pumpkinstrokemarrow

Although perhaps not today. The self service stations were down and the librarians had to do it themselves on their computers. It seems that they even had to do it by hand one day during the past week. Even signs up saying that their usually reliable Internet service was a touch off-colour. All this made me think that doing it by hand must have been a bit of a palaver, copying out lots of long book numbers and a slightly smaller number of long person numbers. Plenty of room for transcription errors. But then we come to the senior moment. It must have taken me a good thirty seconds to take my mind back to what used to happen in the olden days. When you used to hand over two or three cardboard tickets into which the librarians popped the ticket of the books that you were taking out. Good reliable system which lasted, I should imagine, more than 100 years. But my random access memory clearly not what it used to be; not lasted anything like so long.

The library was also the locale for another couple of firsts. Passing through a motorised revolving door and climbing on and off an escalator, stick wise. A slightly intimidating experience. I am clearly headed to be the third string spokesman for those with impaired mobility at TB, standing in for the first string who is wheelchair bound and the second string who sports the double sticks, as occasion arises. I must try not to sport the enthusiasm of the newly converted.

Worn out by all this, reduced to emptying the waste transfer facility (vide supra) outside the kitchen window by bucket. Decided that moving a dustbin half full with dirty water and scraps, 50 yards slightly uphill, was going to be too much of a challenge. Full buckets were quite bad enough, especially when Franklin thought he would join in. The up side was that, it still being fairly cold, the week old kitchen waste did not smell of much. But I dare say our small four footed friends know better.

And while we are thinking of acquisitions policy, I noticed a shock horror piece in today's DT about a centenarian who was evicted from her home by an uncaring council despite the intervention of the great and the good in the matter. Now the home in question is a care home run, I think, by said council, but which has reached its sell by date. Too many bedrooms do not have en-suite facilities and the kitchens are short on microwaves. No facilities for customers to have pets or overnight guests. Or whatever. Why the thing is past its sell by date is not the point. The point is, how does one run such a thing down in a graceful way? Do you stop taking in new patients and run the thing until the last patient snuffs it? Do you run it, more or less at full throttle, until one fine day you move all the customers to a new home and knock down the old one? Hiring some expensive management consultant to design a process for some slightly less expensive project manager to execute. Something between the two extremes? Given that the first option is not giving very good value for money (something that the DT is not very clued up on when it comes to spending the taxpayers money, despite the amount of ink it spends on the subject), one of the customers is going to have to be the last to leave.