replies.

Partway through a particularly dense patch of verbiage lie the words "and of course, increased visitor use of your library." I've now read the bloody document five times and am none the wiser as to where the "of course" comes from.

As far as I can tell, we're being asked to act as recruiting agents for volunteers for the London Olympics, using the People's Network to provide access to the online application forms. If they said that I'd be all for it. Dumping a pile of officious bumptious garbage on us all doesn't endear the project.

On the Hop

Just a week into The Summer Reading Challenge and Frog and Maudie are already inundated with calls (always from the same two libraries) asking: "the children have finished the Summer Reading Game, what do we do now?" The professionalism of both shines through and they give better answers than I would have.

Perhaps the most spectacular challengers frequent Pottersbury Road Library. Hedi was ringing up with the question last Monday afternoon. No mean feat given that the game started on the Saturday, the library was open for three hours on the Saturday afternoon and she was ringing an hour after re-opening on the Monday. We're still trying to work out how the children would have registered for the game, gone away and read two books, come back and got their first set of goodies, read another two books and come back for the second and then read the final two books and come back for their winners' certificates in the time available.

Maudie, as ever, is a model of economy in response to daft questions.

"What happens when we run out of goodies to give to the children?"

"You won't have any left."

Work makes us free

I tried to explain how the council works to Posy. This was as close as I could get.

Five foot five, known stamp-collector

A missing letter S on a request slip leads Sybil to a dark place. Thinking that she's looking to see which libraries nationwide are holdings copies of a novel for genteel ladies she finds herself looking at cataloguing details of a book which describes itself as "the ultimate pin-up book of soft-porn punk princesses." This comes as a surprise at first as Sybil knows that Verity is the very model of probity and wouldn't dream of asking for naughty books for her library. It comes as a relief to realise the spelling error.

There is still a body of opinion that says that we should get the ultimate pin-up book of soft-porn punk princesses. Stock selection is always a burning issue in public libraries.

"We're always saying that we need to attract the young male demographic to our libraries."

"Yes, we should buy a copy while we're still allowed to buy any books. It would go out on loan OK."

"It would go out on loan OK but we'd never see it again once it had gone out."

"And we'd have to laminate the pages..."

Slouching to Bethlehem

Library Policy & Strategic Management Team (this week) emerge, blinking in the sunlight from their bunker. They look around and seem astonished to find us still here. They scuttle away back into the bunker and put a "Meeting in progress, do not disturb" sign on the door.

This is what passes for management these days.

Void

I'm in a meeting in the Town Hall. From my vantage point I can see the empty rolling plains that is the staff car park. The prohibitions on staff parking there are everything to do with the council's commitments to its Green Commute Programme and nothing whatever to do with trying to rake off a take from the commercial car parks in the town centre.

And absolutely nothing to do with the rumour that the car park is structurally unsound, nor should anything be read into the Building Inspection Team's being told that on no account must they investigate the lumps of concrete that fell off the side that time.

Only a cynic would point out that that of the Building Inspectors were made redundant last month.

Nature red in tooth and carpets

For the second year running, peregrine falcons have successfully nested on the old Town hall at Umpty.

"That's splendid news!" said Frog to the Countryside Officer.

It's not so splendid when you get half a pigeon dropped on your head as you're clocking in for work."

Sometimes they don't, do they?

So this is where we're up to in the lending library...

After complaints that telephone calls aren't being answered a solution has been determined. Anybody ringing the lending library office at the top of the building finds their call put through to Maisie in the basement. Maisie then tries to put the call through to the lending library office and after three rings it comes back down to Maudie's 'phone, Maudie sitting next to Maisie. Bad words are said by one sotto voce while the other apologises to the caller and tries again. With the same result. Third time lucky, they always say, and as "they" patently have no idea whatsoever Maisie tries to put the call through to the lending counter, that being next to the lending library office. Only to discover that that is no longer a valid number on the switchboard. After apologising to the caller, taking a message and promising to pass it on, Maisie and Maudie draw straws to see whose turn it is this time to run up all those stairs and pass the message on to whoever's up in lending today.

Meanwhile...

Sybil tries to ring the lending counter to try and sort out an inter-library loan request and gets a disconnected tone. Doreen, who is in charge of the lending library inter alia, is passing so Sybil asks a sensible question.

"Is there something wrong with the 'phone upstairs? I keep getting a disconnected tone when I ring it."

Doreen blows a gasket.

"I only had the number changed this morning. All the lending staff know about it."

After a suitable interval, Sybil points out:

"Yes, but we didn't. What number do we need to ring to get through upstairs?"

Doreen blows another gasket.

It turns out that the new number is what was the old Children's Librarian number, back in the days when dear old Betty Rosencrantz was Children's Librarian Of All The Russias. So that's all right then, isn't it.

Sibyl was bitching about this exchange over the lunch table.

"Why didn't you ring extension 18?" asked Maybelle.

"What's extension 18?" we all asked.

"It's the other 'phone on the counter. It's the one the staff use when they want to get through to the counter. It's sort of a secret but everybody knows about it."

I've worked in this building for nearly two decades and it's the first I've heard of it.

Ranting windmills

Helminthdale being such a small place, many of our customer transactions have a lengthy back story. Take the Child Psychologist who's just had his books issued to him by Janie. Janie used to be a teacher before she retired and had to go to some of his seminars.

"Some of the teachers used to hang on his every word as if it were gospel. Which was strange given that his children had such extraordinary behaviour. One insisted on coming into class on a skateboard and just wouldn't be stopped doing it. I'd get 'phone calls: 'how dare you stifle my child's freedom of expression?' I tried my best to explain that I also had to respect the freedom of expression of the thirty-five parents complaining about their children's bruised ankles but he wasn't having any of it."

Ding dong

Walking through the bus station I notice a figure walking through to the chip shop car park, pulling along a little suitcase on wheels.

It's the council's Chief Executive, J.Arthur Blenkenstein. Poor old devil. Fancy having to become an Avon lady at his age.

Cloud computing

There's no money about. The architects are presenting the new Town Hall at Umpty, which will also be housing the council's IT Section. All goes well until someone from the IT Section puts his hand up.

"Where are the servers going?"

Yup. There's no room at the inn for the council's IT infrastructure.

Plan B now involves a loft conversion.

Not good uns, just recognisable

Not a good idea...

We're coming up to end of day. The staff on the counter have switched off all but one terminal. Three staff are behind the counter waiting for time's up. One is serving a queue of customers at the terminal that's still switched on.

I'll make a point up being up here tomorrow evening and perhaps lend a hand if the circumstances recur.

The delusional and terminally superficial

Some of the staff have come back this week's indoctrination session. The Bobbing Up And Down Team have been wound up and the relict members are passing on the good news about Helminthdale Council's new way of working.

The idea that Helminthdale Council works at all strikes many of us as a dangerous novelty.

Apparently, that isn't an attitude that's going to be tested under the new regime.

Be careful what you wish for

The council's intranet includes a staff forum. "This is your forum where you can discuss the issues that are important to you; where you and your colleagues can share ideas and let us know what you think." For one brief, glorious ten minutes the forum discussion on the staff consultation process was available for staff to see.

The question was: "What do you think are this organisation's core goals and objectives?"

I particularly liked "Striving to maximise adequacy."

The healthy living agenda

A couple of the Library Assistants are moaning about stiffness and bad backs.

"Hey up," says a passing customer (of an age), "tha'll be alright once you have a shit and a sleep. Not at the same time, mind."

Those parallel wrinkles that are the penalty of superciliousness

I am persuaded that librarians don't do teamwork.

A mournful concern for what happened

The unions are inviting us to "fight the ConDem plans to destroy public services." It's difficult to rouse oneself to the barricades as it's evident that public sector managers seem to be intent on beating them to it.

The latest news on the grapevine involves a local authority a few miles away. They've sent all the staff above scale 4 redundancy notices. No word of warning, just plop on the hall floor when the postie came a-calling. They will be able to apply for their own jobs, once the council's decided which of those jobs they're not going to cut.

1. Scale 4 is the unofficial aspirational entry level for graduates coming into local government posts. It's the lowest point on the scale where you earn enough to definitely be paying Income Tax and National Insurance, plus the contributions to the fully-funded-by-staff-contributions pension that the government says it can't afford despite the fact it doesn't actually cost the taxpayer anything because it's entirely funded by staff contributions. Scale 2/3 is the actual entry level for most graduates in local government. The payment rate for Scale 1 is actually below the national minimum wage.


2. The clock starts ticking on the day that you are declared redundant. You have 90 days to find alternative employment. At the end of the 90 days you are unemployed. You will notice that this council has decided to have a think about which jobs to keep, then advertise, interview and appoint after staff have received a letter of redundancy.

Touch wood, I don't think Helminthdale will be as bad as that.

We called him all the Portuguese pet-names we could think ofand made up a few new ones.

As a consolation prize for Friday's slight mishap Digby Deadpan, the council's Press Officer, has set the library up with another prospective road crash. This time it's A Celebrity Some Of Us Have Heard Of.

"I want you to get in some schoolkids," he tells Posy. "Of course, I'll need to know what they're going to say to him."

"Schoolkids?" asks Posy, "do you imagine they're going to remember what they were going to say to him a week after they've told us?"

"Well, we can't have them upsetting him with difficult questions. He's a bit of a diva."

Kettle. Pan.

"If he's a bit of a diva, what the fuck is he doing booking him to meet the public in a library?" explodes Maybelle.

Rock and roll nostrils

Oh joy.

This afternoon, Umpty Library was to be visited by A Celebrity That Nobody's Ever Heard Of. For no apparent reason other than the council's Press Officer was offered him cheap by somebody he knew. To say that the run-up to the calamity has made us pine for the seamless efficiency of the planning regime of T.Aldous and Mary is to understate considerably. Not least because the council's Press Officer is a bit of a prima donna.

There have been a flurry of bumptious "Thou shalt" emails from said chappie for the past four weeks. Between them, Doreen, Bronwyn and Posy have exhausted their vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon colloquialisms. And today's the day.

Posters all over town.

Queue of damp tweenies waiting for signed photographs.

No show.

"He's on his way," became, an hour later: "he's not coming." He's unwell out of a bottle, but we can't tell the tweenies that.

"Ah well, if he's not coming I'll leave you to it," says PR Professional.

Which is when Doreen discovered a word she didn't think she knew.

It smells of brown soap and beer

Maybelle is laughing immoderate. This is usually bad news.

She is reading a set of minutes. Definitely bad news. She folds over the top of the sheet.

"Read these minutes and see if you can guess which meeting it was," she says.

Let's see..

• Action one to be done by the Counter Supervisors (Hettie, Daisy and Maybelle)...
• Action two to be done by Hettie, Daisy and Maybelle...
• Action three to be done by Hettie, Daisy and Maybelle...
• Action four to be done by Milton...
• Action five to be done by Hettie, Daisy and Maybelle...
• Action six to be done by me (nice to know!)...
• Action seven to be done by Hettie, Daisy and Maybelle...
• Action eight to be done by Frog and Bronwyn...
• Action nine to be done by Hettie, Daisy and Maybelle...

It's too easy. The Assistant Librarians are conspicuous by their absence.

All morning trying to push a cow into Hangar 25

Maudie and Maisie are strung out to the nines. As well as doing their own jobs - all the admin. and finance for the whole of the Library Service; reporting yet more building problems at Catty, Umpty, Spadespit and Windscape libraries; collating the 2009/10 statistics that Jack Harry decided he wanted last week that could have been collated as we go along throughout the last financial year and need to be delivered today; that sort of thing - they're answering the 'phones for Library Policy & Strategic Management Team (this week) because, well, we're not sure why but it's bound be a jolly good reason; making tea for the Social Services meeting up in the lending library community room (no, we're not sure, either); and answering all the calls to the Assistant Librarian's office on the top floor because of a Customer Care Audit diktat that states that they must answer that 'phone, despite it being four floors upstairs from us and all the calls are from staff wanting to talk to the Assistant Librarian.

Jack Harry takes a 'phone call from the new Assistant Director. He comes out of his office to speak unto Maudie and Maisie.

"Kieran Paisley in the Leisure Section needs some help to pack some boxes. I've said that you'll go over to the Town Hall to give him a hand."

The girls are just - only just, mind - professional enough not to say they can't go out because they're washing their hair.

For the answers to these questions tune in next week and much good it'll do you

I knew it was all going too swimmingly lately. I've been getting a bit giddy with it. It had to come to an end. And inevitably, it was a meeting of the Shadowy Cabinet that brought me back down to Earth.

The past few meetings had been pretty good. Possibly because, in the absence of T.Aldous and with Library Policy & Strategic Management Team (this week)'s complete and abject inability to work as a team, Warner had asked Julia to fill in for a bit pending the latest restructure of the Assistant Directorate. The moment has passed and she's now back in tight defensive Group Librarian formation, conveniently forgetting the moments in the recent past where... [Oh, it's no good, I'll have to start a secret blog to do the stories justice.]

Anyway...

Most of the business of the meeting was unremarkably remarkable save that I'm appalled by what we consider to be normal these days. Where I came a cropper, and badly, was the photo library.

We have a lot of photos. We have a lot of photos in digital format held in files on the computer. We have a lot of photos in digital format held in files on the computer in a file and folder structure that can at best be described as random to the point of wilful obscurity. This has suddenly become a problem for the Library Service because it has inconvenienced a member of Library Policy & Strategic Management Team (this week).

"We need to sort them out so that we can find pictures we may want for publicity."

Now, if you're reading this blog you can come up with at least one perfectly good way of solving this problem. And I have already presented them with three of those solutions. I made a noise then shut up.

"Yes this is a problem."

"Is this something we could get volunteers to do?"

I'm sat at a table surrounded by librarians. Will somebody please tell CILIP that I did this next thing. I said:

"Isn't the selection, description and organisation of materials and the building of the means to retrieve them the sort of thing a librarian should be doing? I mean, it's good old-fashioned librarianship, the stuff that you've been trained properly to do."

I looked around the table.

It was all I could do not to say: "I'll get me coat."

Falling in love with rain and melancholy

I'm talking to Alice at Spadespit Library. She's a bit concerned that the library's not as busy as it should be lately.

"It's been so quiet they've been hunting stags in the reading room," she explains.

Luxuriating amongst fourteen aisles of dry grocery products

The new stock selection policy, such as it is, is easy: Frog's signed up to every children's literacy programme going - Book Off, Book You, Book North, Booked If I Know, etc. etc. etc. - and Bronwyn's signed up to every reading agency programme going and a couple that aren't yet. That way between them they hope we'll be able to blag a couple of hundred free books a month. Meanwhile, the rest of us are on the look-out for anything that may provide us with a few boxes of free books without our having to sell our own families into bondage (other people's families are fair game).

If you see anybody in the supermarket ripping special offer labels off cereal packets, or mugging old ladies for their copy of The People's Friend, it'll be your local public librarian doing their bit for the bookshelves of Britain.

The Apocalypse wears crimplene

How events are organised...

In a couple of week's time we are to host an event upstairs in the lending library. It's only tangentially-related to what the library does for a living but we have to do it as part of the contractual arrangements for some project funding. It's high profile but not a big deal.

A couple of weeks ago it dawned on Posy that it'll probably be landed on her to do so she was a bit proactive (I know, I know, but she's not been with us long) and worked out the logistics and arranged with Bronwyn and Frog for them to chat up some contacts to provide a tame and happily responsive audience. Job done-ish, pending final details from Doreen and publicity from the Press & Publicity Section.

Just before lunchtime Doreen breezed into the project like a Double Gloucester on a hillside...

• Nobody would be around to host the event. [Posy had already offered to come in to do precisely that, killing two birds with one stone as she needs to pay back some time off she had to take last month.]
• Bronwyn and Frog hadn't made themselves available. [Neither had been asked to make themselves available and weren't needed anyway as Posy could do all the necessary and the audience was to be primed well beforehand.]
• Frog was double-booked. [He'd already been slated to do a story session at Gribble Community Centre and wasn't really involved in this event anyway.]

And sundry other. We don't have nearly enough problems so it was nice to see somebody putting so much effort into generating a whole flotilla of them from absolutely nothing.

Maybelle was unimpressed:

"You watch: Doreen will get everyone as confused as hell, it'll all become a panicky shambles and it'll be decided that It's All Posy's Fault."

I can see nothing to argue with that analysis.

The Boulevard of Broken Dreams

A vision of loveliness assails me on the way into work. Passing through the bus station I managed to avoid any eye contact with the elderly chap in the black blazer, black Homberg and white plimsolls.

And no trousers.

You can never be sure that an Eccles cake would stop moving

How events are organised...

From: Frog

To: Dagmar

Subject: Children's Reading Week event

Hi Dagmar,

The poet's available any time that week. Which would suit you best at Raccoonville?

From: Dagmar

To: Frog

Which day is the poet available?

From: Frog

To: Dagmar

The poet is available any time that week. When's best?

From: Dagmar

To: Frog

Any time's fine.

So Frog books the poet and sends out the publicity. Sure as eggs...

From: Dagmar

To: Frog

We can't have the poet on a Thursday. The Ladies' Reading Guild uses the meeting room that day.

She had a cheeky mole on her left thigh.It stuck out its tongue and ran up her knicker leg

We're not the only ones with stock-editing problems. I was at a thing this morning (I have a horror of calling anything a "workshop" that doesn't involve hammers and industrial lengths of metal) and got to swapping stories with a couple of the other contestants.

"I had to take a sex education manual out of the children's library last week," one confided.

"Oo-err. That bad?"

"I'l say. The section called 'Bliss within marriage' started off by saying that the wife should always have her man's tea on the table when he gets home and not to let him see you with your hair in rollers."