A faint hope

by itchingmyknee

There comes a point, when youthful gadding has come to an end and full-time work has leached the lifeblood from you, that pinpricks of freedom take on huge consequence.

The odd day off, long weekend, even a coffee snatched during work hours are the stalwarts of happiness.

One such window of delight that’s lodged in my brain is the advent of Glastonbury Festival. I have taken 5 days off. I am going to spend time with my friends, see my boyfriend without his dog playing chaperone (don’t ask) and generally run amok.

This festival has taken on incredible significance. When I missed Seasick Steve at the Spitz last week and then found out he was playing Glasto, I took it as a sign. A sign that a weekend in late June will be the Mecca of my desires.

Of course, somewhere in the recesses of my consciousness, I know this isn’t strictly true. I will most probably spend the weekend searching for lost friends, missing the best bands (I always lose my timetable) and snapping waspishly at my boyfriend from sleep deprivation. But I don’t care. We all need these bright spots on the horizon to keep us going, us drones. Even if they turn out to be (overpriced) black holes.

Librarian's Corner VI

By wrackingmybrains

I think a lot of people come to work in libraries because they imagine that they will be calm, stress-free environments; that was certainly one of my motivations for choosing my current job. And actually, for all my pet anecdotes about our more eccentric patrons, I do find my Library Assistant’s existence a pleasantly tranquil one, especially when compared to my previous student jobs working in trendy West End shoe shops during sale time!

For the most part our Readers are a laid-back and amiable lot, happy to join me in my favourite activities of chatting about books and films; very different from the rude, demanding and indecisive shoe shop customers. I have always put this down to the fact that while the latter are incessantly plagued by the sneaking suspicion that the shop staff are only interested in parting them from their money by any means possible in order to secure their own commission (yes, we did used to get commission – if you never suffered such paranoia before, you will now!); library visitors, on the other hand, are always subconsciously aware and grateful that they are essentially getting stuff for free (see note).

It is, I believe, because of this reputation as comparatively un-stressful workplaces that most libraries have a high proportion of nervous, timid or psychologically damaged people on their staff. My library is particularly affected by this as we are the smallest in the borough and therefore assumed to be the quietest and ‘easiest,’ so if someone is thought not to be coping in another branch, they are sent to us. The thing that amazes me is how tolerant the Council are of the ‘issues’ of such people. OK, fair enough, Judith, our new part-time manager, has been transferred to us because she found her old position in charge of a large, busy library too much after she suffered a back injury in a car accident. What I don’t quite understand is why she needs the three special ergonomic chairs that she has just ordered at the Council’s expense, when she only ever sits in our one office room, finding the actual library itself too tiring.

However, Judith’s expensive taste in chairs is nothing compared to the drain on resources wrought by Pamela, our Duty Supervisor. Pamela has been with the borough for over 12 years and is married to a man who works in another of its libraries. She herself didn’t start in an actual library but with the team who choose and buy all the stock. Bizarrely, she decided that this job – sitting in a basement reading publishers’ catalogues – was too stressful and insisted that she be moved to her husband’s library.

Quickly discovering that customers are a lot more demanding than books, Pamela then took four months off sick with work-related stress. Finally, the powers that be, always anxious that callous handling of such cases will incur the wrath of the powerful public sector union, Unison, managed to bribe Pamela back to work by transferring her to the small library where I now work and promoting her to Duty Supervisor.

The main responsibility of the Duty Supervisor is to take charge of the library when the manager is absent and, less than a year after Pamela arrived, our then-manager, David, was called away indefinitely to fill the vacancy left in another library by Judith’s accident. As soon as the Head of Libraries announced this plan, several weeks before David’s actual departure, Pamela became so terrified by the thought of having to run the library herself, that she went off sick again and didn’t return for six months, until an Acting Manager was safely installed.

Although Pamela is now technically back with us, she has been suffering on and off from a tenacious ear infection ever since the efficient Acting Manager was replaced by Judith, who, due to her disability can only perform a limited amount of managerial duties.

The irony is that my little library, supposedly such a ‘rest-cure,’ is constantly so understaffed that the remaining staff members all have to do twice as much work. In fact, I’m so stressed I think I’m going to take some time off…

N.B. OK, so you have to pay for the music and DVDs but they are pretty cheap, and I know, I know, we are funded partly by council tax but actually, our council charges some of the lowest taxes in the country, although they are one of the richest Local Authorities; the majority of their income comes from parking fines – true story.