Who told you to stop doing star jumps?

Jim took a day off sick last October after catching a really bad cold and spending a day shivering and throwing up.

We had a sickness monitoring briefing this morning. It turns out that we're the third worst service for sickness this year after social services and the one-stop shops. Something must be done says T.Aldous. To my dying day I'll never know how nobody said: "why don't you retire then?"

Instead, T.Aldous stares at Jim and pipes up:

"Well one person here had a day off sick last year."

This appears to be the sum total for his strategy for progress.

Spinning blancmange on a nail in the ceiling

Let the welkin ring! The staff newsletter has finally been published and circulated. (This is issue one of the regular monthly newsletter that's been published since December). It's OK-ish up to the point where T.Aldous' responses to the long-abandoned staff suggestion scheme appears in print.

There is spin and there is spin. Even the questions are rewritten to fit T.Aldous' peculiar mindset. My suggestion that we put the stock in the reserve stacks to use in displays and historically-themed stock promotions is turned into: "What's the point of having reserve stock? Let's get rid of it all."

It looks like I'm not alone. A zamizdat version of T.Aldous' responses is now doing the rounds. Starting off with:

Staff ask:
"When are you going to fill the staff vacancies in the branch libraries?"

Management hears:
"Well done you for managing the service so well."

T.Aldous replies:
"At the turn of the century, explorers regarded the North Pole as the last prize in the Northern Hemisphere. The quest for the Pole turned into an international race with teams from Britain, Norway and America vying for the distinction of reaching it first. Robert Peary, a Commander in the U.S. Navy, made his first attempt to reach the Pole in 1893. Two more expeditions followed (1898-1902 and 1905-1906). Both fell short of the mark, but the efforts propelled Peary to the distinction of America's foremost Arctic explorer. "

We all know where this is going. The next time we get inspected, Himself will be asked about staff consultation and he'll say:

"We have a staff suggestion programme but staff don't use it."

Servus interruptus

I'm trying to set up a vote of no confidence motion with regard to our IT section. They have spent thousands on the room housing servers etc, only for the air conditioning to blow on Saturday and take five servers with it, and last night a power cut took out the lot.

I innocently asked what happened to the UPS, "Oh, that must have failed as well".

Marshalling resources

"We need to get the Library Service Strategic Plan onto the web," says Milton. "Jim's going to send you the document."

"It should be easy enough. We just need to find someone with a pdf writer so that we can convert it," I answer.

"I've got one on my PC. I got it installed when I got my PC. I got Visio, Photoshop and a few other things as well while I was at it."

...

I confined myself to mentioning that it's always useful to know what resources are available to the Library Service.

Another of life's mysteries

Something catches my eye as I read some auditors' notes on the CIPFA stats collection:

"...In the event of system failure these data are secured by the implementation of the Business Continuity Plan."

This is news to me. I ask Jim if we do have a Business Continuity Plan.

"Oh yes, we wrote it a while back."

I'm not impressed. I'm even less impressed when I read it. I manage to persuade myself that I really do need to make the effort to get this revised into something that might actually work.

Marching backwards to a brave new tomorrow

A colleague writes:

Much to my delight I find that our council has a Maximising The Potential Of Our People Project Board, charged with creating a culture with a "can do" attitude, which is flexible, nimble, inspirational and focussed on making things happen.

So yah boo, sucks to Helminthdale! We got there first.

And damn me, he's right: we have no such thing. I intend writing a stiff memo to our Performance Team telling them that I'm worried that we may be quartile dipping on our non-deliverable bullshit outputs.

Tomato! Thou art like the mind

Our Corporate IT Newsletter comes a-pinging into our Outtake mailboxes, sandwiched in between the offers of cheap Rolex watches; offers of cheap v!agra and "press releases" from some bunch of rogues determined to have us believe that Helminthdale appeared in the top quartile for customer satisfaction in the last perfomance cycle.

"Investing for a better infrastructure!" proclaims the screaming headline. Actually reading the article (I know, I know) it turns out that the sole strategy for transforming our network architecture is "we will be attaching our Outlook server to a spam filter."

The Michigan Insane AsylumIs up on the top of the hill

Some more of the furniture's arrived for the new Glass Road Library, round the back of St. Barrabas' Primary School, but it can't be delivered. The school's commandeered the library to provide office space for the OFSTED inspectors who are in this week and they won't let us in.

The new library opens at the end of the month.

We've been paying rent on this place for the past two and a half years.

Doesn't bode well for the future.

A noble structure which has many charms

Jim's been working out the floor areas of libraries for the performance reports. Much to my surprise it turns out that public floorspace only accounts for 52% of Catty Library. Surprising because there's nowhere for staff to work at Catty, the workrooms barely having room to swing a cat. We think it through: the 48% staff area has to include the five small rooms off the entrance hall (each the size of a broom closet); perhaps the entrance hall itself (it accounts for a good third of the building) and the attic.

Catty Library: a great façade on a derelict bike shed.

Why, is it possible that 'tis the same!

By one of those coincidences beyond the nerve of creative writers, Daisy tells me that she's spent all morning looking stuff up for one of the planners at Dutch Bend.

"I told him that he could do it on the web but he said that the connection in the planning office is so slow that he can't do anything on the web without it timing out on him."

Some rare bits of brain lie here

We're having a problem with one of the library portals. It worked fine yesterday. It works fine on public PCs in the library. It works fine when someone logs in at home. It is completely inaccessible on library staff PCs. We're used to it timing out on our PCs — everything on the internet times out on the corporate network at one time or another because it's so damned slow — but this is a new wrinkle.

I log the call with the corporate helpdesk. They proxy into my PC and see for themselves. After twenty minutes' worth of trial and error they find that if you search for the server's name and then enter the IP address as the URL then it'll open up a session on the portal. Which stays open until you change pages. This is peculiar on so many levels I'm boggled. But not any more so than when I'm told:

"It's an application problem. You'll have to contact the supplier."

Err...

"How is it an application problem? It's working for the public but not for us. What's changed overnight? I'm not allowed on the server. The supplier's not been allowed on the server since the software was installed."

"Well it can't be a network problem. It must be an application problem."

I do as I'm told and report it to the supplier. My account manager 'phones me up:

"This isn't so much passing the buck as throwing it bodily out of the window."

"Can you tell them that? They won't believe me."

They might throw pennies

Compare and contrast, from the world of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport:

Cost of execrable 2012 logo for the London Olympics: £400,000, cash on the nail

Budget for the national Framework for the Future Library Improvement programme: £4,000,000, to be paid in instalments

One to bear in mind the next time some politician starts banging on about the return of investment of the public library sector.

Skip

Lemuel's off sick (he's been looking peaky for weeks), so it's down to Seth to look after the ship single-handed. This doesn't stop T.Aldous' providing him with more things to do elsewhere. Today it's shifting a pile of crap down to the old Noddy Library site (it's some of the crap that was brought back the other week and it's the old Noddy Library site that should have been cleared out by the end of April). T.Aldous has hired a skip for an hour and Seth's to fill it up with the aid of Kevin the van driver. If they've the sense they were born with they'll make a day of it.

Dust and yesterday's greasepaint

An odd morning for posters...

There's a new one at the railway station saying: "Go back in time... ...Travel with Northern Rail." I thought this was very appropriate as I decamped from my 1985 Sprinter and got onto the Transpennine Express (like the Pony Express but slower and less reliable), built in 1988.

Walking down from Helminthdale Station there's a new one put up by the Regeneration Unit:

Put on your dancing trousers and boogie on down
To the bars, pubs and clubs
In Helminthdale Town Centre

As the local nightlife is made up of The Monkey's; The Duck & Pullet and O'Rafferty's Catholic Ukrainian Club I can't imagine John Travolta strutting his stuff of a Wednesday evening.

Library –2.0.1

Investigations show that the corporate ban on blogging sites only covers those sites with the character string 'blog' somewhere in their URL. The only thing more fun than an irrational ban on online resources is a lazy irrational ban on online resources.

Library –2.0

Picking up a reference about online learning resources for public library staff on a site in the States I make the mistake of trying to check it out at work. Access denied By Order Of The Management. I log a call with the corporate IT helpdesk asking for access to this site.

Sorry, this site's blocked because it's a blogging site.

It pays to talk

T.Aldous is disputing the architects' costs for the move to the new Noddy Library. He insists on an itemised bill.

By far the biggest item on the bill turns out to be "telephone conversations with T.Aldous Huxtable."

You really don't want to read this one

One of the cleaners, a lady in her sixties, has just come back from her holidays in Blackpool.

"My daughter bought me a vibrator for me holidays. Does anyone want it? I've only used it once."

To sunshine and song I but just awaken

A wave of optimism surges round the staff room table. And hits a breakwater.

"When's T.Aldous going on his holidays?"

"End of the month."

"Ooh, I can't wait: three weeks' bliss and getting stuff done."

"He's only going away for two weeks."

"Shit... Ah well, at least it'll be two weeks without his meddling interference."

"Nobody's told you the story about the postcards from China, have they?"

Uh?

Noreen comes back from leave to find a note on her desk:

Half a bottle of milk was thrown away last Thursday because it has gone off.

Perhaps we should hold a wake.