Resigned to my fate...

No rethinking then. A new organisational structure. No mention of terms such as regrading or promotion. No evidence of thoughts ever having touched on them. I notice both my old departments Serials and Document Supply have been renamed or submerged under different titles. My always-lurking paranoia questions whether perhaps my deafness has been factored into the move. That perhaps I have been found wanting in my customer care skills.
I move to St Georges Library in January (unless those lottery numbers come up first) and expect that life will go on. I will miss the team I have now - they have easily been the best team I have ever worked with. I came to Document Supply trying to find a way to deal with a fractured trust and a feeling that management had used me and exploited me. Being continually asked to do small extra tasks that might eventually give me a job description that would merit upgrading. The promise was dangled above me various times in Serials - new job title - extra responsibilities - but Pay and Reward rather failed to reward me.
Document Supply made me glad to go back to work, not because I believed the future was any brighter but because I loved the people I work with. Thank you for helping me. I wish we could continue.

Restructuring.... Feudalism

At this moment in time I am hoping for a re-think. For a miracle - for the forces of management to stop their meddling in people's lives and start considering their people. You know, those people, us, that they supposedly invest in, in order to get that plaque. The shield that has been carefully removed from the mezzanine level for safekeeping whilst our workplace becomes a building site.
Of course according to the latest rather vague plan under orders I might be deported off to another workplace come January. In management's version of consultation I have been offered either the job I do now in a different place or a job where I stay with my friends, my team, doing a job I have no desire for - and a hearing problem that makes it almost impossible to really do it well. I consider this offer further evidence that when it comes to consultation some levels of our organisation possess the man-management skills of Vlad the Cataloguer.
The culture of academia has long been considered more humanitarian than,for instance, industry and commerce but within its management framework there are still elements that view those ununionised days of toil and strife as the ideal world. Whilst the world of Trade downsizes, the planet Academia considers the merits of "cheaper, faster, better" and voluntary severance schemes. It pays lip-service to its slave labour, says thank you for building those pyramids with the payoff of Danish pastries and collages of melons but pay and reward is remarkably patchy. The workplace is placed under intolerable conditions. Floundering in a miasma of mahogany dust and accompanied by the rythym of decibel-rich diamond drilling we whinge and we work. Then the library staff cope. Its employees are willing to struggle but we would like to be able to use the experience we have accumulated. If I am separated from my team the University Library will still survive but the world will be less enjoyable particularly for me (and my friends I think). I don't suppose it really matters it just means that caring will become a little bit more difficult.

BBC Poetry

Although I dislike the way television governs people's actions (especially mine) I must admit to entering into a very difficult stage of the year. These next two months will find me stretched between the Ashes cricket and the Tour de France, but on top of these is a more peculiar return to an old love. It keeps me awake at night and it makes my eyes go glassy and write interesting phrases into a notebook. It isn't healthy like my love of running, or jogging, or sitting in an armchair eating doughnuts whilst watching cricket. Poetry. Perhaps it was just a combination of factors. Television programme about Eliot and Prufrock, tidying my attic and finding Stephen Fry's "Ode less travelled", and remembering an old friend Christina whose views on poetry depended on the use of rhyme. No rhyme equalled No Poem.

Stephen Fry was alternatively scathing about the belief that Poetry was easy to write because it didn't need to rhyme. He stresses the discipline of the different forms and the difficulty of finding the "write" word. I am intrigued by the fact that as a writer (of whatever quality) I can feel if a word is correct. I can feel that also there is a better word but, at this moment in time I can't remember it. Where does that word live ? Where does it come from ? How does it return ?

This "vocation" also fits in with that strange need to comment on whatever surrounds me. Whether in emails to friends and strangers alike. Whether in comments directed to my colleagues passing by an enquiry point in a deserted catalogue hall. Whether in those occasional times when I exchange diction for drawing and design. I am unsure as to whether I am some sort of detached observer whose failing ears have kickstarted some long-submerged literary and emotional turbine or whether the creativity virus has always infected me and gradually metamorphosed out of dormancy.

Whatever - I thank all those people who made it possible - BBC included (although I still begrudge them the licence fee) and will finish with a poem (as they say, defensively, a work in progress...)


On/Off : the rails

Background noise, loud-mouthed boys
Humming conversations.
Power games, shrill-voiced girls
Expressing complications.
Landscape moving, no-one watching
Visions craving patience.
Tram rails down, approaching town
Arriving platformed stations.
Mobiles waiting, appointments, dating.
Embarrassing situations.
Thinking, writing, avoiding fighting
All possible variations.
Riders dispersing, rarely conversing,
Alighting then into the silence.
Remarking in murmurs, remembering journeys
The walking, the driving, the distance.
Passengers roam, but the writer’s returning
Determined, believing in learning.
Inspired to try, not frightened to pry
In the sound of a voice gently yearning.

Twitterdom

All things considered.
Well, no. Not really. I never consider anything. I just do it (to quote an old advertising slogan). I don't understand it really but this glamorous woman said Do this - so I did. It is like all the other next big things ; Web 2, Wii fit, and other monstrosities moving rapidly from wow to old hat. All it served to do was to remind me that I ought to update some of the other last big things.
My blog, unnoticed by the entirety of humankind serves as a sort of diary to myself in which I hardly ever participate. Perhaps in that parallel universe where I run the world as a wise, benevolent and magnanimous dictator I actually do what I say I will.
Or maybe I won't.
The idea is that we are basically interested in what OTHER people are doing. Now. It's an "In the present tense" idea. How to track people. We used to call it stalking. Now it's described as social interaction. Following a succession of Status messages. Like the dylanologists used to study Bob's leftover Curry cartons to discover the meaning of life. Are we defined by what we say we do and what we say we are ? My dad, Christian to the last second believed that we are defined by what we do; by action. By deeds. I think he assumed Good deeds. If this is true and my current career and lifestyle in the library-world serves to define me then I am going to face a pretty boring recitation of my achievements at the Pearly Gates. Pete, er, well, I'd like to confess three major sins but want 8,000 renewals to be taken into account and I once offered additional support to a totally innocent bystander.
God (or the other one) will certainly have an archive. A dark shadowy place where shelvers fear to tread. I can see the management-speak as the red fiery horned one suggests doing a spot of shelf-tidying and we, taking it all on board, respond in the affirmative and trudge off into the corners of life's mysterious and modular shelving.
Anyway Status. Not waving but drowning.
...and you're not vile.