bizgirl

A slightly scruffy, youngish guy (about my, age, I suppose), let's call him Shaggy, comes up to the information desk and asks...

"Where do I sign up to become a librarian?"
"You can send your CV to the Library Manager. If a position comes up, and you're considered a potential candidate, she'll give you a call to come in for an interview."
"Oh, you mean you can't just come in and help out?"
"No. All the various library assistant and professional librarian jobs are filled through normal employment channels. The library advertises, people apply, someone gets the job. That sort of thing. It doesn't hurt to have your CV on record - it shows you're keen."
"So you're saying..."

...Shaggy was obviously struggling with the concept....

"...that you get paid to do this?"
"Yes. In fact, a good proportion of the staff are professionals. You need a Masters Degree in Librarianship to become a fully professional librarian."
"Really? Just to shelve books and stuff?"

Shelve books, and stuff. There are times, as one of those fully qualified professional librarians, that you really want to smack people with an older edition volume Sa-Sm of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

"Yes." I tried to glower at him. "There's a bit more to it than shelving."
"Oh yeah, sure, I mean I can see that. There's the check-out, and, ummm..."

Shaggy looked around, looking for more clues as to what it was that we were paid to do all day.

"...I suppose someone has to do all the sign-ups, and, uh, the..."

He ran out of ideas at this point.

"Would you like a brochure about the Library School?" I suggested. We keep a few behind the desk for just this sort of person.
"How long does the course take?"
"Have you got a degree already?"
"Nope."
"Well, probably three years to get a degree to start with, and then another year or two to get the Masters."

Shaggy blanked out for a second, then...

"What? Really? Four or five years?"

Couldn't fault his maths ability.

"Yes."
"Just so I can work in a library?"
"Oh no, anyone can be a library assistant, but they do tend to give preference to people who are studying to be librarians."
"Man. You're sure I can't just help out, for free? I'd really love to get some experience."

Cute, kinda. Maybe I could give him a call when I was on shelving and pop out for a coffee while he did my work. A library slave. Very tempting.

"Well, like I say, you can send your CV to the Library Manager, maybe adding a note that you're happy to work for free. I'm not sure if we're legally able to employ people without paying them, but it doesn't hurt to try. And library assistant jobs do come up pretty regularly, so if your CV's in the pile, you might get a look-in at a regular job."
"Oh no, man, I don't really want a regular thing. I was just kinda hoping I could drop in and do some stuff when I got the urge, you know?"
"Um, yes. Well, I'm sure there are plenty of other community-based organisations that would be happy to have your help."

I gave him a couple more information pamphlets about ways he could use his irregular bursts of volunteering enthusiasm to assist some organisations that really needed some help, and gave him the old 'will that be all?'

Shaggy slowly looked around, obviously still a bit disbelieving that I wasn't about to let him get stuck into sorting out the recently returned pile or something.

'Yeahnah, cheers,' he finally muttered, and shambled away.

Shelve books and stuff. Really.

I grabbed myself the library's latest British Vogue from a 'to-be-catalogued' pile for my own weekend perusing, and was amused to find yet another section extolling the virtues of librarian fashion. Writing about the return of the blouse, Vogue impresses upon us that...

"Whether it's a flouncy pussy-bow or a demure high collar you're after, the look
to aim for is part Belle de Jour, part sexy librarian."

Whether they mean the infamous blogger Belle de Jour, I'm not sure - it's hard to tell with Vogue, and guessing by some of the outfits, one would be inclined to think yes.

So, anyway, yes, there's a few photos of girls on the catwalk wearing what are presumably the 'sexy librarian' clothes. I'd like to meet the librarians that can (a) afford these clothes, and (b) actually pull off wearing them. From personal experience, being a member of (a) seems to preclude the ability to belong to group (b), and vice versa.

The one item that really ties them all together is the cardigan, which, admittedly, is a fair enough call. There's some nice ones too: the Dries Van Norton and Prada ones are particularly pretty. Now all I need to do is save up for six months so I can buy one. As for the flower print silk dresses! Ahh, at least dreams are free, I suppose.

Coincidentally enough, a link posted by sex and the library on Saturday led me to the Anthropologie website which is also using the sexy librarian-theme at the moment. They've also got some very nice clothes, which I also can't afford.

Ahh, the school holidays.

In some ways, it's quite nice: parents bringing their children in to experience the joys of the public library. We librarians get pleasure from finding kids another book in whatever series they're addicted to at the moment, and instill the love of the written word into another generation of young'uns.

In other ways, it's total hell: the library becomes a de facto creche/playground, kids scream around the book shelves colliding with each other and adult patrons. Frazzled parents yell across the library trying to corral their no doubt sugar-loaded children into some semblance of a manageable group. Tears and tantrums abound, and that's just the librarian's tea room.

Thanks to my Dungeon assignment (it's going very well, thank you), I'm managing to avoid a good hunk of the holiday chaos, and I've only had to surface for a handful of 'public-facing' shifts this week. One of those, however, was on the Children's Information Desk shift, which is where I met 'Artemis'.

I've named this particular lad after Artemis Fowl, who, for those who aren't up on kids' literature, is a fictional 12 year old criminal mastermind, the subject of a series of books by Irishman Eoin Colfer. I've read the first three books in the series, and while they're good, I suspect the fact that the fictional Artemis is a supremely arrogant technical genius full-of-himself little tosspot appeals much more to the younger teenage boys (who eat it up) than the girls (who, as far as I can tell, are still hanging out for the next volume of the increasingly bad Harry Potter series).

Anyway, Artemis came up to me while I was lazing behind the desk, failing to get the energy up to try and stop a couple of pre-schoolers trying to push one of the library computers off its table. Artemis looked about twelve. He talked, on the other hand, like a forty year old English lecturer...

"Do you know when the new Artemis Fowl novella 'The Seventh Dwarf' is going to be added to the collection?"
"I'll have a look."

I did a quick catalogue search.

"It's not on the catalogue," I reported.

He looked at me like I'd sneezed on him.

"Of course it isn't. Can you tell me if the library has ordered it?"
"Ah, right. Let me check for you."
"Thank you."

Some manners, at least. Knowing how popular the series was, I'd have been surprised if we didn't at least have it on order, and, indeed, we did: it was 'in processing'.

"It's getting processed at present, which means it'll probably be out on the shelves shortly. Although, I suspect ... actually ... no, there's no reserves at all. Do you want to place a reserve on it?"
"Yes please."

He handed over his card. A child's card, so he was definitely under 13. I wondered. Tappity-tap, clickety-click, full patron record, aaaand...

"I'm nine," said Artemis, peering around the corner of the screen to see what I was doing, and somehow having caught onto the aim of my snooping.
"I was just checking your...uh..."
"I'm sure you were. Can you make the reservation from that screen?"

Busted snooping a patron's personal record by a nine year old!

"Uh, no, I have to..."

Unable to come up with a decent excuse, I just clicked through to the appropriate screen, made the reservation and returned his card.

"All. Done." I said, in a ' go away little boy' tone-of-voice.
"Thank you," he replied. "Actually, there's one more thing you might be able to help you with. Do you know where I could source..."

'Source'! The vocab!

"...underground tunnel diagrams of the Wellington central city?"
"What, like storm water pipes and stuff like that?"

'Stuff like that?' Great reference interview Natalie!

"Yes."
"Council, I suppose. In fact, you could try Mrs Kenilworth on the Reference Desk upstairs, she'd probably know a bit more that sort of stuff than me, she used work for the Council's information unit."

Artemis snorted. "Hardly a glowing recommendation, is it?"

I had to laugh. He was right, it wasn't.

"I'm sure she'd steer you in the right direction. It'll certainly be the Council that would hold those types of plans."
"Well, thank you. But I was hoping I might be able to get something from the library itself. My mother believes if I can't find the information I want in the library than it's information I probably don't need."

I was inclined to agree with his mother.

"Besides," he continued, "I'm not allowed to consult with the adult reference librarians any more, my mother told me I was wasting too much of their time."

Again, notch one up for the mother. Still, my interest was piqued.

"Well, tell you what, I can't really do anything now, I have to hang about the desk, but I can have an ask around later and see what we've got, or can get hold of. Do you come to the library regularly?"
"Yes."
"I'll leave a note on your card, or, uh..."
"What's your name?"
"Um, Natalie."
"Just Natalie?"
"Natalie Biz."
"Nice name."
"Thank you. I picked it myself."
"Could I just ask for you?"
"I suppose you could."
"All right then. Thank you for your help Natalie."
"That's okay."
"You know, you're very pretty. Goodbye."

And he turned heel and headed back to where his mother was trying wrestle a couple of crying pre-schoolers - twins by the looks of it - into their double-buggy.

I was left with cheeks burning bright red from his compliment.

The kids of today, I don't know.

[ continued here... ]

So yes, there I was, on my own, in a strange city, surrounded by the crème de la crème of New Zealand's music scene. Everyone who wasn't partaking in a rejuvenating smoke on the venue's steps was jumping into one of the many mini-vans and shuttles that had flocked to the front of the Bruce Mason Theatre to transport the throng back to town, where the official after-party for which I didn't have a ticket (did I need a ticket?) was taking place. That place was the Studio. I figured I may as well give it a go. I spotted a half-full shuttle and put my head in the door.

"Are you going to the after party?"
"Yeah! Sure, climb on in!" was the reply. Phew, that was easy.

I climbed in, only now realising I'd attached myself to a mob of card-carrying bogans. The mullet on the guy I had sat down next to - henceforth known as 'Daz' - stretched halfway down his back but was shaved on the sides, and with a short fringe. A classic. The rest where much the same: tight black jeans, black muscle tees, badly drawn tattoos.

"Are you guys in a band?" I asked.
"Nahhhh!" laughed Daz. "We won the tickets on the radio. Come along for a laugh! Never seen a bigger bunch of dicks collected together in one place!"
"Oh."
"Ahh, didn't mean you of course, love. Just all those poncy dudes."

This bought forth a torrent of comparisons from the bogan boys as to just who was the ponciest guy they had spotted there that night. By this point the shuttle had picked up another couple of stragglers, and we were on our way. I noticed, after a couple of minutes and a few swigs of the rocket fuel that the bogans were passing around, that we seemed to be heading North, away from, not towards to the Harbour Bridge, which was, as far as I was aware, the quickest way to the City.

"Ahh, where's this after-party happening?" I asked Daz.
"A mate of mine's putting on some beers at his place!" he cried. "Free piss!"

Ah. Great.

"Oh, I was actually wanting to get into town."
"Ahh, hell, sorry love. You're probably a bit stuck now. Best bet's probably to grab a lift back with this guy..." he nodded to the cab-driver "...when he heads back, and go from there. Mate!" he yelled at the driver, "are you headed back to Takapuna after this!"

The cabby nodded. Well, that wasn't so bad then. I was probably only down a couple of dollars for the shared fare out, and maybe a ten or twenty on the way back, maybe less if I could get some people from the 'after-party' to head back with me. And these guys were quite entertaining, if a little lacking in the hygiene department.

"Just about there," Daz informed me, as we turned into another dark North Shore street. What is it with the streets up here? Half of them don't seem to have any street lighting. And then there seemed to be waaaay too much lighting. Too much indeed...

"Whooahhahhahahhh!!!" cried the occupants of the shuttle. I fell sideways off my seat as the shuttle swerved to avoid one of the two cars hooning down the road directly towards us, and clonked my head, on the same place I had at the library, on the sliding door. I'd swear we were up on two wheels for a second or two, but then we righted, the shuttle slid to a stop, and a calm descended. A few giggles and exhalations of breath broke the silence.

"Farrrk," said Daz. "That was a bit close. You all right?"
I felt my head. No bleeding. Just a clonk. "Yes."
"I'll fucking kill those boys when I see them," muttered Daz.
"You know those drivers!!" the cabby yelled back at us.
"No!" said Daz. "I meant, if we seem them again."
"You know them! You tell me who they are! The police are on their way!"
"Scarper!" yelled Daz.

The shuttle emptied in a flash. The bogans ran every which way. The cabby, noticing that I wasn't going anywhere, ordered me to stay put. Where the hell was I going to go? Five minutes later a police car arrived, two cops clambered out, and started giving me and the cabby the third degree on what had happened. Well, actually, it was more like the seventh or eighth degree, and they quickly bought my story of hijacked out-of-town girl, and simultaneously managed to calm the cabby down from a raging fury a more manageable grumpy. We gave our fairly short statements to the police, after which the cabby demanded I pay the fare. To placate him, and to keep onside with the police, I gave him 10 of my last remaining 40 dollars. He humphed at me, climbed into his shuttle and drove off, leaving me with the police.

"Want a lift anywhere?" the younger of the two (they were both probably younger than me) asked.
"Can you get me to the City?"
"Auckland? Nope. We can get you back to Takapuna if you want. You can catch a cab from there."
"That'd be great, thanks."

They dropped me by a taxi rank on Takapuna's main street. I climbed into one, on my own.

"Um, the Studio thanks. In Auckland."
"The what? Where?" asked 'Sabdar', the Asian-of-unknown-origin driver.

Where?

"The. Studio. Auckland. It's a bar, I think. A nightclub. Auckland's the big city across the bridge"
All right, I didn't say the Auckland bit, but I thought it.

Still, Sabdar turned and looked at me quizzically, then turned back, picked up his walky-talky thing and spieled off a long non-English rant into it. An equally indecipherable reply came back.

"OK," said Sabdar, "we go."

At least this time we were headed in the right direction. The Harbour Bridge hoved into view, and up and over we went. I watched with trepidation as the meter ticked up over $20, and then, as we headed into town and hit yet another set of lights, $30. It seemed to be taking an awfully long time to make the same journey that had taken 20 minutes on the bus coming the other way. Finally, as the Sky Tower came into close view for about the fifth time in 5 minutes, and the meter ticked up to the $40 mark, it was becoming apparent I wasn't going to be able to pay the fare. We pulled up to our umpteenth set of lights. Steeled by the rocket fuel the bogans had shared with my earlier, as well as the jagemeister and a couple of beers at the awards ceremony, I slipped my heels off, opened the back door, put $20 on the seat, and as Daz would have so eloquently put it, scarpered.

I was probably safe after running 50m down a fairly busy footpath and around two corners, but the adrenalin was still flowing through me and I sprinted on. I kept looking over my shoulder too see if Sabdar was after me, and, it was while doing this that I failed to see one of those annoying waist high street signs someone had planted outside a kebab shop. I went straight into it and clattered to the ground. I didn't bump my head this time, but did graze my shoulder and hip, and I could feel a couple of decent bruises welling up on both my knees where I'd smacked them on the sign.

"Hey! Watch out for my sign!" yelled the guy behind the kebab counter.

"Sorry," I moaned, pulling myself up.
"You OK?" he said, having ascertained that his sign showing no obvious signs of damage.
"Errr, yes, I think so."
"Someone chasing you? You need help?" he enquired.
"Err, no. Just late for something. Actually, do you know where the Studio is?"
"The Studio?"
"It's a nightclub. Venue. Thing."

I showed him the Studio logo that was on the back of the awards ticket. He shook his head.

"Kebab?" he enquired.

Actually, I was pretty hungry. I hadn't eaten anything substantial since lunch, with only a few nibbles at the awards ceremony keeping me going in the interim. I ordered a falafel, and parted with another $7.50. I was down to my last $2.50. Things were getting a bit tight, and I still had to get back to the crash-pad (Noizy's in-laws' place out at Mount Eden) later that night. I tried my luck with directions with another couple of kebab-shop customers with no success. I figured I'd head towards the Sky Tower, get my bearings, and forge on from there.

I looked up, and realised that I was only half a block from the said tower, so I headed off that way, munching my falafel. When I got there, I felt a weird impulse to go in and check out the casino.

I never gamble - it was more of a touristy move, having never set foot inside the place before. But, it was one of those moments, and I couldn't resist just one punt on one of the pokies. Naturally, I won $40 with my first coin. Yes, I should have quite while I was ahead. I had, after all, just won back all the money I'd lost and spent over the course of the night in one hit. But no, at this point my sordid story reaches it's nadir. I spent the next hour playing that stupid pokie, and it robbed me of nearly all my remaining swag. I was back down to my last $10 when I started to feel sick. It was pretty warm in there, and, all of a sudden, I felt that horrible clutch you get in your guts when your stomach says to your brain...

"No two ways about it Natalie. You're going to spew."

I stood and started looking around for a toilet, but the mere process of standing up got the gastric juices flowing, and before I knew it, I was, in some sort of karmic retribution, vomiting all over the pokie machine that had just eaten all my money. In a flash there were two female security-usher-types on either side of me, one of them hurriedly scooping up the won tons, sun-dried tomatoes, falafel and semi-digested cheese, while the other, having figured out I was not an out of control drunkard, guided me to the sick bay.

"Eat something that didn't agree with you, dear?" 'Sally' enquired as she sat me down on the sick bay bed.
"Ugh." I agreed.
"Here, have a few sips on this. It's got some electrolytes in it - should make you feel better."
"Ugh. Thanks. Sorry about ... sorry about that."
"God, we see much worse than that. Don't give it a second thought."

A couple of other people came to check me out, and I was given the all-clear to either return to the gambling floor or head home.

"I think I'll go home," I said. It was about 2am by now, and I had an 8am flight back to Wellington.
"Shall I get you a taxi?" offered Sally. Twice bitten, thrice shy?
"Yes please."

Five minutes later, Sally escorted me out to a waiting taxi, gave the driver instructions on where he was to take me, and within 10 minutes I was back at Noizy's in-laws, curled up under a sleeping bag on the couch. Don't even ask about the flight home the next morning. Ugh.

Late night schmoozing with celebs? I think I'll stick to the librarianship.

previously: part 1

I considered ducking behind the pile of books I was sorting out the back in Returns, but I was too slow. Mrs Oolong was upon me before I could take refuge.

"Natalie, are you busy?"

Was she blind? I looked at the teetering pile of recently (and not-so-recently) returned books that needed to be sorted and trolleyed. Mrs Oolong totally failed to take the hint.

"Err, no, not really."
"I shan't hold you up. Just a quick question. How do I convert an Acrobat file back into a Word document?"
"Um, you can't. Once it's been converted, that's pretty much it. It's a one-way process."

Her face literally went white. Well, whiter. She's a very white lady.

"Surely not."
I nodded.
"You're sure?"
"Well, you can cut and paste the text back into Word, and screen-grab any graphics you might have in there. Although I assume..."
"So you can get it all back?"

Tread carefully, Natalie...

"Like I was saying, the text is still there. And you can, assuming you haven't published your file with any odd security settings, cut and paste that text back into Word. You'll just have to reformat the whole thing again."

Again, Mrs Oolong pulled out her 'It's all your fault voice'...

"Well, I suppose that's better than nothing," she huffed. "Cut and paste you say?"
"Yes."

She whirled and whisked out of the room. Inevitably, ten minutes later the Returns work-room phone went. My assistance was required upstairs.

"Natalie," she snapped as I entered her office, "I cannot for the life of me cut and paste the text of my proposal back into Word."

I leaned over her shoulder, and, with one hand: CTRL-A, CTRL-C, ALT-TAB to Word, and CTRL-V. Voila.

"Oh, that was quick. How did you do that?"

Snip yet another five minute explanation of basic short-cut key usage here, which I'm sure will be instantly forgotten the moment I walk out the door. It was at the end of my tutorial when it finally occurred to me...

"Mrs Oolong, I'm assuming you've deleted the proposal that you're trying to recreate here?"
"Yes. Of course, I assumed I'd be able to edit the Acrobat version. So I just deleted it once I'd finished with it. It's always the way though, Mrs Darjeeling [the Big Chief Librarian] wanted some revisions made before we sent it off, so now I've got to reformat all this..."

She gestured at the plainly unformatted text I'd just dumped into Word for her.

"...by the end of today."
"When did you delete the Word file?"
"Yesterday."
"Have you emptied your recycle bin since then?"
"Have I what?"

Bingo. I opened her recycle bin, and discovered, of course, that Mrs Oolong has never emptied it. She had a couple of gigs of files in there, dating back to the start of 2002, which is when, as far as I'm aware, the senior staff last got all their PCs updated. Her Word version of her proposal was at the top. I restored it and opened it for her.

"There you go," I chirped.

Mrs Oolong looked suitably astonished, and would, I suspect, have hugged me if she wasn't such a prim and proper prude.

I headed back down to Returns, another favour for a senior staff member notched into my belt.

As my favourite "liberry" blogger pointed out recently, other people's IT struggles just never get old.

Noizyboy, who has been to the last three b.net awards on the strength of his online schmoozing with NZ music industry big-wigs, this year managed to get both he and me tickets to this year's awards. He just asked the organisers, and they coughed up!

(The b.net awards, for you non-NZers reading this, are the 'alternative' NZ music awards organised by what used to be the student radio stations, but which are now a mostly commercial nationwide radio network.)

So, we took Friday off work to get ourselves up to Auckland and to the event itself, which, for some reason that eludes most everyone, is traditionally held outside the Auckland CBD, on the North Shore, at Takapuna's Bruce Mason Centre.

Noizy, having had some perilous transport issues at previous ceremonies, insisted we get there 'nice and early'. Three hours early, it turned out. Auckland has transport woes? Our bus whizzed from central Auckland to Takapuna across the bridge in less than 20 minutes. After getting our bearings and scoping out just where the Bruce Mason Centre was, we had over two and a half hours to burn. We went for a quick walk around the Takapuna shops, and, before I could even say "Let's go for a walk on the beach", Noizy had spotted a sports bar, and declared his intention to go in and watch whatever was on. I ventured in the door with him, but was repelled by the wall of cigarette smoke, so left him to it, and strolled down towards the waterfront, where, I had been told, there was a lovely beach.

On the way there, I spotted the Takapuna Public Library. And it was still open! There's nothing I love more than scoping out a foreign library, so I went in.

And it was dead. I was literally the only patron in there. I gave myself the quick tour, taking particular note of their signage - a particular hobby-horse of mine - and giving them a mental tick for their (mildly) informative local elections display. Upstairs in the magazines section, I couldn't find one single mag I wanted to read. It was the end of the week, I suppose, and all the good stuff would have been long gone, so I settled with a six month old Vogue, and had a couple of reference books lined up for perusing, when a gentle East European accent flitted into my ear...

"Excuse me Miss, ve are closing, you vill haff to leaf."

Oooh, their security guard was quite tasty indeed, in a slightly-better-looking-than-Tim-from-The-Office way.

"I thought you closed at 7.30?"
"No miss. 5.30 on Friday. 8.30 on Monday and Thursday."

Where the hell had I got 7.30 from? Anyway...

"Oh, sorry, I'll be off then."
"Zis way miss."

He beckoned me to follow him down the steps. Somehow I had missed the rest of the staff shutting up shop, so when we got downstairs, I saw that the main gates had been closed, and there was nary a librarian to be seen anywhere. Foreign Tim was ushering me towards a side-door, and in the dim light of the powered-down library he looked even more handsome. I was on the verge of asking him for a drink somewhere after he finished locking up, but then I clonked my head on the door, which had failed to open when I put my shoulder to it. I had missed the fact it had a door release button. Foreign Tim kindly pointed at the red button in the wall to the right of the door, with only a slight hint of a smile on his lips, and I let myself into the Takapuna night, alone, cheeks burning bright red, and nursing a bump on my temple.

I continued on my way down to the beach - still with an hour and a half to burn. Takapuna Beach is indeed very nice. I strolled up and down it's sandy shore, breathing in the brisk sea breeze, taken aback, as always, by just how fantastic Mt Rangitoto looks perched in the middle of the harbour like that. I was so enraptured with it that I totally failed to notice a giant kite screaming down the beach directly towards me at about 60km/h. It was attached by a couple of 50m guide-wires to a guy on a surfboard, who had presumably seen my predicament, and managed to pull up the kite before it ploughed into me, or, worse, decapitated me with the guide-wires. I had thrown myself into the sand regardless, and came up with what I hoped was a fury in my eyes, but the offending kite-surfer was already half a kilometre down the beach, and much further out to sea.

There were actually three of these high-speed wind bogans zipping up and down the coastline, and there must have been a good 30 or 40 people on the beach at any given moment. I wondered if there ever were any collisions or decapitations of the sort that had nearly happened to me. Surely. I waited and watched for a few minutes, and, despite a couple of semi-close calls, my thirst for bloodlust went unsated. Still, it wasn't for lack of opportunity - the beach was like a thoroughfare with a steady stream of joggers and walkers making their way past me. I can go for a walk around the south coast of Wellington on a pleasant evening and maybe have to walk past a dozen people in total.

God, away from home for a half a day and homesick already...

It was starting to get cold and dark, so I headed back into town to find somewhere warm to hunker down. I considered trying to find Noizy at his sports bar, but the mere thought of a smoky blokey pub on a Friday evening was enough to put paid to that thought. There were a few nice looking bars down the road a bit, so I picked the warmest looking one, headed in, took a bar stool with a view of the footpath, and sat on a gin and tonic for a good hour or so, only having to rebut one drunken approach by a heartily unattractive suitboy. Ugh.

I had to laugh when one young bunch of lads wandered by a few minutes before the awards started. They looked like real fanboys, dressed to the retro-nines and with suitable late 60s scruffy hair-dos. They looked like they'd just finished school and had decided to dress up like their favourite British Invasion band of yesteryear and head down to the Awards for a laugh. I surreptitiously followed them down to the Bruce Mason Centre to see if my suspicions had any foundation in reality. They were waved in with nary a second glance from security, and were immediately swarmed upon by a swarm of Auckland's hipsters and scenesters. Aha! Turns out they were the Checks, hot young things on the Auckland music circuit right now, and who are indeed fresh out of high school. So cute.

In fact, of course, the whole place was crawling with NZ music and entertainment celebs. I developed a massive case of shrinking violet, and rather than introducing myself to a few of the people I had at least had some email correspondence with, sat on a couch on my own and watched the movers and shakers, err, moving and shaking.

The bell rang to alert everyone to move into the auditorium for the ceremonies, at which point I finally caught up with Noizy, who had been comparing young dad notes with his childhood friend, and now musician-producer extraordinaire Dale Cotton. Turns out we were out separate tables anyway, he being thrown right down the back, and me just a bit in front of him with a bunch of extraordinarily befrocked girls that put my knickerbockers and blouse combo to shame. They were all very accommodating to the out-of-town girl though, and having downed the complimentary Jagermeister and Red Bulls we were in good spirits for the events to come.

Which were all a bit tame, to tell the truth. The live acts, with the exception of two-piece electro-rock outfit The Fanatics didn't exactly light my fire. The Fanatics, in fact, were great, although I'm pleased I was situated as far back as I was when the lead singer started hurling water and beer bottle about the place and then leapt onto one of the VIP tables at the front.

And the various awards and acceptance speeches were all a bit ho-hum - a bit like any Awards ceremony you see on the telly I suppose. Any sort of suspense was also removed by the girls I was sitting with, who managed predicted every single winner before the official announcement was made. I asked them: "How did you know? Are you the vote-counters or something?" They laughed: "It's just obvious, isn't it?" Apparently so. They did get one wrong, I must admit, the best compilation award, which went not to Return of the Boomschwack, but A Low Hum, which brought a tremendous whoop from behind me, as Noizy knows the publisher of the compilation/magazine Blink (yes, I live in a world of boys who use their website usernames in real life) quite well.

Before I knew it, the ceremony was over, and the assembled glitterati started moving in dribs and drabs to the fleet of shuttles and taxis (and one ostentatious limo for the hip-hop label boys) that had gathered outside. Noizy informed me he was feeling sick and tired, and wanted to just go and crash, and had scored a lift with the lovely Lil Chief Records crew, leaving me at something of a loose end. I looked around, wondering just how I was going to get back into town on my limited funds.

Actually, what happened after that is worthy of a whole other story. Perhaps for another day.

as such...

Citizen Bus Driver has (presumably) had his eyesight fixed, for he was back at the helm last night, cheerfully clipping ten-trips, happily instructing the throng to 'move to the back of the bus', and merrily admonishing kids for not giving up their seats for their elders.

Again, we got to the Basin Reserve gridlock. Again, a hush fell over the bus as the electric trolley-bus's engine whirred to a halt. And, yes, again, he took his chance to voice his concerns over health sector issues...

"Just a quick word to you all!" he shouted back to his captive audience. "We're coming up to our public hospital, a place where our lovely nurses toil day and night providing care for the unwell and needy. Our nurses are currently negotiating for a fair pay-rate. It appears the powers-that-be aren't willing to meet their terms, and it is possible that there may be some strike action in the future to force the paymaster's hands. I urge you all to support the nurse's actions, and to write to your local MP to voice your approval for their cause. Our nurse's are nothing short of angel's in uniforms, and I think any pay-rise is too small - which is just my opinion, course - but they should be getting at least what they ask for. Thank you for listening!"

I may have paraphrased there a bit - I was standing up and unable to get my pen and notebook from out of my bag - but that was the general gist of his speech.

And I assume the angel nurse's he spoke of helped him recover his eye-sight properly, as we made it all the way to my stop without hitting one parked car.

Anyway, his speech got me feeling all political. 'Power to my underpaid professionally-trained sisters!' I thought, wondering if a librarian's strike might be on the cards to get our pay-rates up?

Mr Assam - the Keeper of the Keys - showed me down to the room in the basement where the maps are kept. I have christened the basketball court sized room, naturally, the Dungeon. The concrete lined room is deep in the bowels of the building, and is where, as far as I can tell, every broken chair, surplus bit of shelving and defunct dot-matrix printer has come to await some unknown fate.

It is also the temporary home of the maps' drawers - half a dozen two metre wide, one metre high, one metre deep steel boxes, each with half a dozen sliding trays inside of which are contained several hundred maps of all different sorts and shapes. Well, rectangular or square shaped, but all different sorts, at least. Topographic, political, relief, a bewildering array of geologic and climatic maps, and, my favourites, the ones with lots of lines and numbers, but no reference anywhere on them as to what sort of map they actually are, or, in some cases, what part of the world they are actually representing. Say hello to my 'miscellaneous' category.

So, yes, I've taken the job. The Dungeon is great. For a big concrete room, it's amazingly warm, so much so that after about five minutes of exertion - pulling out maps and trying to arrange them on the two big tables I've also been supplied with to ease the workflow - I'm working up a decent sweat. I was positively whifftacular after a couple of hours of map-shuffling wearing my jeans and a long-sleeved T last week, so this week I'm going prepared with my favourite old summer frock. And that's the other great thing, I've got the place to myself, so not only can I wear what I want, I can sing along to my discman at top volume. Brilliant. The freedom to do so, that is, not the actual singing, which, despite being heavily reverbed thanks to the concrete walls, still fails the 'in-tune' test. Not that I have to listen to myself with my discman set to max volume. And they even put in a networked PC for me so I can access and update the catalogue, which also means, phew, I'm internet-connected.

If it wasn't for the maps themselves, which currently have no rhyme nor reason applied to their organisation, the situation would just about be perfect. As it is, there's two, and sometimes three copies of every map: a 'true original', the library copy, and a recently made copy. This was what kicked off the whole maps re-organisation, apparently. Someone decided the library needed to copy all the high-usage maps which were slowly disintegrating after years of use, laminate the copies so they'd have a longer lifespan, and store the older copies as masters should we ever need to do the copy/laminate process again. Except, of course, the 'originals' weren't always the original, with the real originals being stashed away in safe storage off-site somewhere. Once this was discovered, the real originals were pulled in from off-site and got added to the whole mass so they could make the copies from them, rather than the dog-eared public copies. But then it was discovered that the budget wasn't going to stretch to laminating all the maps we wanted to laminate, so someone had to figure out what the most high-usage maps were (these would be the ones, I imagine, that were falling apart the most), and to laminate just those. Anyway, it turns out most of the maps did get copied, and some of those copies got laminated, but then they all got dumped back into their current storage space without any thought to labeling the various versions for what they were. Or even keeping the copies and originals together. Enter Me.

And with all this copying going on, what of copyright? I asked Mrs Kambaa. She rolled her eyes. "Don't even ask," she said. I didn't want to be a silent partner in some shadowy Cataloguing Department conspiracy, so I bought it up with my boss, Mrs Liddesdale, who told me there had been some agreement with the map-makers of yore that they would allow a copy for library use so the publishers themselves could use the library archives as a kind of back-up for their own archiving purposes. Apparently this agreement has never been reviewed, and the current spate of copying got underway without anyone even considering the issue. Ahhh, bureaucracy. I do love being at the bottom of the chain in situations like this, flitting around the Dungeon barefoot in my summer dress, singing Björk tunes at the top of my voice, perusing the latest 'librarian style' fashions on the web. Bliss. The Maps of Victory are mine!

[thanks to Damian of Cracker for the title of this post]

I suspect Mrs Kambaa has gleaned my little subterfuge relating to my non-working co-worker down in the cataloguing dungeon. We had this little encounter the other day...

I'm busily surfing away, delaying the cataloguing of a particularly tedious religious essays collection. The soft sound of footsteps on the library's carpet floor reaches my ears (I long ago learnt the perils of listening to my discman while slacking off, and have fine-tuned my hearing to recognise the various footfalls of all my superior's who might potentially frown upon my extra-curricular surfing during work hours). I alt-tab back to the cataloguing interface.

"Natalie, could I see you in my office please?"
"Of course." I follow Mrs Kambaa back to her office. It's a dark and gloomy little office, but immaculately laid out. Professional cataloguers are a tidy bunch.
"Shut the door please."

Ohhhh: close the door! Trouble's brewing. I quickly check my clothes for any unsightly stains or plain old sartorial extravagance, the main cause for previous 'close the door' events in my library past. I'm pretty sure though, of what's to come, and that I have nothing to fear. My speculation is proven right...

"Umm, Natalie, your co-worker, Norma, what do you think of her performance over the last couple of weeks?"
"Well, uh, I honestly don't know. I suppose she's getting things done. It's a bit hard to tell when we never actually work at the same time together."
"Yes. Well, I've noticed you've started noting which of the tasks on the worksheet you're completing, and, from what I can tell, you're doing virtually all the work being put your collective way at the moment."

Yes!
"Really? I hadn't noticed."

Mrs Kambaa smiled. I suspect, in retrospect, that she knew exactly what I was up to. Perhaps she'd been ahead of the game the entire time?

"Well, yes. And I appreciate your efforts in keeping the throughput at a good level. Your work has been admirable, in fact. And as such, I've talked with Mrs Liddesdale [my actual boss], and we've decided that, should you agree, to give you a special project. Our maps collection is in serious need of organisation, and both she and I think you'd be an excellent candidate to knock it into shape. You'd be removed from straight cataloguing duties, and we'd be asking Norma to fill to cover your hours while you're completing this project."

This wasn't quite how I'd envisaged things working out, but I could see the sense in it. Norma would now have no-one to rely upon to do her work, and my 'admirable' work ethic could be put to use elsewhere. Maps though? I had no idea.

"Um, that sounds great. Thank you. I actually really love maps, it sounds like a great project..." (God I'm terrible) "How long do you think it will take?"
"We've blocked out a month of work using your current secondment hours. It may take longer of course, but we'll be reviewing progress on a weekly basis, and will re-schedule as required. I take it that you're keen then?"
"Well it does sound interesting. And I'm always keen to tackle new tasks." (Shameless, really.) "When would I be starting?"
"As soon as you want. Of course, you don't have to commit right now. I'll get Mr Assam to show you around the maps room in the basement, and you can take a look at the collection. If you decide you're still keen, we'll make the necessary arrangements, and you can get under way."
"Great."

Or so I thought. Continue reading 'Maps' here...