Friday, October 22, 2004
So.... my shit day.
Well, we were very busy, not necessarily a bad thing in itself. We're still doing a fair bit of signing up of new members, a small number are from the university halls down the road but mainly they seem to be just members of the public. In a sense this is good because it means they've seen us in publicity and thought "Cool! A library! We must immediately go there and hang out and it'll be the happening place to be! It'll be like Studio 54!" In another sense it's bad because we're at the end of three weeks after opening and our book selection isn't great at the moment, some areas are completely empty. Books are issued for three weeks, so stuff will hopefully start getting returned next week that was taken out in that week after opening. But I'm worried that people joining today will think, "they haven't got anything I like here, I'm going to go hang out under the railway arches and inject heroin into my ears instead!"
We had a couple of children's events going on. People often wonder how we get so many children to come to our library and it's quite simple: We kidnap them. Yes, much as in the film 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' (now also a successful play, 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' and TV series 'The Alan Clark Diaries') last night, after closing, the staff went out and scoured the local area, stealing children with the promise of some sweeties and rough non-consensual sex. We store them in pupae attached to the children's library ceiling then, at the required time, they are released. Due to the lovely wings they grow overnight they flutter down to the ground where the children's librarian reads them a couple of stories before they are gassed and put into drawers where they are held in place with extremely large pins.
Anyway, so at the same time this is going on, we've got a shitload of builders in the other side of the library. Two lots really. There was a trio of electricians who seemed to be right out of the League of Gentlemen, they looked slightly inbred and seemed to be having some big emotional breakdown in the staff corridor. The other group were fitting the fixtures for the library cafe. First we had to move a load of free-standing shelves five inches to the left because the counter was longer than was initially thought and was now pressing against the David Brin books on the Sci-Fi shelf. So we had to take the books off the shelves, detach the shelves, move the frame, reattach the shelves... My three years of librarianship had prepared me for this by telling me that if we took the books off the shelf and piled them in order we could quickly reshelve them afterwards. Unfortunately the caretakers were doing it so they just pulled books off and made piles at random so it took us about two hours to order and reshelve them. To make things more exciting our electricians managed to short out half the lights on the ground floor. My manager said he'd heard one of them call out to their mate "Is it the black or the grey wire that's live?" So we were shelving in semi-darkness.
But even better the people assembling the cafe counter presumably found they couldn't put the bits together because one of them brought out a powersaw thing and was making a massive noise sawing stuff. The next thing was a pungent smell of burning plastic. The windows have all been fixed shut because of our air conditioning, this sucked up the smell and made sure it was distributed evenly throughout the entire library. But there was no barriers put up, so any children could have walked up and placed their heads in the path of the saw without anyone noticing. Things are fun when we don't have to worry about Health and Safety directives. However, we were safe as they stood in the entrance hall and screamed in terror at the screeching noise of the circular saw.
Well, we were very busy, not necessarily a bad thing in itself. We're still doing a fair bit of signing up of new members, a small number are from the university halls down the road but mainly they seem to be just members of the public. In a sense this is good because it means they've seen us in publicity and thought "Cool! A library! We must immediately go there and hang out and it'll be the happening place to be! It'll be like Studio 54!" In another sense it's bad because we're at the end of three weeks after opening and our book selection isn't great at the moment, some areas are completely empty. Books are issued for three weeks, so stuff will hopefully start getting returned next week that was taken out in that week after opening. But I'm worried that people joining today will think, "they haven't got anything I like here, I'm going to go hang out under the railway arches and inject heroin into my ears instead!"
We had a couple of children's events going on. People often wonder how we get so many children to come to our library and it's quite simple: We kidnap them. Yes, much as in the film 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' (now also a successful play, 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' and TV series 'The Alan Clark Diaries') last night, after closing, the staff went out and scoured the local area, stealing children with the promise of some sweeties and rough non-consensual sex. We store them in pupae attached to the children's library ceiling then, at the required time, they are released. Due to the lovely wings they grow overnight they flutter down to the ground where the children's librarian reads them a couple of stories before they are gassed and put into drawers where they are held in place with extremely large pins.
Anyway, so at the same time this is going on, we've got a shitload of builders in the other side of the library. Two lots really. There was a trio of electricians who seemed to be right out of the League of Gentlemen, they looked slightly inbred and seemed to be having some big emotional breakdown in the staff corridor. The other group were fitting the fixtures for the library cafe. First we had to move a load of free-standing shelves five inches to the left because the counter was longer than was initially thought and was now pressing against the David Brin books on the Sci-Fi shelf. So we had to take the books off the shelves, detach the shelves, move the frame, reattach the shelves... My three years of librarianship had prepared me for this by telling me that if we took the books off the shelf and piled them in order we could quickly reshelve them afterwards. Unfortunately the caretakers were doing it so they just pulled books off and made piles at random so it took us about two hours to order and reshelve them. To make things more exciting our electricians managed to short out half the lights on the ground floor. My manager said he'd heard one of them call out to their mate "Is it the black or the grey wire that's live?" So we were shelving in semi-darkness.
But even better the people assembling the cafe counter presumably found they couldn't put the bits together because one of them brought out a powersaw thing and was making a massive noise sawing stuff. The next thing was a pungent smell of burning plastic. The windows have all been fixed shut because of our air conditioning, this sucked up the smell and made sure it was distributed evenly throughout the entire library. But there was no barriers put up, so any children could have walked up and placed their heads in the path of the saw without anyone noticing. Things are fun when we don't have to worry about Health and Safety directives. However, we were safe as they stood in the entrance hall and screamed in terror at the screeching noise of the circular saw.
