A post that, despite its length, doesn't say much

Today, I was supposed to go into the city in which I work, and do several things, such as return library books, get my bag mended and take some unwanted books to the Oxfam (or similar) shop. However, I have not gone. There are a few reasons for this, shown here in no particular order:

• It's raining
• I go there every day to work
• It's a 45 minute train journey
• I am too lazy
• I know that if I go I'll do what I have to do and then mooch about aimlessly and possibly buy an item of clothing that I'll never wear

I will do the things I have to do in my lunch hour one day this week. Actually, in reality, I probably won't. The bag that needs to be mended has been loitering in the office for weeks, waiting for me to take it to the repair place. The books (or at least one of them) have been languishing in my desk drawer, also at work, waiting to be returned to the library.

I have just finished, and hence want to return to the library, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. It took a while to get into, and I wasn't sure I was going to make it to the end of its 900 or so pages, but it was worth the effort, and I enjoyed it.

Mr C has gone to London to see a friend and go to a wargames shop, which might be detrimental to his bank account.

I keep dreaming about the Library of Doom: even in my sleep I cannot escape. I wasn't feeling too bad about work this week, mainly because I wasn't there very much, had more important things to think about, plus Enemy Number One was away this week. Actually her absence wasn't entirely a good thing, as something has gone wrong with the Inter-Library Loan reports and, due to the distribution of power (or lack of it) in the Library of Doom, she is the only person who can potentially sort this out. I felt very sorry for the Singing Librarian this week, as, due to the ILL problem, he spent two days re-doing work he had already done.

Anyway, as I said, I wasn't feeling too bad about work, that was until Friday night, on the train home would you believe, when I was talking to two colleagues, and of course, we 'had' to talk about work, and the dreaded permissions came up in the conversation. I am having an ongoing 'guilt' phase regarding my part in the reduction of permissions on the issue desk computers. I won't go into the whys and wherefores of why the permissions have been reduced because they're boring. In fact, this whole paragraph is boring, but I will plough on until I get to the point...

Which is that this issue is a good example of me being weak and also not thinking things through. Both of these failings are common in my life, in fact they probably occur on a daily basis. Every [working] day I do something that makes me think that I'm rubbish at my job. It doesn't have to be anything very big or very wrong, just something.

Then I think, 'why do I worry so much about my job?'. It's not life and death, I work in a library, for goodness' sake! But it's my job, and I want to do it well, and I especially don't want my failings to make everyone else's lives difficult. It does make me a bit cross, though, that it makes me feel bad. This morning I woke up thinking about work, and, as I said, I even dreamt about it last night. This is not on! I don't want to waste my time away from work thinking and worrying about it. Surely my brain could find something better to do?

I have been thinking recently about my future career, and about what I really want to do. Starting the chartership process has helped me a bit with this, as I'm supposed to be setting goals and then planning how I'm going to achieve them. Of course, the problem is that I'm not really sure what I want. I'm not particularly enjoying work at the moment, and term hasn't even started yet! But I think this is due to too much worrying. I don't know whether I want to work as a Reader Services person forever - the complaining students/staff get very irritating/depressing after a [short] while. I said to Mr C last night that if I didn't like the people I work with so much I would probably not want to do my current job. Hopefully I will feel better soon.

So, maybe I could be an academic librarian/faculty liason librarian. This was my original plan after my trainee year, and it's still something I would still like to try. It does involve budgets, which involve numbers, but hopefully I could get some training in this. Well, I will see. Sometimes I think I might like to be something other than I librarian, but I'm not sure what that is, apart from bestelling author, academic, jazz singing sensation, teacher, prime minister, ballerina, doctor, or songwriter. Only one (maybe two) of these is actually achievable within the realms of reality, however.

Reality = I will stay where I am until it becomes financially unviable/I get sacked/Michael Buble (sorry I can't do the accent on the e) asks me to be his singing partner.

I just visited the Lipstick Librarian (I was searching for other blogging librarians) and it seems I cannot be a Lipstick Librarian, as I am currently wearing an item of clothing with a duck on it. Two ducks, in fact. Perhaps I wouldn't want to be one anyway.

I apologise for the length and whingy nature of this post.

Procrastination

Well, here I am again. It's Monday lunchtime. I'm half on lunch and half being a desk back-up person and I'm in the office. During my lunch hour I've done the following:

• Eaten my sandwiches and a chocolate bar.
• Booked my driving test. (After trying several times online and being forced to give up due to the computer not being able to cope with the fact that I've changed my name.)
• At a colleague's request, looked at a cheque without a cheque guarantee card number on the back, and then put it back in the till anyway.
• Sorted the post.

I'm trying to avoid (re)writing my Personal Development Plan for my chartership programme. I have already written it once, but Mrs Mentor says it's too detailed and full of irrelevant things. Even though I know she's right I just can't face writing the wretched thing for a second time. I went a bit too much to town on the last one, and put in everything I could possibly think of to do to develop myself professionally, and it was 11 pages long, so I do see Mrs Mentor's point. It's just fiddly and annoying to have to go through it all again and pick out what to leave in, what to change, add etc, especially as I'm having a sort of 'not bothered' period regarding chartership at the moment. Very Bad Librarian, I know.

Lacking in motivation.

Perhaps I'll just sit down tonight and do it in one fell swoop.

It just thundered very loudly.

Three days later...I have now re-written it.

Training

I've been on a couple of training courses in the past few days. The first thing was on Wednesday evening, when I went to the Preparing for Chartership course held at CILIP HQ in London. It was a bit of a pain that it was in the evening, after work and therefore at a tiring time of the day, but I got the train and found the venue ok. I had some trouble with escalators on the Untergrund (U-Bahn). This often happens, mainly on down escalators. I think it's to do with vertigo, which I don't have when I'm on/in tall buildings, but do on stairs without handrails (can't do them), and escalators. Weird. Anyway, fortunately, there were also some stairs (avec handrail), which isn't always the case, so I got to where I had to go.

For a full report of the chartership training please see my notebook. Oops sorry you can't do that, so please see my chartership blog. I started it on a different blog hosting thing because I wanted to be able to keep some bits private, in case I had to say bad things about anyone. Not really, it was more because I might want to mention people by name so that I can remember what on earth I was doing at the time, and I don't really like doing that when other people can read it. As far as I know there is no privacy function on Blogger. If you know differently please let me know! The other blog will (hopefully) act as a diary to record events, training, incidents. meetings etc relevant to the chartership process and also be somewhere where I can write my reflections on these things (which, as I learned on Wednesday, is a very important part of the process).

Regarding the course, the gist is that it was very useful and I'm glad I went.

The other training was yesterday, which was in-house training on recruitment and selection. This was also very worth while. The course leaders did well to make the subject less dry than it might have been, and it was definitely useful given the current changes happening within the library here. I will write a more detailed report about it in the chartership blog soon (I hope).

Blogger seems to be working ok again, so I will try and reload Bob tonight!

Chartership update

Oops that last post was a bit long. I am going to go on a 'Preparing for Chartership' training course next Wednesday. It's in London, and in the evening, so I might get back quite late. I wasn't sure whether to wait and see if there is going to be one held in the daytime, but my mentor wants me to go on one before we meet, so I thought I should go as soon as possible. I did attend a course last year (maybe the year before that now!), when I was in my old job, but that was when I was applying under the old regulations. I also have to look at my Personal Professional Development Plan (more concisely known as PPDP) and update it and change things as appropriate.

It's really cold in here. Can't believe it's June! Brrr.

Meetings and a mentor

Today I got an email from a lady saying she would be my mentor for my chartership, so there's some good news. Hopefully things can now get going a bit more.

Last week was fairly busy - a couple of meetings and a few interesting incidents. We had the meeting for the evening and weekend team people. This went quite well, considering that they had somewhat of a right to be grumpy. I just came out and said that I abdicated responsibility for the mess-up with the rota (which had led to them having to make up their hours) because I wasn't even in employment at the time the decisions were made. Anyway, everything seems to be sorted out now, although there are still discussions to be had about changes to opening and working hours next academic year.

The university has gone through the HERA (Higher Education Role Analysis) process, and people's pay has been re-evaluated. It's supposed to make the pay scales clearer so that we will all be on grades and not spinal points. To be honest, I'm not all that sure how it works, as I hadn't joined the university when it was started. The new scales come into play on 1st August.

The university are also making changes to the way the working week is structured for support staff. We are going to be working '5 out of 7' days, which means that we can be asked to work any 5 out of 7 days, including Saturday and Sunday. Apparantly academic staff are already doing this. We're going to have meetings (yet more meetings) about this over the next few weeks, where we can ask questions of the people who made the decisions. I would like to know what happens if you say you can't work on a Saturday (or Sunday, or any other day I suppose) for religious reasons. I would have thought this would be contrary to legislation about religious discrimination. Maybe I should look it up.

We also had a meeting about the changes within Library Services since ISS has come into existence and about changes that are going to take place in the near future. We didn't really find out much information, except that the remaining library people in our office will have to move rooms before the beginning of August.

Our neighbours seem to have suddenly increased the volume of their TV over the last week. I have no idea why this should be, but I hope they turn it down again soon. Maybe I will have to write them a note. Aggh.

Small things

Hmm guess the font was no different!

I was saying in the staff room yesterday that you can tell a lot about people by small things they do, or don't do. For example, people who don't return their cups and saucers to the canteen or, similarly, don't return their books to the shelves say a lot about themselves. To me, such behaviour indicates several character traits:

1. Laziness
2. Lack of consideration for others
3. Selfishness
4. Lack of thought

Of course, people who 'dump and run' on an occasional basis might just be busy or desperate for the loo or something.

I am trying to write an article for the CILIP Gazette. It has to be done by 5th April. I am just not sure what to write about. The piece is supposed to be my opinion on any issue affecting libraries/information professionals - either in terms of the wider profession or more specific to my sphere. I can find plenty to say when I'm chatting to people or whatever, but when it comes to actually writing a piece 'to order' I seem to be stumped. Will have to do some brainstorming. That's how I usually write essays etc, just put everything in my head down on paper and then try to get some sort of structure to it. I think once I've actually decided what to write about it'll be better, but at the moment I am feeling particularly vague.

I'm also looking for mentor to guide me through my chartership, but I'm rapidly running out of time until the deadline for the amount of time allowed between registering for chartership and finding a mentor is upon me. Maybe I should go and email a potential mentor.

Just realised I have forgotten to post a wedding invitation reply. Must do that tomorrow.