Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny

It's our turn for the smash-hit national pastime "Pay and Grading Review," a treat for all the family. Especially of those paid at too high a scale to have to join in. As for the rest of us we're helpfully reminded that the value of our salaries can go down as well as up. Good game, good game.

It turns out, we're told today, that we were originally slated to go through this process this time last year but T.Aldous cited problems with staff availability due to staff sickness (we're sick of him) and school holiday activities (but hey, we're only providing a front-line service to the public). It was subsequently postponed to some undefined autumn period but "I only found out in December that we were going to have it in February this year." Then "we had it rescheduled to September as that would be better for us but now for some reason it is going to be this month with Mary having the first of our evaluation interviews this morning."

So get this: we've had at least a year's notice of this happening, have won at least three postponements and have done absolutely sod all about preparing anyone for something which could have serious financial consequences for low-paid staff. The one consolation, I suppose, being that the library assistants are so badly paid there's nowhere to downgrade to.

In briefing those members of staff not having to staff the counter or enquiry desk or answer telephones T.Aldous spends half an hour telling us that none of this is his fault and listing the emails he's received on the subject from Human Resources, citing date and timestamps for that added touch of authenticity. He spends precisely no time whatever telling us what we need to be doing.

Could library assistants get together to make sure that they're singing from the songsheet and not accidentally doing themselves down by underestimating the value of the work that they're doing. Our Leader replies:

"They've got together at Dutch Bend and Catty but I don't know what's happening here."

How about support during the evaluation interviews?

"Your line manager will be in there with you. You could ask a union official to accompany you but they'll be too busy."

And then the classic:

"I'm only here telling you this because Human Resources wouldn't make more briefing sessions available this month."

And there was me thinking he was telling us because he's paid to manage the service and the staff providing it.

There are no winners, only survivors

That's torn it: I've just heard that our token Young Lady Library Assistant at Dutch Bend, Mitzi Thunderbird, has got a job elsewhere in the council. That puts the median age of staff in this library service back to 49.

Playing the loyalty card

Conversation between Daisie Mutterbucket and Our Glorious Leader:

"There isn't any career path for librarians in this authority."

"You can always go and work for another authority."

I should like to have a good epitaph

T.Aldous is still obsessed with "leaving this service in a better shape than I left it." Which is OK in principle, if risible in objective review. This is one reason why we'd hoped that our meeting an unlikely number of performance targets might have prompted his retirement. Not many of us are convinced that the trick could be repeated.

I think I'd settle for "Didn't do nearly as much damage as he might have."

The country where the Hot Fudge Brownie Blast isn't a video presentation

It could be worse here: a colleague elsewhere tells me that she's been told that she's not allowed to go on a training course because "you've been doing this work a while so there's no need." What particularly irks her is that the edict came from the chief accountant, not the chief librarian. Doubly irksome is that the chief accountant is being paid to do a full-time job but only works four hours a day, three days a week. Even we wouldn't stand for that!

Obvious, really

Maybelle Googly used to run the old Glass Road Library and has today started working at Helminthdale, taking up part of the Counter Supervisor job-share. (The job-share is a story in itself which I won't be telling here.) First day in the job, she's had the ten-minute introductory chat with her line manager, Julia; then the tour of premises and fire escapes with the caretakers; and now T.Aldous is giving her a lecture about the booksale. At least she'll know her working priorities.

A yearning for a past time or place

A long, long letter in this week's "Catty Examiner" from the chair of the Friends of Noddy Library calling upon the shade of Andrew Carnegie to smite the council from beyond the grave for daring to imagine that it might move the library from the present picturesquely-decrepit building into shared premises in the community centre 150 yards down the road.

Of course, they can't see that the options are to move the library and try and use the savings in premises costs to improve services locally or close the whole thing down and save a whole pot of money for the council and ease some of the strain on the library service's resources by having one less service point to resource and staff. I can't say that I'm entirely enamoured of the idea of moving the library into the community centre — they have strange ways — but I'm even less enamoured of closing this particular library as I think that even though it's generally underperforming there is scope for renewal.

I happen to know that that view isn't universally shared: this was one of the libraries in the frame for closure proposals earlier this year. I don't think it's on the final hit-list/wish-list that's currently being looked at by our local equivalent of the great and the good. In times like these it's a relief not to know who's on the chopping block.

An amiable weakness of human nature

Stock-editing again. If we didn't have stock-editing I don't know what we'd do for feckless confusion. T.Aldous, panicking about Public Library Standards and the fact that we are officially overstocked by about 50,000 items, keeps going around saying that he wants more stock editing to be done.

"It's essential that we get all the old and tatty books off the shelves: it helps us with our performance targets and it also makes the libraries look better. What's the point in buying lots of new books if you can't find them for old rubbish?"

So far, so fair. Unfortunately, he's also going around saying that none of the people who are available to do the stock editing should be doing it. A few of us have tried to gently make the point that the "professional" posts he says should be doing the stock-editing have been vacant for years and that perhaps these posts could do with filling. You might as well kick a carrier bag in a wind tunnel.

The latest to-do is at Windscape, where last year's inspectors tried to pick a copy of "The Gruffalo" from the shelf and accidentally removed three yards' worth of children's fiction which were packed together like sardines. Lola has removed one small box of children's fiction (as much as she could do in the half hour available to her this morning) and there are already complaints about the library being denuded.

"Are we being lined up for closure again?"

asks an assistant.

The polar bear's pyjamas

Throwaway line in a conversation with someone from corporate IT:

"By the way, has anyone told you that we won't be letting your customers save to disk on the People's Network?"

"No..."

"Oh, right. They probably forgot. Not to worry."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggghhh!!!!!

Thinking is but an idle waste of thought

I'm peculiar as although I work in a public library I think that cataloguing's quite an important function. To my mind if we can't be bothered to tell the public what we've got and where to find it why should the public be bothered to hunt it down and use it? This used to be one of Jimmy Huddersfield's many unsung duties before his retirement and his lack of replacement is reflected in the amount of non-fiction stock awaiting classification backstage at Helminthdale. For once we are swimming with the tide: a colleague tells me that their cataloguer had been replaced by the head of service's personal assistant (the new head of service having decided that he wanted his old PA to come along with him), but had proved such a bad choice for the job that she was moved to a new post running a project digitising the library's special collections. After six months, the total throughput is one photograph (which is an improvement on her throughput as a cataloguer) and she spends most of her time writing her Rotary Club newsletter and running copies of it off on the laser printer.

One of the things I can never get my head around is that librarians — who make such a big deal of being 'professional' — don't set much value to the skills they learn at library school but imagine that their library qualifications automatically make them top-notch generic managers.

His baroque attire may not only interest but even delight the observer

Personnel management: a small master-class...

Senior manager to backstage member of staff who has just won an argument by quietly demonstrating that the senior manager doesn't know what he's talking about, saving a three-figure sum in the process:

"You really must learn to smile more at work. I've been getting a lot of complaints about it lately."

Sophisticated boom boom

A colleague is visiting the States:

"All the non-fiction books on the news stands have titles like: 'Being Growly: how Fred Bloggs is ruining the country by being an utter tosspot and his friend Alan's a bit of a wanker, too, and his dog's got bad breath and he drives a shit car.'

"Good to see that it's not only our library service that hasn't found its way out of the school playground yet."

Heaven only knows

Frog's in high dudgeon. He's been trying to finalise the arrangements for the summer holiday activities (it's delayed in part by his being off ill a while; part by pressure of work which is getting silly; and part by his spending so much time trying to get permission to buy some book tokens to give the winners of the Easter Egg Competition ). Just at the point where he knows what's happening, where, and that he's got the wherewithall to do it, T.Aldous chucks a spanner in the works: there has to be three holiday activities at Mattressbrook, despite the fact there's been no library at Mattressbrook for years.

"It's politically sensitive," says T.Aldous.

I expct the fact that Mattressbrook will consequently have one more holiday activity than any of the main libraries and two more than most of the branches and will contribute nothing towards any of our targets will register not one blip politically.

Doing the numbers

A friend's just got a new job in another library authority. As always, there's lots of talk beforehand about all the challenging and exciting things that he would be expected to do in that post. Turns out that the first challenging and exciting thing he's going to have to do is find some way of addressing a hole in his equipment budget that's equal to what he had to spend on equipment in his old job over the past four years.

It's easier to cry

I get a 'phone call from Henry Kendal, who's filling in for Arthur Sixpence while he's off sick.

"We've got a £10k project from last year that really needs signing off. Do you intend doing anything about buying any online services?"

• http://helminthdale.blogspot.com/2006/01/why-put-off-today-something-that-you.html


• http://helminthdale.blogspot.com/2006/01/maana-is-bit-frenetic-for-some-people.html

Not poetry, but prose run mad

It turns out that the reason why I can't get the dead PC on the counter replaced is that "according to our records this PC was replaced in 2002." As so often before, I point out that that PC has sat on the counter since 1999 and I'd be very interested to know what it was replaced by.

Obviously The Great Stock Inventory which IT required of us at the beginning of the year was an utter waste of time.

• http://helminthdale.blogspot.com/2005/12/merry-christmas-to-all-our-readers.html


• http://helminthdale.blogspot.com/2006/01/rubbing-salt-in-it.html

Bollocks

Typical. Close of play and just as I'm getting my coat on the 'phone rings. I was hoping somebody would be ringing back with some information I need on Monday. No such luck. It's someone from a call centre going through the script: "This is just a call about your free subscription to Computing Magazine. Please could you take a few minutes to answer a few questions so that we can renew your subscription..." And so it goes for half an hour, by the end of which I'm saying 'yes,' 'no' or Sans Fairy Anne at random, anything to get the damned thing over and done with. Of course I'm delighted to be getting home an hour later because I've missed my train.

I'm old enough to remember when annual subscription renewals took place once a year. And when reminders were sent by email with a link to an on-line form that you could do at your leisure when convenient and provide accurate answers.

If I get another 'phone call asking me to renew my annual subscription to Computing any time before Xmas I'm going to tell them what to do with their magazine.

The first in banquets, but the last in fight

I've been trying for weeks to find out who's authorised to sign software licences. I've had considerable success today: I've narrowed it down to two people, each of whom is happy for the other to do it.

How old *is* Ivy Benson?

A systems administrator's travails...

Last year we had the software auditors in and one of the security tests involved my being given a list of names by the auditor and him getting the security and password permissions for each person off me. I came to one name I didn't know. Being a trained scientist I assumed that this was the "control" and replied that I did not know this person. Apparently they'd been working at Catty Library for two months.

Being an awkward cuss, I've hung fire on asking Catty Library for her details for to be set up on the systems and I've waited to be told. Until today, nine months later. Before asking IT to set her up with a network account I checked up on the address list and found her name. This is a true exchange of emails, I promise:

Hi Hetty,

Is this the same Maisie Doakes who works/used to work in Planning Administration in the Town Hall?

Kevin

...

Hi,

She doesn't know.

Hetty.

I have been a stranger in a strange land

I've been asked why I've not written much of dear old Reggie Clockwatcher lately: "a barmpot of that calibre shouldn't be ignored!" True enough, but sadly the poor old thing is no longer with us. His post was deleted during the reshuffle and he was offered a retirement package that he would have been cutting his nose off to spite his face to refuse but which was designed more for dignity than renumeration. The one policy of self-censorship I impose on this blog is the discussion of individuals' personnel issues so I won't detail how the dignity was leached out in the process. Reggie may be an idiot but he is a well-meaning idiot and deserved better.

One of the other unhappy consequences of the reorganisation is personal uncertainty about jobs and roles as people find that large parts of the work they've been doing for the past decade are assigned to new posts as yet unfilled. This is made the more galling as great play was made of "keeping the staff who are affected informed," which involved getting all the Assistant Librarians in a room and telling them the new structure. The Assistant Librarians were the only people whose jobs weren't being fiddled about with in the process. One of my colleagues found that nearly all the work he'd been doing for the previous twelve years was now assigned to the post that sort of replaced Reggie. When he queried it he was told: "it's nothing to do with you: you'll be carrying on as you are now." Like he said:

"If that means I'll be carrying passengers being paid PO7 instead of PO3 then you can get stuffed."

At close of play one day after a month's worth of emails to T.Aldous and Harry Presto (the then head of service) and a couple of emails from the union, T.Aldous popped into my colleague's office.

"I'm starting to pick up the impression that you're not very happy about the reorganisation. I'm very sensitive that way."

"I'm bloody furious about the reorganisation and I'm pig sick of being told it's nothing to do with me."

"Well, as you know, I was on leave the week it was announced so I had nothing to do with it: that was all Harry's work."

Anyway, it got worse and worse, until it got to the point where he was working to his job description (an execrably sketchy thing written on the back of a fag packet by Shagger Noakes) just before the first of last year's inspections. What he describes as "a rolling temporary modus vivendi" was negotiated, though uncertainty still reigned. A combination of all that plus two years' worth of doing his job and a load of Reggie's in our wonderfully organised and supportive working environment finally got to him recently and he was off work for a bit over a month with stress. He'd been back less than a week when T.Aldous popped into his office and, inter alia, said:

"We need to get sickness levels down, they're still unacceptably high."

Afterwards, I asked him what he replied.

"Any response would have involved one or both of us being sectioned."

I guess that the causal relationship between poor personnel management and workplace stress levels don't figure highly in the library school curriculum.

O land of manure and mist, of dirty, cold rain

A toddler in the children's library has had an accident, as children do, but unfortunately walked a lot of the resulting mess into the carpet and threw a few books into it. Mary and T.Aldous drop everything to review this outrage. As Seth gingerly donned his Marigolds and started putting soiled books into a bag Mary turned to Lola and said:

"You'll need to get the barcodes out of those books so that they can be withdrawn properly."

The glory of a firm, capacious mind

The council's doing a full-service salary review and, mindful that salaries can go down as well as up, the Counter Supervisors are a bit twitchy. Due to a series of quick-fixes to solve problems entirely created by management team the Counter Supervisors are theoretically doing the same job but have different job descriptions. And, as we've been missing one of the Group Librarians for three and a half years, the Supervisors at Dutch Bend and Catty have been having to cover a lot of their work. Consequently, any thought of a salary review based on job descriptions and custom & practice is made more nerve-wracking than usual.

Daisy Duck asked to see T.Aldous to have a chat about the situation.

"Is this to do with the fact that Julia's going to be moving over to be Group Librarian for your area?"

"That's another complicating factor I suppose."

"What you need to bear in mind, Daisy, is that Julia isn't me but I'm sure she could make a good job of it anyway."

Dancing with my shadow

Off sick yesterday with chest pains (it's OK, I've had all the tests recently, my cardiovascular system's OK. Any time I see my doctor we have this conversation:

"Are you still in that job?"

"Yes"

"When will you do as you're told?"

and then he tries to persuade me to take a few weeks off work. I resist this as I know full well that there are four or five issues that have been droning on for years that 'would have been miraculously resolved' but for my absence. My last holiday coincided with the only window in the past five years for T.Aldous to make a decision about self-service circulation.)

I've been waiting a couple of years for the new council web site to come on stream. Yesterday, Lola got stuck with doing the mapping exercise for the library service's part of the site because the request for us so to do had been stuck in Mary's "unread emails" folder for the past few weeks and the deadline was last Monday. Lola had to teach herself the new Local Government Navigation taxonomy from scratch because I've spent the past three years trying and failing to get library service participation in the work I've been doing on e-government. She's done a good job of it in the circumstances but I feel childishly put out that having waited all this time I've not been involved in the doing of it, although I'll still be held responsible for anything that anyone doesn't like. Nothing changes...

Tie up the knocker! say I ’m sick, I ’m dead.

Oh just what I need...

I arrive at work to find that all last night's overnight systems housekeeping crashed after a power failure in the council's server farm and on my keyboard T.Aldous has left a three-week old letter from a councillor complaining about the people's network and a note to say that the response needs to be sent by the end of today.

Roll on Christmas.

Courted by all the winds that hold them play

Overheard at the counter in lending:

"How come you've gone part-time Betty?"

"I'm old now, it takes me a longer time to have sex."

A tale told by an idiot

A couple of people have asked me if I've heard anything about the reports from any of last year's inspections. This puzzled me a bit as they've been on the inspectors' web site for a month. I passed on the link. About an hour later I got a 'phone call from Dutch Bend:

"Now I know why they've been keeping it a secret!"

"What do you mean a secret?"

"Well, when I asked T.Aldous the other day he said that the report wasn't ready yet. Mary said that they're waiting for the final report."

"But T.Aldous went down to London with Warner Baxter months ago to receive the report."

"Well, we're not supposed to know about it. So I've printed a copy out and put it in the staff room."

Only here could a document in the public domain could be regarded as a secret!

With God on our side

We don't have any staff development or training strategy in this organisation. I'm thinking of putting together a page on the corporate intranet providing a list of useful online resources for our staff. So far I've come up with:

A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette for their professional development;

Dilbert so that they can understand the bigger picture; and

News of the Wierd so that they can keep tabs on co-workers.

Early days yet but not a bad start.

Sandy deserts full of wild beasts

In between quizzing staff to find out who's been organising birthday presents for him T.Aldous has been having a series of panicky 'phone calls (in the public arena because his 'phone's through to Tilly Floss who put her 'phone through to the Acquisitions team who work in the open-plan office). The panicky 'phone calls are all on the general theme that he knows there's a problem and somebody else caused it. Naturally, there's not much in the way of problem-solving. The reason is simple. I have to apologise for this metaphor: once it occurred to me it was inescapable...

Imagine you've got a big, white living room with a big, white shagpile carpet. All white and clean and shiny and lovely. And you've got a great, big dog. Which takes it upon itself to stroll out into the middle of the carpet and empty its bowels thereon. What would you do?

• Me, I'd get the dog out of the way, in case it had plans for a repeat performance, then I'd clean the mess up. Once all was done and dusted I'd then make it clear to the dog that this had't been a good career move.


• T.Aldous would sit there and do nothing. If you came into the room and pointed out the mess (and smell!) he'd reply: "it's nothing to do with me, the dog did that."

A dead waste of a shilling

Bless him.

In the end, all corners of T.Aldous' empire chipped in to his birthday collection with a rare generosity. Especially given that everybody's well aware that it's not a retirement present. This lunchtime he was presented with a fine card, some gift vouchers and a nice bunch of flowers to take home to his lady wife.

He had a face like a slapped arse.

"Thank you very much but I was keeping my birthday a secret."

He's spent the last hour quizzing people to find out who organised the collection so that he could given them a bollocking.

Bereft isabellas in rubber thigh boots

Frog, who is supposed to be in charge of such things, suggests alternatives to the "Messy monkeys" event:

"How about 'top a toddler' 'nobble a nipper' or 'brain a brat'? "

And it's not even the start of the summer holidays yet.

And nought is everything and everything is nought

A quick review of the collection to date for T.Aldous' birthday gift. A bit embarassing really: Dutch Bend has collected £30; Catty £25 and Helminthdale £10. Embarassing because Helminthdale's got twice the staff as the others.

The charitable explanation is that T.Aldous is based at Helminthdale which makes it difficult to put out a collection tin without his knowing about it.

The realistic explanation is that T.Aldous is based at Helminthdale and has got on people's tits so much that they're keeping their hands in their pockets.

Surfin' safari

One of my colleagues has been conned into doing an internet taster session in one of the branches as someone was off ill and has subsequently discovered, once he arrived, there is a "Messy Monkeys" event going on there. (Anything organised by Fluffyland has to have an alliterated title. They didn't like my suggestions of Kill a Kid or Shoot the S*ds)

Ad quod damn 'em

It's good to be popular. Looking up from my desk today I noticed that I had a queue comprising:

• two from Fluffyland (Children's Unit);
• the part-time, job sharing Web site manager who is not doing part-time, job sharing web site manager work as she has just returned from long term illness, precisely at the time her pay was about to be cut, but now has plenty of time to do nothing but annoy me;
• next a dead ringer for Caroline Aherne "Mrs Merton" who has something to do with IT provison for the disabled, well she is supposed to manage it;
• and finally my line manager was in the queue.

Whatever happened to Geneva Convention? I confess, I started the Second World War, I have Hitler's genes, I was driving the car Diana waa killed in, I shot John F. Kennedy, I taught Lucretia Borgia all she knew about cooking, I was a script writer for Crossroads, tell me what else and I will confess.

The clouds will soon roll by

Overheard:

"Should we circulate T.Aldous' retirement card for people in the branch libraries to sign?"

"He isn't retiring."

"I know, but it might boost morale if people thought he might be."

Euphemisms, Audrey, euphemisms!

Mary has a quiet word with me and Frog by the coffee percolator:

"Could you spread the hint around to staff not to keep calling Management Group 'The Secret Society'? T.Aldous has got wind of it and doesn't like it."

Fair enough I guess, though shutting the stable door as far as I can see. One of last year's inspectors asked me: "why do they call Management Group 'The Secret Society'?" I was so surprised I can't remember my response.

Be careful what you wish for

With the new recruits at Dutch Bend and Catty and their satellite branches they're now up to strength in lending. This should be good news, and will be eventually. At the moment, though, it's a problem as they're all falling over each other and not getting much more done than they were last autumn when they were virtually single-staffing the main libraries over lunchtimes. The reason's easy enough to see: they've been crisis-managing due to staff vacancies for about three years. Now they're able to do more than just run themselves ragged trying to keep the wheels on the wagon they're blinking like rabbits on a roadway wondering what to do next. It's always the way: if you've been desensitised enough your head only starts to hurt after you've stopped hitting it with a tea tray.

Aurea mediocrities

I'm picked up on the front desk/back office issue.

"The front desk is more important. If we weren't there then there'd be no point in having anyone working in the back."

The converse to that, of course, is that without somebody buying, receiving and distributing the stock then the libraries would be empty and the staff could all go home. This nonsense needs to be knocked on the head: there's no "us" and "them", they're all part of a team and if we want to deliver a half-way decent service in our libraries then we need both ends of the process staffed and working properly.

One of the charges commonly levelled against Barry Trotter when he worked here a few years back was that he didn't "spend his share of time on the enquiry desk". Quite right too, I said at the time and say all the more now. What's the point of paying somebody principal officer grade to do an assistant librarian's job? Given the desperate need for any sort of proper management of the service we can't afford to waste what few management resources we've got.

"When Garry Chevalier was in charge at Dutch Bend he wasn't above spending all day on the enquiry desk."

No, but then again Garry wasn't above sliding attractive young female staff's payslips into the inside pockets of their blouses, whether or not there was a pocket there. I don't think he'll do as a paragon of public library management.

Garry was part of the management team that in 1991 decided to completely cut the marketing budget. As Little Billy Liverwort told councillors: "if we publicise our services we might create a demand that we can't meet."

Standing in the corner, nothing else to do

One of the things that constantly irritates me about the library service is the systemic assumption that if anything's away from the public interface it must be

1. Dead easy to pick up


2. Not really all that important

Today's illustration is in the Acquisitions team: there's a bit of spare capacity upstairs so they've sent a couple of people down again to "lend them a hand." Which is great in principle and almost certainly well-meant. Unfortunately, aside from printing out spine labels there's nothing that that team does that can be picked up and done without at least a few days' training. This could/should be possible if someone was assigned to lend a hand on a regular basis over a period of time (I'm saying could/should because knowing this organisation's attitude to staff training and development it isn't a given). Unfortunately, staff are sent down unannounced on an ad-hoc basis for an hour or two, which just adds to the stress overload of the team as they struggle to catch up with their work, cover long-standing vacancies, answer everybody else's 'phones and also try and find things for the lending staff to do.

You couldn't mismanage it better: lending resources are wasted; willing and capable staff are made to feel useless; an over-stretched team is put under more pressure; and an unnecessary tension is built up between the two teams.

Daffodils in your gaiters

A particularly fraught discussion upstairs in the main library. We're supposed to be putting a dozen new public terminals in the community room, partly to maximise the use of the room as a learning resource but mostly because someone got nervous about meeting the public library standard on the number of public workstations. We have the PCs. We have the network connections in the room. We have the network connections in the library. But we don't have the network connected as to do so we need the shopping centre's agreement to take the twelve cables across a seven-foot stretch of ceiling space just outside the library. The centre manager isn't authorised to give the OK, it has to be done by head office, which appears to be a black hole somewhere down south. So we're stuck and have been since last autumn.

Today I'm called up to discuss where the PCs would be going if we could bridge the gap. The answer is the same place as every other time I've been asked, using the network points as a bit of a guide. And just like every other time I'm asked why the network points are in those locations. And just like every other time I remind T.Aldous that he decided that these were the best places to go once Mary and I convinced him that they'd fit.

Then he tells me about the problems we had buying the PCs, of all of which I'm all too aware. Then he tells me about the problems with the shopping centre, ditto. Then the problems with the PC requisitions forms, ditto. Then the problems with some of the people in IT, ditto. Then he reprises the problems with buying the PCs and with the shopping centre's head office, ditto, ditto, ditto ad nauseum.

I'm in the lift coming back down to my cellar office and about halfway down I hear a noise. It took me a few moments to register what it was: someone was screaming, a long, low, sustained scream. It must have gone on for two or three minutes. I was aghast: who the hell screams like that in a public library?

It was me.

Thrills and spills on the gardener's lady

Tilly Floss is throwing a wobbler:

"I shouldn't have to do stationery. I'm not the stationery clerk. They shouldn't expect me to do other people's work."

At which point her 'phone rang and everyone sat on their hands waiting for her to finally get round to answering it.

Editor's note: Nobody else is stationery clerk either.

Full of sound and signifying nothing

Postscript to the Gypsy Cream drama: Mary's 'phoned Pansy to ask what she's doing putting copies of The Bookseller out for the public.

Let the devil take the park attendant first

High dudgeon at Gypsy Cream Library where local fusspot Mrs. Nattercan is raising Cain because Pansy Potter's moved the 10-year-old copies of The Bookseller off the Reference shelf.

"I wouldn't mind: I've left the past six editions on the shelf and displayed them face on so that everyone could see that they're there. It looked horrible: ten years' worth of Booksellers spine-on in the middle of the library, neither use nor ornament."

"Did anyone use them?"

"No. I checked with the assistants who've been covering here for the past three years [the branch librarian retired last summer after being off sick for two years after doing her leg in after an accident] and they've never seen anyone use them. I've even put string along the top of the magazines to see if it's been disturbed by the end of the day. Zilch."

"Does Mrs. Nattercan read it?"

"No. She just doesn't like me changing the library."

"Can I make a suggestion: rather than having an constant sniping war with Mrs. Nattercan every time to make small changes why not review everything that you want to do and then blitz the place and make big changes. That way you're not constantly battling with your more conservative customers and make a bigger impact."

"I'll have to think about it. If I do big changes then you-know-who will stick his oar in."

Sigh...

Night and day? You are the one.

A colleague in a media library sends me this. It's quite a lot like sending Coles to Newcastle.

It's a crap job, in a crap place
All the work is boring it's a disgrace
It's no rat race, I'll be a mental case,
That it's all shite to me.

It's a crap chair, in the wrong style
So I bought my own chair, it was worthwhile
Feel I'm on trial, and I'm so versatile
But it's all shite to me

I can't say how happy I was to come here
I can't say, because it's not true
There's this stuff I'm trying so hard to forget
Wouldn't you like to forget something too?

It's the wrong sound with the wrong scripts
Though your clips are tempting, they're the wrong clips
Find the right clips, better get to grips
But the day ends, I'm free
Dear, it's all shite
It's all shite to me.

Pavement oysters

We're coming up to T.Aldous' 60th birthday with the vexed question as to whether or not to have a collection for a card and a present coloured further by his announcement that he's not retiring this year after all.

A cricket-loving colleague supplies an answer: Bill Frindle, the chap who does the scoring for Test Match Special on the radio, celebrated his 40th year in the job. His colleagues bought him a card but there was a slip-up and somebody got one with the message: "Sorry you're leaving." Perhaps we could do similar.

"If we give him a "sorry you're leaving card" every birthday he might take the hint by the time he's 65!"

Is that cannon fire or is it my heart pounding?

We've had wind of comments in one of last year's inspection reports:

"Prioritisation and decision-making are either non-existent or based on crisis management. "

Next week: the toilet habits of bears and the bouyancy of ducks.

Icky the bare bum firewall bobby

The council's email server is playing silly buggers again. No, scrub that: it's behaving exactly as you'd expect anything to do with Helminthdale to behave. None of us have been able to receive any emails from discussion lists for about six weeks. In the mean time, we're receiving dozens of spam emails for larger body parts; genuine imitation Rolexes at imitation genuine prices; gentlemen's pharmaceuticals; and weekly global updates from the Chief Executive.

It isn't just us affected: none of the planning appeals are getting through the spam filter because the form includes the word "erection."

Today we appear to have hit a crisis: everyone's email account seems to have gone AWOL: if you click on Outlook on your PC you get access to a pile of spam but none of your emails. A treat.

Belshazzar's snatched cheese butty

Frog's received the first parcel of Reading Mission goodies for the summer holiday Reading Challenge. He's especialy pleased to get to play with the secret message pens (the writing is invisble until you rub it with the other end of the pen). The sensible grown-ups amongst us wonder if the ink in the pens will last out to the end of term.

"I'll be able to write rude things on the walls," says Frog.

"I think the writing's been on the walls here for a while now," replies Noreen.

Keep a twinkle in your eye

One of the consequences of T.Aldous' 'phone having been listed as the number for telephone renewals in the Phone Book of 1997 is that he has an excuse to have his 'phone permanently put through to his Secretary. Which means that everyone else has to take his calls because Tilly Floss, his Secretary, is never at her desk. Two of today's examples will illustrate this..


The Acquisitions team, still at half-strength, still desperately trying to catch up with the backlog of work created by their prodigious bit of end-of-year sensation, constantly being boggled by the ever-more nebulous answers to questions about their goals and work plans, also cop for most of the telephone receptionist work. During a particularly fraught hour, Noreen happened to pass the caretaker's room and there was Tilly, making notes in the community room booking diary.

"Couldn't you do that at your own desk?"

"No, it gets too busy to work there."

"How do you know?"

A bit later, Tilly's phone rings again. "Could somebody answer that for me please?" she shouts from the one and only desk on the whole floor that doesn't have a telephone. Altough there are eight other desks she could use for whatever it is she's doing, this particular desk is the one that does it best.


Earlier this year I had to complete a scoping document to see if any of our customer-facing staff should be moved to the new corporate call centre. It seems I successfully argued against any of our front-line staff's getting co-opted. I conveniently forgot Tilly's post in this review; I begin to wonder if that was a mistake.

What news of the Rialto?

The Greys are in control in Helminthdale in that they've got exactly the same number of seats as the previously-ruling Black/White coalition and as the Greys caused this year's budget crisis by vetoing last year's savings the coalition voted to pretend to be divided so that the Greys got lumbered with sorting out the mess. The new regime's immediate response is to have the budget review that they vetoed last year and to impose a jobs freeze. How this might or might not affect posts currently being advertised, including some of our more mature vacancies, who knows. As there's a jobs freeze every May and June in Helminthdale we're really not too fussed but it might provide yet another excuse for not getting on with the recruitment, whether or not the freeze has any effect.

Ruby lips and eyes of pink

If you're managing a service or a process it always helps if you have some sort of grasp of the concept of cause and effect. In no particular order...

• We don't have anybody available to deal with donated items as both the cataloguing and stock management posts are vacant.


• Policy is still to accept donations as to do other might upset customers. Policy is that items may be put into stock if deemed suitable or else will be put into the booksale.


• With libraries being closed for refurbishment or being emptied prior to moving to new premises there is no storage space anywhere in the borough.


• With the huge backlog of unclassified non-fiction and boxes of stock for the attention of the non-existant stock manager there's no room at headquarters.


• We need to withdraw about 60,000 items from stock to meet the public library standards in 2006/7, though T.Aldous is going around branches telling staff that they can't do any stock editing as it should be done by the non-existant stock manager.


• A hard core of about twenty boxes of books have been in every booksale in libraries across the borough in the past three years.


• Somebody who will remain nameless ordered a pile of furniture to spend up last year's budget and still hasn't decided where any of it's going.

A few members of staff have asked if we could stop taking donations for now so as not to add to the pile. Management group might discuss the idea if they get the time, if they get round to meeting, but until then it's business as usual.

"We'll have to do something about all these boxes that are cluttering up the libraries, they look a right mess. What would somebody think if they saw it all?"

asks our fearless leader.

Drunk as penguins

There's always someone worse off than yourself:

"It seemed pretty straightforward in theory, get each service point to run off a report and get them to act upon it. That was almost three years ago. Maybe it was naïve to set out instructions on a piece of paper, forward, demonstrate procedure to those in charge of the various areas, and expect thing to work.

"What do you mean you haven’t started doing the reports yet?"

"I asked on discovering one branch had far more than its far share of stock transiting in and out, being traced or claiming return.

"Well we haven’t had chance to read the procedure yet. We’ve been quite busy."

"It’s over two years since the procedure was sent out, what do you mean you haven’t had chance to read it yet?"

"Well when we get procedures we file them in a box until someone rings us and tells us we are starting to operate them."

"So you don’t use the neat yellow folder provided with a big label saying ‘Staff Manual’?"

"Yes. Once we have been rung and told the procedure has started we file things in there then."

"So how many procedures have you got in your Staff Manual?"

"Three, I think. The box we put them in while they are waiting is quite full though."

Naturally this prompted tirades in direction of appropriate Group Librarian.

"Do you know what those plonkers are doing?"

"I rarely know what they are doing, they have a unique method for everything. I tried to sort them out when I started this job, but have basically given up. They just do what they want anyway. I once did a stock exchange, or tried to, they unpacked the boxes and re-shelved the books before they left the branch. When we were on a manual system they decided one year they weren’t going to put up the fines. They even put a sign in the window saying ‘Cheapest Fines in the District’. So if you think you have a hope of getting them to run a report every now and again, well think again."

Further details on enquiry sent under plain wrapper

I've been asked why I spent a week at the beginning of April knocking myself out to get stock and circulation statistics for CIPFA when staff have been used to doing manual shelf counts for years. Well...

A colleague in another authority once referred to a branch under his charge as a "rogue" branch. Suggestion was that everything that went wrong in the world, or anything happening without logical explanation, could be traced back to this single epicentre of the bizarre. It didn’t matter that a problem apparently resided elsewhere, after a few phone calls the true source could be discovered in this one location, this one insoluble problem. The real world, he claimed, ceased to be as the threshold of this particular building was crossed, and no matter how many times he explained a procedure it was always followed by strange conversations.

"Does this new procedure start next week or now?"

"This new procedure started fifteen years ago everywhere else."

"Oh well, I’m not sure we have the right stationary, the van hasn’t been yet this week has it?"

Worse still every instruction was followed by a question as to whether a red pen or blue pen was required for the task.

For a while this notion was lost in the mists of my mind, until I came to the conclusion that if a couple of my branches just happened to be Anne Robinsoned off as weakest links, I would have about fifty percent less of the proverbial fire fighting to do. This I considered to be more than my share of the rogue branch syndrome.

For example, a simple system report detailing which branches were most proficient at sending items into permanent transit, that is they either left or arrived at location months ago yet still carried the transit status, would highlight a disproportionate percentage at branch X.

Alternatively take an overview of the items with a "cannot trace for reservation" status and even the most myopic individual couldn’t fail to note that branch Y was doing something peculiar when 58 items were so set on the same day.

Of course explanation for these happenstances there is none as "we didn’t do anything, I’m not sure we know how to change the item status".

And then along came CIPFA. Now we all know that those who decide what form CIPFA returns take have a few beers, get drunk, take a few risks with exotic fungi and then decide what they are going to introduce as subtly different this year. A challenge they would probably call it, a bloody pain I would say. Previously well thought out solutions to the enigmas of times past become redundant. Add to this the non-obvious changes they make, the ones they hope we won’t notice until all forms have been completed, at which point it is blatantly clear figures don’t balance and you have to go back to the beginning. The cocktail formed by Mr. CIPFA and Mrs. Rogue-Branch produces son Molotov.

So come early March last year a carefully worded memo to all branches outlining the necessary procedures winged it’s way towards the unexpectant, prompting the inevitable from Rogue Branches.

"Do I have to count the books on loan?"

"Have you any idea how you are going to get the stats off the system to do that?"

"No."

"Well in that case how did you expect to count the items on loan?"

"I was going to use last years figures and alter them a bit."

"So we’ve paid a third of a million quid for a system which can count these totals and you want to make the figures up?"

"No one has complained before. And what do I do with the form once I have completed it? Oh and does it matter if I fill in the bits you have asked for with a red pen, or should I use blue?"

The result of this is that you discover the figures for rogue branch do not in any way match those of the last fully manual count, and you then spend ages trying to find reasons why within the system. Mind you, if they have been making up figures for the last twenty odd years is it any wonder there is no conformity between the two? And for reasons I will never understand it is Systems Librarian who has to explain why the system isn’t producing accurate data!

Rogue branch then have to cover themselves and find any excuse to knock the system which has mysteriously taken 2,000 books off their shelves, "and heaven knows what it has done to our issue total". This last because suddenly what was once a seemingly thriving centre of activity, with apparent staff shortages, becomes a much over-staffed establishment because someone else is creating more accurate measurements of performance than the previous imaginary.

You were asking...?

When Yuba played the Rumba on the tuba down in Cuba

I think I may have opened the floodgates last week:

Issuing A Book
(Country and Western, arr. Grainger (not))

I'm issuing a book,
Issuing a book.
My barcode reader's busted
And my date stamp's run amuck.
It's going to be half seven before everybody's gone
And I'm issuing a book
With my high heels on.

There's only me on here today.
You're the thirtieth person I've heard say:
"Hello dearie, where is everyone?"
Two of us retired last year;
One girl's off, she's feeling queer;
If I were allowed leave then there'd be none.
I came in at the crack of dawn
To put the new stock out so that
Customers could come and help themselves.
But, alas, it's plain to see
That the bestsellers from TV
Are resolutely sticking to the shelves.

I'm issuing a book,
Issuing a book.
A borrower wants Kafka but
I think he's out of luck.
Our closest is Jean Plaidy
Or Henry Williamson.
And I'm issuing a book
With my high heels on.

Not in Kansas any more, Toto

A member of staff who will go nameless (so long as the agreed amount arrives in my secret Swiss bank account) was observed clicking her heels together and muttering in the staff room. After a couple of minutes of this she gave up and sat down at the table, a picture of dejection.

"It worked in 'The Wizard of Oz'," she said.

There were consoling murmurs from her colleagues. Suddenly one piped up:

"Perhaps it's like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan. Perhaps we all have to believe in it for it to work."

Which is why half a dozen members of staff could be found sitting around the table with their eyes closed, fingers crossed and heels clicking merrily together as they chanted

"There's no place like home."

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings and right down the back of your suit

Uh-ho Chungo! June is Surestart Month. I hope we survive it unscathed. This is the month where the costs and benefits of Surestart are both magnified to the max. We have been doing some wonderful things with Surestart projects and funding and it shows both in the statistics and in the faces of the kids in the photographs. The down side is that it is so narrowly focused geographically as well as topically. What happens is that lots and lots of things for pre-school children and their parents/carers are happening in three of our libraries -- often crowding out activities for other parts of the library community at those libraries -- and bugger all gets done anywhere else save weekly-ish under-fives' story times at half a dozen places when we can manage it. And of course the Surestart project workers can forget that they're not the only game in town and their high priorities aren't always ours, which leads to occasional tensions. (Of course, that last is always true of any specialist service: I've sometimes had to point out to our people that it's no good shouting at the IT department when we're panicking about a forthcoming inspection if they've got other departments panicking about Ofsted and the Social Services Inspectorate at the same time.)

During Surestart month the gulf grows deeper, with so many things going on at one library in particular that the staff there feel like unwanted lodgers. I can only sympathise and put a superhuman amount of effort into not winding staff up any further (which would be the work of a moment as in an earlier life I lived and worked with social workers manquées and find them a couple of orders of magnitude more irritating than professional librarians -- it's amazing how often it's the people in "caring professions" who are happiest to plough their own furrows regardless of other people's feelings).

With a bit of luck all will be well and nobody will get silly or prima-donna-ish and the libraries and their customers will reap the undoubted benefits of Surestart activities without alienating anybody in the process. I know Frog's spent the past few weeks going out of his way to smooth ruffled karmas in the hopes of calming everyone down before the programme starts. Fingers crossed he's succeeded!

You're sick while you're dancing

Poor old Frog's back from holiday, the highlight of which was a bout of bronchitis. "How are you feeling, old man?" I asked.

"I could do with a relapse,"

he said as cheerfully as any man could who'd come back in to work to find that he's got until 4.30pm to create and finalise an entire summer holiday activity programme from scratch.

As slippery as a well-buttered ice rink

I don't believe this exchange and I was a party to it:

T.Aldous:

"When will we be getting the other online reference databases?"

Me:

"When will you be telling me whether we've enough money to buy them?"

Ping-pong:

"Which will we be buying?"

"It depends on how much money there is to spend."

"No, that really won't do. I need more information than that."

"I have provided a list of the databases I think we should buy if we had £10k, £15k, £20k or £25k. And I included all the details of what jobs they did, how much they cost, the licensing regimes and contacts for ordering, etc. Could we work from that?"

"Can you get me more details?"

Enterprises of great pith

Dagmar Braithwaite again. Obviously not as busy as she would like us to believe.

"What's the point of only transferring small numbers of books? I thought we were going to be transferring all the stock around. Mind you, I don't want any rubbish from Dutch Bend. Any time they send me any of their books I always make sure to send them the same number of my books, otherwise I won't be able to fit everything onto the shelves."

I now have enough experience of the inanities of our stock editing processes and procedures not to suggest that she get shut of some of the old stock on her shelves. I limit myself to the following:

• We only got the system this week


• There's only one of me


• Mary and I are planning on building a wholesale rotation of large-print books a.s.a.p.

Not good enough.

"Well, I don't see the point," says Dagmar.

No. Probably not.

Junk mail addressed to the dead

To my utter surprise, a stock rotation add-on to the library management system is signed, sealed and delivered despite Arthur Sixpence having put the funding for it up as a saving on 2005/6 (he was probably so busy shilly-shallying about it that he missed the deadline and the funding was brought forward by default). So I'm having a play to establish the mechanisms and sketch out some procedures. This involves fifty popular science books from one of the travelling collections which has been sitting in a box by the clock machine since September waiting to be moved on by the non-existant Stock Librarian. I split it up into ten piles of five and allocate each pile to one of the branch libraries in the system and send them on their way, with a note saying: "please put these in non-fiction; they're being used to trial automated stock rotation. I'll be writing some notes soon, once I have you'll get a copy."

'Phone call from Dagmar Braithwaite at Doggedly Library:

"What's the point of sending me all these [five!!!] science books? They'll never go out here. Science books never go out here."

"You've got no science books. Could that be the reason?"

"We've not got any because they'll never go out."

I try to explain as diplomatically as I can that even if these books don't go out they're different enough to make it obvious that fresh stock's coming into the library and it might cater for unvoiced needs within her borrowers.

"It's always useful to test the market," I say.

I don't say: "I'm not your librarian so you can't bully me into only providing you with family sagas, true crime and cookery books for your old ladies." And I didn't point out that the analysis I did when I was number-crunching for CIPFA demonstrated that 55% of the library's issues were to ladies over the age of 60. Instead, I appeal to her sporting instinct and there's now a fiver riding on whether or not we get three issues out of those five books in the next three months.

An expert on trills and rolls

My comments about library closures, or not, prompts a colleague to send me the following ditty.

(after Randy Scouse Git, apologies to Dolenz)

It's an interesting library
And it's mine, all mine,
With my 1950's bookstock
And my issues in decline.
I've a deal and chipboard counter
That we bought for one-and-three
And some dodgy old electrics that blow
When I make my tea.

They tried to close this library once
When Attlee was PM.
Some folks came in to use it
But they never came again.
We thought we'd put computers in
To try and drum up trade.
The public came in sparsely,
Oh, but such demands they made:

"I know all this is free.
"Why isn't it made for me?
"When I change all the settings
"Why can't you just leave it be?"

Now we've loaded all the plug-ins
And we've locked it all down tight.
A clever bit of scripting
Cleans the cache out every night.
The daily filter updates
Try to lock out the porn.
And the man with twitchy eyebrows
Gives us ire and fire and scorn:

"How dare you censor me!
"I'll choose what I will see!
"Folk died in two world wars for my
"Online obscenity!"

"I know this is all free.
"Why isn't it set for me?
"What care I who else uses it?
"Why can't you leave it be?
"How dare you censor me! "
"I'll see what I will see!
"I've put nudes on the desktop
"'Cos that's what I like to see.
"It's public, so it's free
"And this stuff belongs to me.
"I'm changing all the settings
"And you'll damn well let it be!

(It's an interesting library
And it's mine, all mine.
With my 1950's bookstock
And my issues in decline
They tried to close this library down once
When Attlee was PM
Some folks came in to use it
But they never came again.)

The donkey's pissed on the strawberries

Grrrr...

I've just found out why my attempts to publicise the web catalogue have been spiked... T.Aldous told Marketing to hold fire and neither could be bothered to inform me that this had been done. I only know now by piecing together chance remarks from three different people. Like a fool I go and ask himself what's going on.

"We can't publicise the web catalogue at the moment because people can't reserve books on the PAC at Catty and I don't want to provoke any complaints."

I wouldn't mind hitting an occasional brick wall: this constant spiralling into bewildering mists does my head in.

I'll be OK if I ever have to entertain wasps

To prevent thefts we've put most of our public PCs into chunky metal safes. Two unprotected PCs' going walkies from Senebene Library the other week illustrates the need. This is not without its problems, especially when the time comes to try and sort out a problem with the hardware. There is a definite knack to getting the safes open and virtually all the front-line staff have agreed that I'm the only person on the books what has it. Which is usually fine, if inconvenient, though it makes a splendid excuse for getting out of the office when nerves are particularly frayed. Today it isn't fine as I seem to have lost the knack at Noddy, neatly snapping the key in the lock at the first turn. There was only me and the PC guy there so I can't even blame the staff for distracting me. Luckily the bloke who makes the safes was very understanding and only took the piss a little bit.

No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in

The dust's finally settled after the elections and the upshot is that nobody's actually in charge so everybody's going to work together. This has been the official result of every local election for the past couple of decades, which means that every election ends in confusion because nobody can guess which way the mavericks are going to jump and leads to confusion as the new "everybody working together" dismantles the workings of the last "everybody working together" to make sure it makes its stamp on the scheme of things.

A particular issue this time has been "saving libraries," which translates as "no library closures unless expedient and in someone else's ward" but doesn't translate into any of the additional resources necessary to bring all our buildings up to a habitable standard, let alone staffing, etc. Which has also been the result of elections for the past couple of decades...

Waits and measures

Mary's been told to come up with stock procurement costs so she's going about it in our usual way: including as much as possible that could make us under-perform in an over-zealous effort not to look as if we're fiddling the figures. So far the costs include:

• Acquisitions staff salaries, including those of the two posts that have been vacant for more than a year-and-a-half; and Jimmy Huddersfield's post which has been vacant for eight months;


• The cost of the furniture and equipment;


• The maintenance costs of the ordering software;


• Stationery costs;


• The cost of having librarians and other staff choosing books for stock.

So far so justifiable. The point at which I departed from the exercise was when she had Seth measuring the floor space used by the section. Why? So that she could work out how much of the service charge we pay the shopping centre to include in the costs: if it's x% of the library's floor area then it's x% of the service charge.

"Why not include a proportion of the Chief Executive's salary?" I asked.

There was some quibbling as to whether or not to include the floor area used by the half of the double-sided bookshelves holding the donations that need to be looked at by the non-existant Stock Librarian. The crowning glory came when she instructed Seth to measure half of the office I used to share with Jimmy. This involved him stretching a tape measure across the office umpteen times until Mary was finally convinced that they were measuring the correct area.

"In what way has this office been involved in stock procurement since Jimmy's retirement?" I asked.

By this stage I was getting truculent:

"You'll need to subtract half of the pathway through the section that I use for egress from my office," I pointed out.

"We don't need that sort of detail," replied Mary.

How many pies can a porpoise poise on purpose?

This was floated by me at close of play tonight...

Kevin,
I've been checking up on the targets for this autumn's satisfaction survey. T.Aldous has committed us to:

Found the book they wanted: 94%
Found the information they wanted: 93%
General satisfaction: 95%

Is this achievable?
Jim

I looked around at all the books that hadn't been catalogued yet because Jimmy Huddersfield went and retired after only giving three months' formal notice. And all the books in boxes waiting to be transferred to other libraries by the non-existant Stock Librarian. And the chaotic state of Helminthdale Central where the priority has had to be "try and keep the doors open with the staff left after taking into account vacancies; sickness due to stress; and covering vacant posts at branches." Then I think of the depth and range of the in-house staff training on enquiry and information work and the library assistants dumped on the reference library desk at a moment's notice to make up numbers. I do a quick Google search and have a look at the actual figures achieved by a dozen library authorities, including some that we're always told are red hot good. They average out:

Found the book they wanted: 77%
Found the information they wanted: 75%
General satisfaction: 94%

Do I think it's achievable? What do you think, chums?

One golden spoon of ten shekels

Last week, Daisy Duck asked T.Aldous if it was OK to buy some new teaspoons for the staff room out of petty cash.

"I've a better idea," said T.Aldous, "I can buy some from Connor's Hardware. They'll be cheaper and they have nice gilt edges."

This morning a small package arrived at Dutch Bend. Daisy opened the package: there were ten new cheap teaspoons. With nice gilt edges.

And a memorandum:

MEMORANDUM

From: Chief Librarian
To: Daisy Duck, Dutch Bend Library
Date: 10th May 2006
Subject: Teaspoons

---

Daisy,

These are the teaspoons I promised.

Please make sure that they are put on the library inventory.

T.Aldous

Sproink

Three times in the past fortnight Gypsy Cream Library's telephone has been out of order. Three times BT have come along and strung a new line between the library and the telegraph pole at the corner of the road. This time we get a solution to the mystery...

"Oi! What do you think you're doing?"

shouts a workman from the building site next door (they're putting up some neo-Georgian executive dovecotes)

"I've just cut that down!"

It turns out that the telephone line was in the way of one of their gantry trucks so they cut it down ad lib. Needless to say, the bills for the reconnection fees will be going to the builders, though we suspect that they are only subject to law west of the Pecos.

Ouch!

Advice to gentlemen readers of this blog: if you ever give a lady a willy made of seaside rock, don't hang around to watch her having a go at it with a toffee hammer!

The veneer's peeling off my dressing table

Reality bites... Day five of the "trying to get the OK to buy British Standards Online" game. None of us in the Library Service are allowed to sign licence agreements. I ring one of the most helpful people I know, who tries his best:

"As far as I know, Fiery Jack's the only person in the authority who's allowed to sign licence agreements. If you send it to him he'll deal with it... oh dear... it occurs to me that there's a complication. It might have to go to the IT Partnership [outsourced as of last month], someone spent a lot of last year transferring licences from the authority to the partnership. I'm afraid you're going to have to talk to them. I'm really sorry."

My heart sinks. I have a nasty feeling that this may end up involving Arthur Sixpence, in which case I'll need to buy a sleeping bag and an elephant gun.

Just like any other man except more so

Me and Frog have a day out in Blackpool for a meeting.

"It's alright for some!"

said the Library Assistants, so we promised to pick up some rock for them. A couple of blocks back from the library we were visiting we spotted a rock shop and popped in. Amidst all the usual suspects -- giant humbugs; rock dummies; and those big red lollies with the cat's face on them -- they had some rock willies. Exactly the thing!

Actually, to call them rock willies is to understate the intimidating dimensions of the things. I spent a few moments looking for toes, or at least fingers. Anyway, we bought them to take back to the library. Only after we had parted with our money did we spot that purchases were placed into clear polythene carrier bags.

Still, we got a bit of space on the train back home.

A smile, a song and a boa constrictor

For some reason, whenever something odd happens people ask me or Frog if we're to blame. The latest example is somebody's reserving a copy of "Teach Yourself Tantric Sex" for Deidre at Senebene Library, who's not been well lately. I proferred my alibis, as usual, which weren't believed, as usual, and ditto Frog, as usual.

What's unusual here, for me at any rate, is that there is a book called "Teach Yourself Tantric Sex" and that we have two copies in stock (at Catty and Dutch Bend, the latter making a sort of sense). How the hell do you teach yourself tantric sex? I suspect this is one I don't want to think about lest it joins the ranks of three-in-the-morning mysteries.

Palpable proof of God's existence a posteriori

A colleague sends me a picture of the New Model Library Building planned by the council:

Tha can carry a duck up t'mountain but tha can't mek it quack

Talking to a colleague in IT support about our People's Network computers. He's perplexed:

"They're all the same model and make of PC. They've all got the same software on them. In fact, they're all copies of the same image, so they should all be identical clones. But they're not, are they?"

"No," I reply.

"I can't understand it. Anyway, I've taken the picture of the bloke in his vest off the desktop on PC1 again. And I've turned the sound down on 2 and 5 again. And I've put the Flash plug-in back onto 6 again. And when I'm logged on I haven't been able to replicate that thing on PC 10 where the Word document's in portrait orientation right up to the point where it gets printed: how the hell it does that I don't know, it only happens to some of your customers. We've been talking about this back at the office: what would you say to our blitzing the whole lot one evening?"

"Fire bombing's a bit extreme isn't it?"

"That's not what I meant but I'll take it back as an idea."

Like walking through Alaska in your underwear

I begin to understand why I want to shout at T.Aldous all the time. And, as usual, it makes distance to make things clear...

There's been a cock-up in the "Hooray for Literacy" campaign being run by the Young Persons Directorate. For some reason their publicity states that the library's doing a story time workshop next month despite the fact that nobody's asked the Library Service if it can be done. T.Aldous approaches Frog:

"Have you seen the Hooray for Literacy booklet?"

"No, has it come out yet?"

"It says that you're doing on story time workshop."

"Does it? First I know of it. When?"

"Have a look..."

"Well it won't be me doing it: it's not my Saturday and I'm on leave that week anyway."

"Nancy's got no right to do this without talking to you first. We can't not do this, we need somebody to do it."

"Well, I've got a meeting with..."

"Who can we ask to do it?"

"I've a meeting with..."

And so on for the next fifteen minutes, with T.Aldous rotating between "Nancy's got no right" and "who can we ask" with scarce a breath between. Until...

"I know! We could ask one of the SureStart workers to do it? Could they do it?"

"As I was saying, I've a meeting with them on Tuesday, I'll ask one of them to do it."

And there it is in a nutshell: when you hit a difficulty and need to sort it out urgently do you want to try and sort it out or do you want to listen to your boss going on and on and on about whose fault it is?

Your rosebuds are numbered

Being a bit paranoid about the people counters I was paying particular attention to the one in Pottersbury Road Library when I popped in this morning. I suppose it's just as well, but I'm not convinced. I was irritated, but not surprised, to see that the little red light didn't flash and the count didn't move when I walked past, nor when I wafted various body parts past the sensor.

"Looks like it's buggered."

I suggested with all the technical gravitas I could muster.

"Coo, look at that! Should it do that?" Says an elderly lady.

The numbers were spinning round like a fruit machine.

How many fingers am I holding up?

That's just Jim dandy that is: the people counters that have been installed in all our libraries have no moving parts, but we found last week that they can stick somehow (!!!) and three weeks' worth of stats for Noddy are lost forever; now we find that resetting the counter by pulling the plug isn't reliable either. T.Aldous discovers that giving the counter a vigorous shake and calling it "you sod" seems to do the trick.

"I didn't want to buy this model," he tells me.

For once I sympathise.

An old man going bonkers in the rain

I'm obviously in need of a holiday myself: it's taking me all my powers not to shout at T.Aldous and the strain is killing me. And in fairness, the man himself isn't being particularly irritating or stupid. If he pops his head through the door I want to shout at him. If he says hello I want to shout at him. If he says thank you for sorting a problem out I want to shout at him. I just can't cope with his "I can't do anything without the use of huge doses of adrenalin so the merest thing has to be A Major Problem that needs to be explained over and over again because It's Very Complicated" way of doing things. (Or not, as the case may be.)

Today we did hit a major problem caused by the very complicated procedures forced on us by the corporate support team's new Working Nimbly To Achieve Results Flexibly régime which means that none of us in the library service are allowed to actually buy anything that isn't a book and that we have to allow at least one week to get the OK to order anything and be glad about it. By the time T.Aldous had talked us both through to the inevitable impasse for the fourth time I was crawling the walls. As soon as he left the office I had to slink into the computer room, sit cross-legged on the floor and take lots of deep breaths to try and centre myself. I'm not sure that what I'm trying to do here is worth the pains in my chest.