Pedestrian ettiquette

A funny thing happened on my way out of the office... As I was crossing the road I was approached by an attractive young woman who said hello. Now, I'm getting of an age now, and I'm finding that if I see a half-familiar face in an unfamiliar context I'm often at a loss. Being a friendly sort, if somebody smiles and says hello I'll say hello back to be on the safe side. And so I said hello.

We got to talking about the insularity of the natives and the problems you can have socially in a new job because most of the people you know are either above or below you in the line management chain. This gave me the opportunity to try and find out where I should know her from.

"What job are you doing now then?"

"I'm working in the riding stables up at Spadespit."

So I didn't know her after all. Still, we kept talking and the conversation raised all sorts of interesting and charming coincidences. A middle-aged man's fantasy come to life.

"Shall I give you my 'phone number?" she asked.

"If you like."

"We'll just have to go over to my car. It's parked just over by Kitty's."

Kitty's is an interesting establishment just across the road from the STD clinic. What we used to call a knocking-shop.

"I'll walk you over to your car, but I've got a bus to catch, unfortunately."

"That's a shame. How about a kiss just to say goodnight?"

"I think that would be a bit forward of me."

"You really should let your hair down a bit."

"I know, I'm hopeless."

We parted amicably. There's no objective reason for me to think she wasn't just a lonely soul stranded in Helminthdale and there's no reason for me to be embarassing or insulting.

Come in Doctor Otterbland

The Health & Safety bods are interrogating Frog.

"Are you the only first-aider in the building?"

"Yes."

"Do you think that's enough?"

"No."

"Ah," interposes T.Aldous, "Sybil's going to be the other first-aider but she's on leave when the course is being run."

Later on, Frog asks Sybil the obvious question:

"Have you been on leave for the past four years?"

I want to perch half way up a ladder and talk to the Polydor girl about meerkats

Ha! We're having a Health & Safety Inspection! What a hoot!

It's difficult to know who's the worse: the inspectors or T.Aldous. The rot starts early: we've not had one of these inspections for twenty years so, just like the buses, four insectors turn up all at once. Their first question sets the tone:

"Can we see the recommendations of the last health & safety inspection?"

"You've not done one before."

Seth had to make an excuse and leave when he heard this exchange:

"You seem to have a lot of clutter around this workplace. We're particularly concerned about the number of boxes that are piled around the building, especially in the fire escape corridor."

"Yes, it isn't ideal. Unfortunately we're having a big move-around within the building and we're having to pile boxes up as best we can out of the way while we get on with it."

Are we there yet?

Cosmo's been having problems with printing at Roadkill Library for over a week now and he's getting a bit frantic. He rings me up:

"I've just seen one of the IT Section's vans down the road and the bugger's driven off! Who do I ring to get him back?"

It turns out that it was one of the Schools Support Team visiting The Little Sisters of the Acorn but he's still all for setting the bloodhounds on the van, just in case it's harbouring a fugitive IT bloke.

The last honest man in parliament

Overheard in the staff room:

"...of course, Bonfire Night was the perfect time for Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament because with all the fireworks going off nobody would have heard what he was up to until it was too late..."

That woman's just remembered where she's put the oven gloves

If you work job share or part-time, quite a lot of your time is spent finding out what's been happening while you've not been in. Thus it is that Katie's catching up with things over a cup of coffee with Lola when Doreen comes into the staff room.

"I don't know why you both have to be in here supping coffee. Shouldn't one of you be keeping an eye on the staff?" asks Doreen.

"I don't know why you and Julia both have to be on leave next week. Shouldn't one of you be keeping an eye on the operational management of the Library Service?" asks Lola.

Motherhood hasn't mellowed Lola any.

Splat!!!

Hallowe'en, like Walpurgisnacht, brings out the best in our Library Service...

For some time there's been an unwritten rule or folk-policy upstairs in the library to the effect that, no matter how quiet or busy the library is, no customer will be allowed more than an hour on a PC on a Saturday because it's so busy. It would seem that this has now been extended to school holidays, too. A customer has complained that he's been debarred from a few minutes more on the PC he was working on because "somebody else might want to use the PC." He was particularly miffed because eight PCs in the reference library are not in use and haven't been all morning. When Eileen is challenged about this she explains:

"We don't let people have more than an hour on the PCs because it gets too busy and we can't meet demand."

"But if it's as quiet as this, why not let people have a bit more time? When all's said and done, the PCs are there for use, not ornament."

"We can't do that: we've got to be consistent."

Words fail me. One of the hundred-or-so perfomance indicators used by the government to measure the performance of local government is the percentage of available time in which these public PCs are in use. But at least we're applying a secret policy consistently.

Little people in furry suits

Lola's just had a row with Doreen and in the process has pointed out a certain home truth about the consequences of leaving vacancies open for the best part of a year. Doreen could be heard muttering to herself afterwards:

"How was I to know that Bronwyn was doing the Assistant Librarian's work on top of her own?"

The kindest suggestion is that she must have thought that pixies came into the library in the still of the night.

Season's bleatings

The Acq. Team and the Admin Team (all four people in total) got into talking about perhaps having a Christmas lunch some time this year. They'd barely got as far as: "we could get a menu from The Spotted Dog," when Mary drifted over and piped up:

"Well, somebody will have to stay behind to answer the 'phones."

Frog's already bought the humbugs.

Misplace

There is a major to-do up in Lending. A customer has sat down at one of the side-tables in the lending library and started using it for studying, working his way through some homework books and a couple of jotters.

He's doing nobody any harm and isn't getting in the way of any events or activities but there is outrage amongst the troops. If he's coming in to do that sort of thing he should jolly well go up to the reference library.

I know that I'm often marching to a very different beat to this service but this time I don't just not know what they think the problem is, I really don't want to hear about it either.

Still relying on magic

I notice that Helminthdale Lending is relying on the old 'stick an Out of Order sign on a PC to fix it' strategem for IT troubleshooting again.

Rather than upsetting their world view I have decided to allow the remedy to take its natural course.

A bit tucked away in a eunuch's truss

There are being discussions on ways of improving the use of the Teacher's Project Pack Collection. This is necessary because at any given time only 11% of the stock is on loan. In part this is down to poor marketing. Mostly it is our constant need to ration everything, regardless of demand.

Mary and Frog come up with a bazzing idea: why not allow teachers to borrow more than twelve items from the collection at a time? It has fallen at the first hurdle.

Which is, as ever, Policy Team...

"We can't let them borrow more than twelve items! What if somebody else wants to borrow these items and can't because they're on loan?"

Mary is so astonished and angry by this argument that for the first time in recorded memory she's telling her staff what's been said in a Policy Team meeting.

Madame Rowley's Toilet Mask

A recent comment by Lavinia reminded me of something that happened here about six years ago. After thirty years of trying we'd finally been given the OK to close Tarpaulin Grove Library. No great loss: its monthly visitor count was just under the weekly count at Umpty, which wasn't exactly setting the world alight any at the time. Add to that the leaky roof, the drug den next door and a sudden five-figure cut in the staffing budget and the place was on the critical list. What finally did for it was the local councillor's becoming the leader of the opposition. The party in charge at the time saw their chance and ordered the library closed. Just like Helminthdale: the right result for all the very wrong reasons.

Clearing out the library was interesting. Not least because we found four gross of toilet rolls in the back work room.

It turned out that early in the nineties library staff were told that they would have to indent for toilet rolls for their libraries and that usage and supply were both being monitored for to save money. (Not that they actually needed to save any more money at the time but the Chief Librarian of the time came from Yorkshire and was regarded as tight-fisted even by the natives of that area.) The branch manager had indented for four toilet rolls and, after three days' worth of interrogation by telephone the order was duly permitted. Unfortunately, somebody slipped up and ordered four gross instead of four rolls.

Luckily, only use and supply were being monitored by the Chief Librarian, not expenditure, so all concerned decided that the wisest course of events was to pretend that four rolls were ordered and four were received. The rest was archaeology.

Gaslight, son of Flicker

I don't know why, but there's not a day goes by in this place that I don't think of Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil.'

The Russians are sticking it out in Stalingrad, in thirty degrees of frost

For a few short days we have had respite from the unrelenting heat of the building as with the onset of the cold weather Seth managed to find a way of switching off the heating and we've settled into a cossetted langour in the high eighties.

Not for long though: there are complaints from across the veil that the management suite is too cold and he has had orders to switch it back on again.

The Green option would be for our managers to join us out here in what passes for the real world but that is objectionable on so many levels we'll be screwing the planet instead.

I don't know what the subject of my talk will be and after I've finished neither will you, which makes us even

There was a bit on the BBC 'Today' programme on the wireless banging on about blogging being 'so 2004' and dead, replaced by Twitter and tickertape and the like.

I pay no heed. They've been telling us that books are dead for the past decade but we still manage to loan them more than a million times a year.

Annual

Frog's desperate to keep the reluctant readers' momentum up after a bunch of events over the summer so he's bought a pile of TV-related annuals for the children's collections in the hopes of keeping their interest. Like he says, you know they'll be loaned out, they're fairly cheap and anything that encourages any child to read anything must be helpful.

Mary sends Frog an email: "We don't buy annuals."

Next to Frog's annuals are twenty-seven copies of The Guinness Book of Records, the annual CILIP Handbook, Utterthwaite's Definite Price Guide for Electrical Components, Dod's Parliamentary Yearbook and Where To Stay In England 2009.

An unctuous and oleaginous amplitude of peace

Bronwyn is a laid-back sort by temperment, very professional (small and capital P) and a nice person. Decades of coping with Helminthdale Library Service have taught her to be unflappable in a crisis and sanguine in the face of management idiocies that would fell lesser mortals.

"How's it going?"

I asked as I came in this morning.

"We're completely fucked, aren't we?" she replied.

Fellow citizens and scroungers

Saved! We now have enough Team Read certificates to send out to those children who didn't get one because their library had run out and other libraries were hoarding them. Frog's sleeping with a librarian from Pottingshed (it's a contractual arrangement); she's had a pile of the things dumped on her and so he's taking them off her hands, purely in the interests of marital bliss.

When the horsies keep their tails up I'll be thinking of you

"You've been struggling lately," I say to Lupin as he wrestles with a People's Network workstation. "You usually come out to the public PCs pretty quickly when they go up in smoke. Are they running you ragged on the new leisure centre already?"

"Oh no, there's plenty of time yet for that one. We've just not been able to get out much lately."

Something about his demeanour tweaked my curiosity.

"Not been able to get out much?"

"No."

"Any particular reason?"

"No particular reason."

"Are you sure?"

"(sigh) If you must know, the business administration team forgot to renew the tax and insurance on the van fleet."

Ooops!