Moving Earth

T.Aldous accepts an offer to host a model of the new industrial estate just outside Milkbeck. Seth is delighted to hear the news.

"How big is it?"

"It's about six feet square."

"Where are we putting it?"

"I thought we could move the newspapers out of the reading room and put it there."

"How on earth are we getting it up there?"

"You're just being difficult because you don't want to do the work."

The open road and the wind in our heads

We're having a little local difficulty with some of our friends in the Town Hall. I'm all for nipping round with a baseball bat but Milton thinks this is a bit extreme.

"We can't expect their undivided attention, they're going though another restructure. They don't know whether or not they'll be having jobs, let alone which jobs they'll be having."

"If you take the money you should be doing the job. How would it be if we all downed tools just because we're going through job uncertainties? Nobody in this council would do anything..."

By golly, I think he's onto something!

Gone

"What's missing from this room?" I ask Seth.

"Nothing," he replies.

"Where's all this room come from then?"

"Nothing's gone."

"Where are the bricks?"

"They haven't gone anywhere."

"So...?"

"They haven't gone anywhere."

"I hope you've saved copies of all the fingerprints."

Making little fists in the pocket

A colleague is in a bate: they've seen yet another newspaper article making reference to librarians' being quiet and mousy and they've taken umbrage. You know the sort of thing: "this is a tired old stereotype," "an offence to our professionalism," yadda yadda yadda.

Oh do get a grip. Of course it's a tired old stereotype, our culture depends on tired old stereotypes: milkmen are randy, accountants are boring, politicians are self-serving hypocrites, Errol Flynn beat the Japanese single-handed in Burma and London is made up of the supercilious rich mooching around in thick pea-soupers and the downtrodden poor living in abject poverty (this last one's true). Why on earth bother reacting to it? It's obviously yet another symptom of the congenital insecurity of the "profession" (it they weren't insecure they wouldn't need to keep telling you that they're professionals).

The sensible thing for them to do is to take the bull by the horns and burlesque the stereotype into oblivion. I was quite taken by the librarian doll that appeared on the market last year (ooh the fuss!) CILIP should create its own version for the local market. Perhaps with a transformer element, switching the doll from twin set and pearls to ninja outfit in an instant. I'm not sure which would make your average miscreant soil their underwear the quicker: a lady of uncertain age brandishing a samurai sword or a ninja with a date stamp.

The wisdom of ages

Customer comment forwarded to Systems Librarian:

How come every time I try to use your computers in Milkbeck Library there's a problem. The network's slow or we can't open attachments or printing's not working and we can never save files on a memory stick. When I lived in Penkage my village library never had any of these problems. Why do you?

Draft response by Systems Librarian:

Because everything this council touches turns to shit; the IT Department tells us what services we're allowed to provide to our customers and the Systems Librarian has the same permissions as the public on these computers.

Taste

I see in the paper that somebody's invented beef-flavoured Prozac. That's no good for the vegetarians on the council's payroll in need of chemical support. I'd start a lobby now for something flavoured with char-grilled serrano peppers, or perhaps artichoke hearts with a drizzle of truffle oil but I expect there'd be some pharmaceutical reason why it would be a no-go, like grapefruits interfering with blood pressure tablets.

Forty shades of green

A chappie from Building Services pops in with a swatch of carpet samples.

"Any colour so long as it's green," says Seth with an evil wink.

"What do you mean?" asks the carpet bloke.

"You'll see."

T.Aldous views the samples and selects half a dozen for staff to have a look at with a view to selecting one for the lending library.

And sure enough, every one was green.

Preserving the incognitos

IT have been "tidying up the user account database." This turns out to be deleting anybody whose name begins with A who happened to be on holiday last week. Which means that I now have to submit a form to create a new user account, another to create a mailbox and another to give them Internet access.

All the forms are on the intranet. Somewhere. I would use the search facility but that's been "coming soon" since 1999.

The good news is that it's still possible to email Shagger Noakes even though he left the council years ago.

Plans

"I've found some plans for the library," says Seth. This isn't devastating news: we've got more library service plans than soft Mick, it's just planning we're short of.

My mistake: it turns out that it's a big box full of architect's plans of the library. Seth's unearthed it in his bid to finally dispose of the radiator that's been cluttering the dispatch room (it should have been installed in the lift lobby before we moved in years ago but the Ringo Kid Building Company lost interest in that sort of thing once it had been paid off). The box is covered in almost as much dust as the radiator so it's obviously been there a while.

"Who put that there? I've been looking all over for that, I needed it for last year's inspection audit," says T.Aldous. "I wish people would leave my things alone."

Seth mentions this to Lemuel when he comes in at lunchtime...

"Who put it there? He bloody did, that's who! 'Put that box in the dispatch room so I know where to find it,' he bloody says and I've been barking me knee on it ever since. As God's my witness he put that bloody thing there last year."

Seth's all for confronting T.Aldous with the truth but decided better after seeing that Lemuel was getting worked up about it. Besides, what's the point: the truth's whatever T.Aldous decides it is on any given day.

The record time for demolishing an upright piano and passing the entire wreckage through a ring six inches in diameter

So we cleared the space in my room and we've filled it with stuff from Noddy. Elsewhere is as bad. We've just had some incoming for T.Aldous' latest booksale. And a pile of book trolleys from branch libraries incoming for the chucking-out of. And a load of Bookstart stuff that can't go to the Bookstart centre because it's full of Bookstart stuff that's not been distributed. And some new children's library furniture. And a pile of new Chinese and Vietnamese language children's books that we think were probably new when they came here a few years back. And a pile of BBC RaW bookmarks. And some RaW publicity materiel with Larry Grayson on it (he's been dead nearly as long as we've been in here). And publicity for SureStart Day 2006. And some superannuated microfiche readers. And a huge box of fluorescent light bulbs that don't fit any light fittings anywhere. And a horse blanket.

Do we want to get involved in the new government initative to give every schoolchild a book to encourage reading? The idea is that participating library services will get a pile of books dumped on them and then they've got to persuade the participating schools to let us ferry them round for them to give to the kids. I've no idea why the books can't be delivered to education departments, which are better-resourced than us and have their own distribution systems, and let us provide a support, back-up and cheerleading role. What will happen (if we go for it, as we probably will) is that we'll have these books cluttering the place up for a couple of centuries, just like all those Italian books that time.

New shit for old

Seth, Milton and I have just mucked out the computer room anew, having finally got permission to get shut of the old rubbish from Catty and Dutch Bend that came my way earlier in the year. We still await the verdict on the tatty old bookshelves that got dumped in there years ago: "we can't throw them out, they belong to the art gallery," says T.Aldous.

Our delight is tempered by the fact that we're just making room for a pile of old tat from the old Noddy Library site.

The caretakers are getting increasingly weary of being treated as cheap removals men. Once every so often is sort-of fair enough but once or twice a week, at least, is a lot above and beyond.

"I wouldn't mind but we're just moving the same old shit from one place to another. How often have we moved those old paperback spinners from Epiphany? They've been here, then out to the cellar at Noddy, then back here again, up in the attic at Milkbeck, back here again and where is it going this time? Back to bloody Noddy, that's where. If we don't want the bloody things why don't we just sling them?" rants Lemuel.

"Just go with the flow," says Seth. "You know and I know that they need slinging but it isn't going to happen so we just do as we're told, take the money and go home. If you start trying to make sense of what they think they're doing you'll just wind yourself up."

Wise words which we've all said to ourselves at one time or another and not really been able to take on board. I hope Lemuel can this time: he's looking a bit grey around the gills and obviously needs his next holiday.

Hey ho

Good news: the PC at Windscape that's been struggling to switch on and stay on has been fixed after a month's waiting and three days' not working at all.

Bad news: it turns out that the repair man came on Monday and was told to come back another time because they were busy.

Lovely

'Phone call down from Doreen the Group Librarian responsible for Helminthdale Library:

"We've just had a 'phone call from a customer who says that the person using the PC next to them was saying personal things to her and gave her his mobile number."

"Yes...?"

"We should do something about that shouldn't we?"

"What do you want doing?"

"Is there anything you can do about finding out who it was?"

"And...?"

"We need a policy on this."

Good job this: I'm responsible for the public systems but have the same systems permissions as the public; I'm not allowed to tell staff that the police say that a customer can't use our PCs because he's been a naughty lad but I am somehow responsible for customers' chatting up other customers.

"Well he was using a PC," says Doreen.

Security

We had some PCs stolen from Senebene Library a couple of months ago and ordered some new ones. We took great pains to check whether or not we are getting towers or desktops and the dimensions of the processors so that we could get the right security cases for them. I asked, Milton asked, then Milton asked again and we consulted the web sites and then we ordered the cases. Five cases for towers fifteen inches tall and seven inches wide. So a couple of months later we get desktops ten inches wide and six inches tall that slide into the security cases without my having to bother the locks at all. Splendid.

No news is good news

This is good. I've had my latest update of the library service's web pages rejected by the communications team because there's more than two pieces of news on the front page.

Whenever we get inspectors in to tell us that we're not modern enough it's me or T.Aldous who get the grilling and have to account for this failure. Meanwhile there's a town hall full of unaccountable noddies coming up with this sort of nonsense.

Jolly

It'll be a relatively quiet day today: most of Management Group has decamped to the LIS in Birmingham. The staff left behind generally fall into two groups: those who see it as a management jolly and those who are annoyed at not being allowed the opportunity to go. Amongst the latter are some people who included this in their wish-lists in their one-to-ones last autumn (the ones that staff had the week before the corporate staff satisfaction survey that asked if they'd had a one-to-one). T.Aldous' explanation as to why nobody else could go varied with the audience...

• "It's not as good as it used to be."
  i.e. it's not full of furniture and freebies from children's book publishers


• "It's very technical these days."
  As every inspection we've had in the past five years has berated us for not having a good grasp of new technologies that's not necessarily a bad thing.


• "We have to go by train, it's a long way to drive."
  Spot the librarian who can't catch a train because he thinks the world should wait for him and who made damned sure we missed the train last time because he had to stop at every stall to tell people who didn't care less that he didn't have time to talk to them.
  

Parking

Custom and practice has it that council staff can park in the car park at the King Cole in Dutch Bend. The council owns the land and has leased it to the pub for 99 years and things have generally pootled along OK this way for the past three decades. This week the pub's landlords decide to stick a sign up and get the clampers in. The first that most of us know is when Polly comes in from her blind readers' club session at Dutch Bend.

"It's a good job that I managed to find some space in the car park at the library otherwise I'd have been clamped!"

Frog decides to send a message out to all staff warning them not to park at the King Cole. He mentions it to T.Aldous.

"Yes, Julia told me about it last week, we're trying to find out the legal position about it."

"Wouldn't it have been a good idea to tell people this was going on?"

"Yes, I don't know why Julia hasn't sent a memo to staff about it."

Caffeine blast

'Phone call down from lending. Can somebody make some coffee for the people who are using the meeting room? The staff down here in the Mary Celeste Suite are me, Noreen and and Pauline, all of whom are up to the gills in year-beginning work on top of our everyday work and the work of people who have retired or who are off sick and none of whom are disposed to add "Nippy" to our job descriptions.

"They don't pay for the use of the room so why can't we just say 'sorry no can do?'"

Pauline makes the mistake of bearding T.Aldous in his lair to ask what to do. And ends up making coffee...

Money well spent

In the absence of Tilly, who retired last Friday, T.Aldous has just spent two hours doing the post.

This is the man who told Seth that the good thing about finally filling the management group posts is that he can now spend time doing the job he's paid for.

The feet of Ozymandias

We've just overheard T.Aldous' vision for the library service:

"I'll be leaving the libraries in a better state than they were when I started."