Lovers dance and children sing and everybody does their thing

It's school half term week and we've geared up a full programme of activities and visits for children of all ages. So far we've had:

• Kids riding through Epiphany Library on their bikes;
• A visit to Epiphany Library from The Jolly Community Policing Team;
• A visit from The Jolly Glazier to Senebene Library; and
• A roof-top demonstration of skateboarding skills at Carbootsale Library.

At this rate we'll have this year's Community Engagement ticks in all the boxes by Thursday.

Kraftwerk playing the Macarena

A meal with friends. Inevitably, we swap work stories. Less predictably it turns out that all of us are yearning for early retirement. We are all in our late forties, we should be at the top of our game, and yet...

Preaching to the converted

Email to all staff from the office of the Chief Executive:

Don't forget to put your clocks back!

The age of desperation

It's coming perilously close to Mary's retirement date and her team are none the wiser as to what, if any, arrangements are being made for their line management after then. Fair do's to Mary: she's got no idea either, but it's pretty unnerving for the troops.

"Don't worry too much about it. You do OK when the whole of Policy Team is on leave at the same time," she tells them.

Which is well-meant but wrong on so many levels...

Hoist by his own petard!

After spending the past week bitching (with considerable justification) about the lousy communication for a meeting this afternoon I discover that I forgot to mention it to one of the key players...

I suppose if we're being human we can all have an arsehole moment but it's pretty inexcusable. I have a lot of grovelling to do!

The poor and the sick turned up for the party but the impotent couldn't come

I have no wish to compete with this, I know when I'm beaten...

Fred Anonymous writes:

"On the very day that we got confirmation that we were all getting substantial pay cuts and that there were very real possibilities of redundancies because the council's on its uppers we each and every one of us received a glossy staff magazine. Highlights include a Managing Director on a six-figure salary complaining about feeling the pinch with the credit crunch and advice to vegetarians that they can have a perfectly nice Lancashire Hot Pot by leaving out the meat."

Me and Ken are agreed that Fred's this month's winner by a country mile.

Unless you know different...

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."

Be like a raggy doll and say: "I just don't care!"

My turn for a quiet seethe. 'Phone call from Julia, ensconced at Dutch Bend Library for the day:

"I had a staff meeting this morning. Bernadette and Nicki said that they could do with some training. Could you find out what training they need and make the arrangements to deliver it as soon as possible?"

I'll have a chat with them despite this; it's not their fault that their manager's too idle to bother assessing her staff's training needs.

The beach is divine

Sibyl is back from her holidays. And is old enough to know better than this...

"How was your holiday?"

"Very nice. But I'm really, really glad to be back. I just couldn't wait."

"I'll bet... Did you do anything nice?"

"I went skinny dipping."

"I thought you went to Whitby?"

"I did."

"What did they say?"

"Oh, I did it at night. We were walking along the beach and it were a nice night so I decided I'd go skinny-dipping."

"Did you both go in?"

"Oh no. He stood there with his coat on, fag in one hand and a torch in the other so's I could see where I was going."

"The locals must have thought he was signalling to U-boats."

"Aye, they would do: he spent most of his time spotlighting my arse. Talk about a full moon!"

"Have you heard this? Sybil's been skinny-dipping!"

"I thought you went to Whitby!"

"I did."

"You'll have been alright: they'll have thought you were wearing a powder-blue wetsuit."

Do not write in this space

Well, we've almost made it to the end of another Friday.

To be sure, none of the printers are working and quite a few of the PCs are out of commission; the corporate internet connection's gone home to live with its mother and the mail server is spamming us with news from the four corners of the Chief Executive's office. And this place looks like a village deserted after The Golden Horde ran their horses through the cardboard box factory. And we've sent the Staff Briefing Ouija Board to the menders because it seems to need a new aerial.

But all is nearly right with the world.

Somebody has left an open bag of jelly babies on the staff room table.

It's a strange world we live in and surely we're forgiven if...

There's an almighty row going about in the town today.

It turns out that the Urban Renewal Team have been trying to attract inward investment to the borough by telling companies that the workforce round here will take a grand less pay than in neighouring bouroughs.

That's the same Urban Renewal Team that's paying consultants to investigate why the town centre's not attracting any big name up-market shops.

Here I stand with a rainbow in each eye

Maisie is trying to buy two anti-glare screens for computers in this building.

Corporate Purchasing doesn't list anti-glare screens as they say they are an unnecessary expense because all new PCs have flat screens.

Maisie cannot nip out to buy a couple of anti-glare screens from the shop across the way for £10 each because she is not allowed to buy any goods not listed by Corporate Purchasing and certainly not from anywhere no longer included in the Suppliers List after Corporate Purchasing accidentally deleted the file a couple of months ago and haven't yet either found a backup or manually entered all the known existing suppliers.

So in order to save £20 we are having to buy a couple of brand new computer screens.

You know where this is going, don't you?

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.

Crikey chaps!

I was trying to explain Biggles to the ladies on the Escape Committee. I was doing OK with Ginger and Algy and they were going along with the idea of a World War One flying ace being an Interpol field agent in the 1960s. The wheels came off the wagon when I explained that Biggles often had to thwart the evil machinations of the German baddie Von Stroheim.

My protestations that this was either lazy coincidence or film crit. fell on deaf ears, but I'm damned if I'm going to go rummaging through the reserve stock just to prove myself wrong.

Nothing much

We're a bit thin on warm bodies here today, it's like The Mary Celeste on a slack weekday and it's not a whole lot better topside. Come lunchtime there's just me and Maudie.

"Are you OK for me going and getting some lunch?" I ask her.

"Oh, bollocks to it. If the 'phones don't get answered they don't get answered and hard cheese. If they were that fussed they'd do something about it."

The time for gentility seems to have passed.

They're just about managing to provide enough lunchtime cover upstairs to keep the doors open by the creative use of odd bits of time owing and staff being willing to be rather a lot more flexible than the Library Service generally manages in recompense.

If we get any incidences of swine flu, morning sickness or lottery winnings we'll be completely screwed.

I'd bet a quarter of the public libraries across the country could say similarly and we've not even had the "savage public spending cuts" yet...

Bing bang bong inky pinky parlez-vous

It's official, Mary really is retiring at the end of the month: T.Aldous is taking the first two weeks in November as leave.

The basic pessimism of our times

This can't be healthy: everyone who's made enquiries about early retirement (which in our service is just over half the staff who are potentially eligible) have been advised that there will be a long delay in getting projected pension forecasts, etc. as the Pensions Office has been inundated with enquiries.

Patois

A bunch of young lads were effing and jeffing in the lending library. The Library Assistants had asked them to tone the language down a bit but they carried on regardless. Eventually, they asked Seth to have a word with them.

"Look lads, you've been told: tone the language down. No swearing in the library please."

"We're not doing nowt."

"Yes you have. The ladies over there have told you three times now. Pack it in."

"Pack what in?"

"Cut out the swearing."

"You're just picking on us. I've not been fucking swearing."

It's a Braceright Midriff Support

Posy Slaithwaite has just been on her first Corporate Culture Induction Morning.

The one time I've been on corporate induction training was back in the bad old days of local government in the eighties, when I was working for Loamshire. We had a welcome from the Chief Executive; visits to a library, a fire station, a disabled person's rehabilitation unit (that was an eye-opener!); an explanation of the corporate executive and political structures; and a half-hour presentation by the Deputy Chief Executive on public sector ethics and the legal boundaries we had to work within.

These days we're more customer-oriented.

Posy was subjected to an hour-long presentation about the Bobbing Up And Down Team; a presentation on the aims and targets of the Bobbing Up And Down Team; and an introduction to The Hexagon Of Excellence...

"They said that they'd had a two-day meeting to talk about the aims of the council and they decided that they are:

• 'It would be nice if Helminthdale was a nice place to live'
• 'It would be nice if everyone was nice to each other.'
• 'It would be nice if there were some nice shops.'"

"There, there... It comes as a shock at first but you soon get used to it."

Smile!

Frog retrieved a copy of a J.B.Priestley book from the Reserve stacks for a customer. She is not impressed.

"Haven't you got something with a jollier cover? It is supposed to be a comedy!"