bizgirl

Yes, I have been dooced. Really.

To add to my woe, my home internet connection has been cut off - my automatic payment bounced due to lack of funds. I'm just quickly dropping this post in from one of the internet terminals at work. After this, I'll be walking out of the library, never to return as a paid employee.

I'll post the full story as soon as I find internet access again.

Oh, and Merry Christmas to you all!

Rather than take the risk of getting to within a couple of days of Christmas without having bought anyone presents, and then realising I had no money to do so, this year I resolved to do all my shopping the day after my pay went through, so I wouldn't fritter it away over the course of the next fortnight on frivolities like food and phone-bills.

I went the Warehouse on Tory Street to stock up on cheap imports for random distribution to my nearest-and-dearest on the holy day. My normal plan of buying a delightfully thoughtful book for each of those close to me had been sunk by a lack of funds, even buoyed by my recent pay-day. The Warehouse, for my non-Australasian readers, is a big barn retailer, similar, I assume, to things like Wal-Mart in the USA. Mass-produced crap, basically.

After maybe two hours of aimless wandering from aisle-to-aisle, picking things up, wandering a bit more, picking up something else, abandoning one of my earlier, now superceded finds by hiding it in the Italian-shampoo section, I had completed my Christmas shopping. I went to the check-out. There was no-one in front of me, I waltzed to the front. The red-uniformed check-out drone scanned my items, one-by-one, until the last - a screwdriver set I thought noizyboy might like.

"Do you have the sticker or bar-code for this?" asked the drone.
"Umm, no, I just grabbed it like that off the shelf."
"Price check aisle two," droned the drone into his mic. There was a corresponding, but considerably more indecipherable garble from the store's in-house PA system.

I looked around. There was no immediate action from either of the two staff I could see stationed at the information desk. Eventually, one of them caught the eye of my drone, and he motioned her over.

"Screwdriver set, don't know how much," said my drone to the price-checker, who, from the frown chiseled into her brow, wasn't getting a lot of job satisfaction today.

They both looked me up and down. Obviously I had committed some sort of horrendous shopping faux pas.

"All right," she moaned, waddling off and disappearing around an aisle.

"Er, I might just serve this gentlemen?" the drone half-asked, half-informed me, indicating the middle-aged guy holding a couple of kiddy t-shirts, a wetsuit and some knickknacks behind me.
"Oh, sure," I said, smiling at the guy, standing aside and moving to stand behind him, at the new end of the queue.

Suddenly, a woman laden with t-shirts, swimsuits and various other items of clothing swooped past me, and dumped her wares on the counter.

"Just add these, dear, and I just need to grab..."

Something else, presumably, because she was gone by the time either her partner or I could hear. The drone started scanning the clothes that were sprawled around the checkout counter. Each piece of clothing had to have its hanger removed, its anti-theft bolt unclipped, the barcode scanned, and then get folded, whereupon it was placed into a bag. This process took about half a minute per item - longer when the drone couldn't find anti-theft bolt or price-tag.

The price-checker arrived after a few minutes and had a brief discussion with the drone about the screwdriver set. Standing a bit further from the checkout, I couldn't quite catch what was said, but they held up the box, and the price-checker pointed to something on the underside of the casing. The drone nodded, and the price-checker departed. Then the clothes-hording women returned, this time with about two dozen plastic-crap toys which got added to the pile of clothes that the drone was slowly working his way through. Now content with her gifts haul, the woman started to prattle on loudly to her partner about plans for their Christmas Day festivities, which, as far as I could tell, involved getting her partner's family drunk on the cheap white wine they'd stocked up on, so her side of the family could indulge in the good stuff later on.

I would have just called it quits and joined another queue, but the drone still had all my screwdriver set and all my other gifts stashed behind the counter, and I didn't want to run the risk of another price-check delay.

Eventually, probably half an hour later, the clothes-horder and her partner collected their now paid-for shopping and departed. I stepped up to the counter.

"Ah right," said the drone, "the screwdriver set. Let's see..."

He held up the case and looked at it. There were some numbers on the bottom of the case that presumably had some relevance to our dilemma, and he typed them into his till.

"Oh, that's not right," he said.

I peeked around - the screen was showing the details for a 5-piece pots and pan set.

"Price check aisle two," droned the drone into his mic, again. And again there was the wait while the price-checker took her own good time to make her way over to us.

"It's not that number," said the drone.
"It's not?" asked the price-checker.
"No."
"Give it to me," said the price-checker.

It was handed over, and she wandered away back to the information desk to consult with the other staff member on duty there. They huddled over a computer, stabbing at keys and scratching their heads at the resulting output.

"If I might...?" asked the drone, gesturing to a couple behind me, who had a kit-set study desk precariously balanced in their trolley.

This couple looked pretty set to go, and with only the one item in their trolley, retreating behind them was a risk I was willing to take. But (ah, yes, you saw that 'but' coming, didn't you?) then...

"That'll be $119.95," said the drone.
"Oh no, " said the man, "it's on special. $80."
"I don't think so," said the drone, doubt etched into his voice.
"I am certain," said the man.

The woman looked less certain, and rolled her eyes at me. And then the inevitable call came...

"Price check, aisle two."

It seemed that the information staff of two were too engrossed in their task of trying to figure out the price of the screwdriver set, to come over, so the checkout drone asked the guy if he could just show him where he had got the desk from. The couple and the drone walked off together, leaving me alone at the checkout. I was sorely tempted just to go behind the counter, grab my bag, forget about the screwdrivers and do a runner. The large and scary looking security guy planted by the door persuaded me this might not be the best plan of action. After another interminable wait, the drone and the desk-buyers returned. The desk hadn't been on special. He grudgingly paid full-price, and I retook my place at the front of the line.

"Ah, right, screwdriver set," said the drone. He went off to the information desk to see if they'd had any luck. After another couple minutes of waiting, where I watched all three staff now involved in the search questioning each other and the computer about the problem at hand, they eventually seemed to come up with something. The drone returned.

"$4.95," he said.

He rang up the price manually, and popped it into the bag with my other acquisitions.

"Have a nice Christmas," he said.
"You too," I replied.

The Library Staff Christmas Party was, for some obscure reason, on Monday night. Normally I'd have bowed out early, but the opportunity to make the most of the free wine and food was too much to resist, as I'd consumed the last of my home supplies late on Sunday afternoon, and was still a couple of days short of getting my next pay-packet. My stomach had been growling all day, despite my best efforts to sate it during my breaks with some powder-heavy cups of Milo and a bag of lollies IOUed from the honesty food tray.

The Library had hired a cafe around the corner to host and cater the event, and I was the first one in the door at the official start time of 5:30pm, swooping on the club sandwiches and savoury pastries they had arranged on a table in the corner. Inspired by my favourite UK bloggers JonnyB and Unlucky Man, I had attended in pseudo-dress up, wearing a santa hat, a liberal helping of my glitter blusher, and the best combination of red and white clothes I could find.

Next to arrive was Mrs Oolong, who walked in the door, spotted me, then stopped and retreated back out the door and lit up a cigarette. Or maybe she'd come in and remembered the new smokefree workplaces law. Either way, an undoubtedly chilly social situation had been averted, and I was left on my own to chow down another handful of pastries, and to start making some headway into the several bottles of sauvignon blanc that had been uncorked on another table.

Josh arrived shortly afterwards, our weekend fracas having been smoothed over when he came over on Sunday night to pick up his laptop, bearing a bottle of wine and a new French film from Aro Video as his olive branch. Obviously, we'd made up.

Josh, a smoker himself, eventually had to head outside to light up as well, and, having established him as my buffer from having to tell any more blogging stories for the evening, I traipsed out behind him. We stood in a doorway down the footpath a way, gleefully lambasting the fashion sense of our fellow librarians, most of whom, presumably, had 'dressed up' (in a flash, as opposed to fancy way) for the big event. The new smoking rules also meant that at least two-thirds of the staff attending, either through their own habits or social obligations with their smoking friends, were sitting at the tables outside on the footpath. And now, having taken all those up, they were now spilling out down the street, causing anyone passing by to play an impromptu game of dodge-the-drunk-librarian. One of those who found themselves careering from elbow-swinging power-suited information professional to the next was Artemis.

"Artemis!" I shouted.

He looked around, spotted me amongst the boisterous librarians crowding onto the footpath, and came over.

"Natalie, hello, how are you? Feeling better?"
"Yes thank you. And you?"
"Excellent. Why are you dressed up like one of the White Stripes?"
"Um, it's actually a Christmas theme thing. White and red? Like Father Christmas?"

I pointed at the hat. Artemis just looked at me, bemused.

"Anyway," I chirped, "Artemis, this is Josh. Josh, Artemis."
"The Artemis?" Josh blurted.
"As if there would be another?" said Artemis, barely concealing a sneer from his lips.

This was great. I could nearly see the testosterone bubbling up underneath the boys' skin.

"And you would be the Josh, I assume?"
"Err, yes."
"You're much shorter than I imagined."
"You're much older than I imagined. How old are you?"
"You should ask Natalie. She is the fount of all knowledge."

Josh looked at me. I told him.

"And you Josh, " Artemis continued, "wrong side of thirty yet?"
"I'm twenty-seven."
"You'd never guess. And you're still a librarian?"
"Yes."

Artemis snorted: this was obviously the most amusing thing he'd heard all day. Josh looked at me, eyebrows raised high, presumably looking for some sort of support, but I shrugged noncommittally and asked Artemis if he might like a drink.

"Pinot gris if it's available."
"I meant a juice or something Artemis. I'm not getting alcohol for someone still in school uniform."
"Orange juice would be fine, thank you."

When I came back, Artemis was gone.

"Where'd he go?" I asked Josh.
"Don't know. Just said he had to leave. Said he'd catch up with you soon."
"You didn't give him any stick, did you?"
"Me? To him?"
"Yes."
"No. He just bludged a fag, said his farewell and left."

Artemis's departure left me feeling a little blue, but nothing a few more wines and a sneaky smoke with Josh couldn't fix. Some bbq kebabs appeared from somewhere, and, despite my ongoing semi-vegetarian status, I devoured about four of the foot-long meat sticks, and followed that effort up with a good helping of the marinated chicken nibbles that had also appeared. I was working under the assumption that Tuesday was going to be food-free zone, so had to stock up to make it through to pay-day on Wednesday.

Now suitably tipsy, I made the mistake of wandering too far from Josh and getting into a conversation with Tam, one of the other junior librarians. She asked about my blog. When I've had too much to drink I do tend to rabbit on a bit, so, in this particular instance, I gave her the story on what I had just been writing about, which was the whole checking-out-Josh's-laptop story. Out it splurged in its unedited, uncensored verbal format. Tam listened to it all intently, eyes wide.

Oddly enough, the four kebabs and most of everything else I had put into my stomach over the last couple of hours also came splurging out into one of the women's toilets about five minutes later. Something - presumably one of the meats, the chicken being the likely culprit - hadn't agreed with my stomach, so all my attempts at stocking up on nutrients and hearty goodness for the next day had been for naught. After three good gut-wrenching projectile vomits, I rested my face on the nice cool porcelain of the loo, and examined the mass of semi-digested sludge floating in the toilet, some of which was now clinging to my santa hat, which had fallen in during one particularly energetic heave. I gingerly fished out the hat, folded it into as small a wad as I could manage, and pushed it into the sanitary pad disposal unit.

Having expelled a good deal of the alcohol and all of the food I had imbibed already that evening, I felt surprisingly alert and energetic, so returned to the party, grabbing a fresh wine on the way to cleanse my palate.

Josh beckoned me over, urgently.

"What did you tell Tam?"
"Errr."
"You told her about what you found on my laptop didn't you?"
"Err, yes."
"And now everyone knows!"
"Surely not."

But, surely yes. The peer-to-peer librarian networking system was in full alcohol-fuelled flight, and furtive glances were being cast our way from all over the room. Josh made some further remonstrations to me about my inability to keep even the most personal of information private, and then, for the second time in three days, stormed off.

How tiresome. I was completely nonplussed, and refused to go after him. If he doesn't want people knowing about his non-library 'collections', then he shouldn't make them in the first place, should he? Seems a fairly simple way to approach life, to me.

I was slogging my way through about section F of the gargantuan Saturday edition of the Dominion Post, when I flicked over a page to be startled by a big photo of myself standing amongst the book-shelves at the Library, peering coyly over my glasses from behind Vikram Chanda's book Love and Longing in Bombay (which I had randomly pulled from the shelves as a prop to hide behind).

It was from a photo-shoot and interview I'd done with the Dom a fortnight ago, which I had never quite believed would make it to print, so flimsy did my story really seem when said out loud. When it didn't make the following weekend edition or the IT pages on Monday, I had assumed the media moment had passed. Turns out my story was flimsy, because the reporter had spent the rest of her time talking to fellow NetGuide Best Personal Blog finalists Russell Brown and David Farrar whose serious non-blogosphere credentials gave the story some much needed gravitas. Reading my own story and quotes was an exercise in teeth-clenching mortification. Did I really sound so ... vapid, when I spoke out loud?

"It wouldn't bother me too much if people didn't read it, I hadn't thought about it too much."
"It's nice to get recognition, but, on the flipside, if people stopped reading it tomorrow, I'd probably still do it."

Ugh. From this point on I'm only doing written interviews. I looked up from my paper, took a soothing sip from my traditional Saturday morning latte, which I had managed to purchase after a manic stray coin-finding mission that had lasted most of the morning, and left me with all of six dollars and fifty cents to last until pay day. I had already spent half of it on my caffeine addiction, and I knew the second half was destined to go the same way tomorrow morning. As I drank, I surveyed the people at the tables clustered around me.

I was at Eva Dixon's, the cafe by the Wellington Zoo, just down the road from my flat in Newtown. Eva Dixon's had, until earlier this year, been situated on the corner of Eva and Dixon streets in town, and was a smoky little hang-out accessible through a hole in the wall and up a super-tight flight of stairs into a smoky and small corner room where the uber-chic central city crowd were, on occasion, known to hang out. For cafe management reasons not known to me, the cool city coffee-shop closed and was then reincarnated out by the zoo, with the same name, but as a baby-friendly, kids-menu, familys-welcome type establishment. Still, they continued to make one of the best coffees in the city, and, oddly enough, it seems the glitterati of Wellington are still spotted at Eva Dixon's, despite it being so remote.

Today, for example, I found myself exchanging a second glance with local-born rock god Jon Toogood, who, up until that moment, I wasn't even aware was in New Zealand, his band having been based overseas for upwards of a decade or so. In fact, there were a couple of the other Shihad boys there as well, so they were presumably back visiting family, or recording, or both. I had taken a quick second look because, well, not only is he a skinny white-boy rock god, he is also a skinny white-boy rock god whose social circles I'm not entirely removed from. A prime candidate for further investigation should the chance ever arise*. I then noticed he had his paper open on the page that featured the article about me, and that he was looking at it, and then back up at me. The dawn of recognition started to light up his face.

I spun in my chair and buried myself in the paper again. I had been recognised by a famous person; what was the world coming to? As I dithered between leaping up and introducing myself, and just playing it cool and letting him come to me, I was completely distracted by an even more unlikely sight: the Brewer's woman - the one who had held me up in Reference the day before. She looked away when I caught her eye, but I could see that she, too, had the paper open on the incriminating page.

That was it. I drained my latte, quickly pulled the blog article from the cafe's copy of the paper, and fled home, checking behind me all the way to make sure Mrs Brewers wasn't following me. She wasn't, but I locked the door upon getting home anyway, and just about jumped out of my skin when there was a knock at the door about ten minutes later. I peeked through the letterbox. It was only Josh.

He had made me a concilatory compilation CD for me during the week, and had now come around with a bag chocka-fill of CDs, a couple of spindles of CDRs, a a few dozen empty jewel cases, and a CD labelling kit so I could make full copies of anything that had taken my fancy.

Ahhh, the old wooing tricks work the best on me. I let him in, and we set up shop in the lounge. I picked out my favourites and we spent an industrious afternoon burning and labelling my 'Best of 2004' collection. We did it in a typically librarianish way - not only did we copy the CDs, but Josh took the time to find, download and print-out as much of the original artwork as he could, while I carefully updated my own database of CDs on my laptop, making mp3 copies of each album as well, rating them, adding genre tags, the whole works. We then had a stupid fight triggered off by a minor disagreement over classification systems (and his disregard thereof), and he left in a huff, leaving his laptop behind. And if you leave your laptop lying around in someone else's house, you're asking for trouble in my opinion. Yes, I had good look - I know I shouldn't have - but it was on, and well, temptation and all.

And it was very enlightening.

[ * A quick google leads me to discover that Jon is married. Meh. ]

Finally, finally, I got home from the library on Friday night, pulled my Personnel File out of my bag, and hunkered down in a beanbag for some serious analysis.

After about 10 minutes, something became horribly clear to me - I didn't have the context to decipher what it was I was holding. For starters, it was all colour-coded, and my photocopies were in black and white. At the top right of each set of documents were, on my copies, a series of one, two or three small grey dots. I could recall from my photocopying session at lunch time that there had been a few different colours - blue, red, orange, green, blue - and each one no doubt held some important meta information as to the content that it was attached to.

All my performance appraisals, for example, had two dots on them. My original letter of application had three, and my aptitude test had two. The many (so many) pages of my blog that had been printed out each had between one and four. And, in one case, there were five grey dots of differing shades bustling for space in the top corner, screaming out their incriminations in a language I couldn't understand. I spent an unfruitful hour or arranging and re-arranging the various pages on the floor of the lounge, trying to discern the shades of grey from each other, and decide which ones were 'good', which 'bad', and to glean any nuance from the remainder. It was to no avail, like one of those terrible IQ and logic puzzles I sometimes feel compelled to do online, which invariably involve dots, grids, sequences thereof, and what comes next. I never know what comes next.

So I tried to make some sense of the other clues. At least three different people had made a few notes in the margins of the blog entries. I figured Mrs Darjeeling and my immediate boss, Mrs Liddesdale were responsible for two of the sets I could find, but who was the third? Most of the notes were just small ticks and question marks scrawled in the margins, but I could plainly make out in Mrs Liddesdale hand, on this entry, the words 'Made up'. In Mrs Darjeeling's beautiful cursive script on another entry was the note: 'Substantiated, irrelevant.' The unknown hand had written on this entry: 'Policy should be reviewed'.

Even re-reading my performance reviews, of which I was always provided a copy anyway, usually to be thrown into a dusty archive box at the back of my cupboard after a quick read-through of the usual platitudes, was now an exercise in unbridled paranoia. Just how much did Mrs Liddesdale know when she wrote '...can be distracted a little too easily'? What did she mean, when, only three months ago, her recommendations included, '...some thought to your career, considering you probably won't want to be doing what you're doing now in the long term.' At the time I thought she meant the cataloguing shift I had been doing, but maybe she meant librarianship in general.

The back-breaker was the cross-referencing. This was the easiest to decipher, but the most difficult to comes to terms with. Down the margins, often near a clustering of question and exclamation marks, another sticker had been affixed, with a three letter/three number code...

OOL103
NON088
FAR281

Oolong. Nonsuch. Farnum. There were others, too, some of which were referred to people or other files I couldn't recognise: TYR013, PER323, TUL592. I could see from my own files that each section, as well as being colour-coded, was also numbered. My file was up to 062. Presumably then, in other people's files, not open to be perused by me, was information relevant to the sections that had been tagged. Obvious things like this, this, and this. But also less 'controversial' (to the library, anyway) things like this and this.

It was all too much. I threw the folder to the floor, poured a big glass of wine, drank it, then another one, and felt miserable. Despite the fact there was nothing particularly incriminating in the file that I hadn't aleady discussed with Mrs Darjeeling, I still felt there was sword hanging over me. Maybe another talk with her on Monday might help me understand where I stood. Maybe the weekend break would give me a chance to recover from this terrible cold, and help me get gain clarity on what I had seen in my file. Maybe I'd win Lotto on Saturday night, and the whole situation would become moot.

Or maybe not.

Normally, when I finish work at the library I've got time to walk a up a couple of blocks to one of the first stops on my bus route home. This ensures I beat the rush at the more heavily populated stops near the library, and that I get a seat for the trip home, with the corresponding benefit of the chance to do some reading on the bus. After my closing up shift on Friday, however, I didn't manage to get out the door until twenty past, and saw a bus shoot by that I just knew was mine. It was a 100 metre run to the stop, where I knew the bus would be pulling over to pick up at least a few people, so I broke into a run. Problem was, I hadn't crossed the road yet, so I wasted a few seconds as I had to wait for a gap in the traffic and do a dash across. As I huffed and puffed up to to the back of the bus, I could see the the indicator light blinking on, then the hiss of the hydraulic doors and whirr of the electric engine revving up for take-off. Usually, all would be lost, but today, I banged especially hard on the side just as it started to pull away.

"Oy!" I yelled. "Stop!"

The bus jolted to a halt with a tooth-rattling familarity. The bus doors hissed open. I climbed on.

"Um, is this the Newtown bus?" I asked. It was only then that I realised I had never actually spotted the destination on the front or side of the bus.
"Newtown?" he asked back.
"Yes, is this the Newtown bus? Do you drive to or through Newtown?"

He jabbed away at his ticket machine and dispensed a $2 fare.

"Newtown, $2," he said.
"Oh, no, I have a ten-trip," I said, pulling it from my bag and giving it to him.

He threw his head back in despair, snatching the useless fare from his machine, flicked it to the floor of his booth with disdain. He then snipped my ten-trip right across the divide of two fares, hissed the doors closed behind me, and launched the bus out into traffic. Despite the fact I was prepared for the acceleration, I was still left with few options but to half-fall into a fellow traveller and bash some poor guy with my bag as I bounced around looking for suitably placed hand-grips.

It was pinball travelling all the way to Courtenay Place, where there was enough hustle and bustle of people coming and going for me to slip into an aisle-side seat. At the first stop around the Basin Reserve, a woman getting off handed a beanie to the driver, and indicated she'd found it on her seat. Something for the lost and found perhaps. As he pulled away from the stop, he flicked the hat out between the closing hydraulic doors. I looked around, searching for fellow witnesses to this outrageous behaviour, but no-one else, it seemed, had seen it.

Three school-girls were outraged, though, when the driver missed their stop at the start of Adelaide Road. They had so far been keeping the otherwise silent rush-hour bus crowd alternately entertained or annoyed with their unending stream of unselfconscious teenage talk, separated though they were around the bus.

"Tiff, I just got a txt from Kay. She's got the hots for Nate!"
"No way! Nate is in love with Rose!"
"Hey," another piped in, from across the aisle, "let's call Nate and tell him."
"Ooohh, yes. Although ... no, what about Jase?"
"What about Jase, Simone?"
"Oh, nothing. But ... remember that pxt?"

Cue insane giggles all round. But then...

"Hey, that was our stop! Driver! Stop!"
"I can't stop! Clearway! Next stop!"

The next stop was probably only a few hundred metres away, but it took about ten minutes to get there, as the bus idled in the grid-locked rush-hour traffic. For a lot of those ten minutes the bus blocked the entrace to the maternity ward of Wellington Hospital. Three cars became trapped in the lane oncoming lane opposite us, signalling and wanting to drive across the exact spot we were occupying, while they held up all the traffic streaming out of Newtown. On the other side of the bus, cars coming out of the hospital and wanting to turn right across the road were held up as far as the eye could see. During this time the teenage girls muttered and grumbled to each in not too overt tones about the abilities of the driver. After some snail-lake progress, we finally reached the next stop, and the girls alighted with a cheery 'thank you driver'. Just as the driver threw the hyper-thrust into gear, there was a timid...

"Back door ... please ... driver."

...from the back of the bus. The bus jerked forward a second and then stopped, and the doors hissed open, giving the man a chance to escape.

Further up the road, going about warp 5 now, the bus swerved around the corner to head up Constable Street, and totally failed to give way to a car coming from our right. There was a squeal of tires, and we only just missed getting sideswiped. Thankfully, the next stop was my destination,and jumped off the bus brazenly withholding my 'thank you driver' as punishment for his poor driving. My chastisement went unnoticed, however, as the driver was too busy waving his fist at the driver of the car he had just cut off, who was giving him the fingers back as he slowly cruised pass the bus.

As the bus roared away up the road, I made a mental note of its number and registration, for the letter to the editor I was already composing at the back of my mind.

Maybe, now it's summer, I should just walk to work more often.

The worst thing about working at the Library is closing up. There's about 20 chores to do, and you can't really get them under way properly until you've got all the patrons out the door. It's like a cruel indoor version of sheep herding, but one where the sheep take affront at your efforts to move them through the gate.

Today, for example, I was trying to tidy up the study desks around the Reference Collection, returning the various discarded books, CD-Roms and Journals back to their designated place. The only person who hadn't got up and left at the ten-minute warning was a middle-aged woman who had pulled out half of our literary reference sources over the course of the afternoon. She had them spread out around her in a wide fan, and was reading Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. The reference librarian within me was impressed, but it was 4:53pm on Friday afternoon, and my personnel file was back in my cubby-hold, still half un-read after a too rushed scan-through during my abbreviated lunch-break.

"Excuse me," I said, "we're closing up now."
"I think you close in seven minutes," she said, looking at her watch and nodding agreement with herself, without actually looking up at me.

Oohh, right. You're going to be like that then, are you? I decided to get on with the job around her, thumping books together into piles as I arranged the displaced titles from around the various desks close to my interloper. I threw in a good sniff and sigh, for good measure, but nothing worked: she was either oblivious, or impervious to my annoying efforts.

With maybe two minutes to go, I gestured to the pile of books scattered about her. "Could I just tidy these books up?"
"Not just yet, thank you, I'm still reading them."
"All of them?"

She looked up at me. "Yes."

She didn't look like a crazy, but I suppose they come in all shapes and sizes. I left her to it. I'd done all the other Reference tidy-up chores, including shutting down the PCs, so I couldn't even surf while I waited. I was tied to the desk while I waited for 5 o'clock to arrive, and for my Phrase and Fable reader to depart. I sat on the high stool behind the desk and glowered at her, sniffing malevolently.

The five o'clock closing time message finally rang over the library's PA, and she got up, nodded thanks in my direction, and headed to the stairs to leave. She was taking Brewer's with her.

"Excuse me!" I shouted after her. "Miss!"

She turned around.

"The book!" I said, "Brewer's - it's a Reference Collection book, you can't take it out."
"Oh, " she said, holding it up for my inspection, "this is my own copy."
"Oh. Sorry."
"That's all right."

She turned and continued away.

Her own copy? Grrr.

I arrived at the Library especially early on Friday morning so I could get to Admin and get hold of my personal file as soon as possible.

But on Fridays, it tranpires, the Admin office (where the record are held under lock and key) doesn't open until after 10am. My earlybirdness had been in vain. With a resigned sniffle, I slunk off to my local cafe so as to avoid being roped into any work before I was actually rostered on to start. I orderd a hot blackcurrant as part of my ongoing effort to rid myself of the cold I've been suffering from, swiped my plastic to pay for the drink, and then, after a few seconds, was informed my card had been... DECLINED.

Noooo! No cash, and with the weekend looming and the cupboards at home totally bare. The lovely barista boy told me not to worry, I could sort out payment for my drink later, and I retreated to a window table to consider how I was going to survive until my next pay-day, all of next Wednesday away.

I was totally wallowing in self-pity, when I saw Artemis strutting past the window, presumably on the way to school. I tapped the window and caught his attention. He spotted me, frowned slightly, then came into the cafe and joined me at my table.

"Hello Natalie, how are you?"
"Hi Artemis. Very well thank you."
"You don't look it."
"Ah, well, I wouldn't want to bore you."
"Why change now?"
"Oh, haha."

I gave him my best, 'please-don't-take-the-piss' look of despair. I really wasn't in the mood for pointless barbs.

He nodded at my blackcurrant.

"Buy a young boy a coffee?" he enquired.
"Ahaha. You've read, no doubt?"
"I have."
"And...?"
"Well, I was very surprised."
"Yes, sorry, it, well, got a little odd, really."
"I can't believe you made me nine years old."
"Well, it seemed funnier that way."
"And the stuff about my dad. And the bomb, and ... "
"Yes," I interrupted, "I know. I got a bit carried away there. Sorry."
"You don't have to be sorry," said Artemis, "it was just very ... well, surprising is the only word for it, really. Once I saw what you were doing, and the fact that no-one would be able to pick that Artemis was me, well, it was quite a good read. "
"Quite good?"
"Yes, quite good."
"Thanks."
"Don't mention it."
"You're sure?"
"What? Oh, ah, I see. Of course, no, feel free to mention it."
"Thanks."
"Look, I really have to get to school. See you again soon, perhaps?"
"Yes Artemis, that would be nice."
"Goodbye Natalie."
"Goodbye."

He left, I finished my blackcurrant and went to work, spending the first hour and a half counting the seconds until my tea break, and my next chance to get to Admin.

I burst through the door into Mr White's office at 10:45am. He wasn't there. Ms Black, another admin person was, however seated at her desk across the room.

"Ms Black, is Mr White in today?"
"Yes."
"Will he be back soon?"
"He's just gone to his tea break. He'll be about twenty minutes."
"His tea break? Doesn't he start at ten?"
"Yes."
"And he takes a tea break at 10:45?"
"Yes."
"Um, right. I don't suppose you could dig out you my personnel file for me?"
"No, Mr Black has the key for that cabinet. You could try Mrs Darjeeling, she's probably in her office, and she keeps copies of all personnel records in her own files. I think she had your file yesterday, in fact. She was synching them up."
"She does? She was?"
"Yes."
"Right, ta."

I went up to Mrs Darjeeling's office. Her door, as per usual, was open, and, when she caught sight of me, she waved me in.

"Natalie, what can I do for you?"
"Um, actually, I was just wondering if I could see my personnel file?"
"Oh. Ah. Of course. Yes, yes you can. Mr Black has a copy he'll probably be able to show you."
"He's on his tea-break. I'm on my tea-break. I was hoping to take a look before my next shift. Ms White told me you keep back-ups up here."
"I do. Have a seat, I'll get it for you."

I sat on her comfy sofa that runs along one side of her room, and watched as she quickly slid open the drawer of one of her many vertical filing cabinets, flicked through the folders, and quickly found my file. She pulled it out and handed it to me. It was heavy. There was a lot of paper inside this thing.

"Can I take this away and photocopy it?" I asked.
"Of course. If I could get it back later today though?"
"Yes. I'll drop it back at lunch."
"Thank you Natalie."
"Thanks Mrs Darjeeling."

I left and scuttled to the tea room where I got trapped in a conversation with Mrs Farnum, thus missing out on any file reading on the last few remaining minutes of my break. I had to stash the file in my cubby hole before heading out on a shelving shift, followed by some returns, so I had no chance to get a decent look at the file until lunch, and there was so much of it I spent the first of half of my break photocopying instead of analysing, so didn't really take much in except that annotated print-outs of my blog featured regularly. I dropped the original back to Mrs Darjeeling, then, avoiding the staff room and any possible side-tracking by Mrs Farnum, walked to the nearby Art Gallery and tried to start to glean what sort of trouble I might be in. What, exactly, was 'On File'?

All sorts of stuff, it turns out.

I'm pleased to see that Dave over at Killing time has similar problems with Hull's bus-drivers that I do here with the Wellingtonian variety. As Dave points out...

Bus drivers in Hull are nasty people who assume you have memorised the tarrifs and timetables and react with disdain when you ask them where the bus stops and how much all this sub-standard journeying is going to cost you.

So, so true. Not for all bus drivers, of course. Citizen Bus Driver, I know for a fact, is happy to answer questions on the various rules, regulations and nuances of the public transport system - but a great many will make you their mortal enemy should you even ask (as I often do) the simplest request, such as to be taken to a specific destination, as opposed to just naming the number of sections you want to ride. I had this encounter with the classic nasty bus driver on the way home from my horrible day's work the other day...

I was sitting at the bus-stop, and saw a Newtown Park bus zooming along the street, that would take me within half a block to my house. I stood, then stooped down to gather up by bag, bent back up, and watched as the bus zoomed by, only to be stopped at a red light, twenty metres down the road. I ran after it, banged on the doors, and saw them swing over to reveal the frowning driver, who said, not trying at all to hide the exasperation in his voice...

"So you did want to get on. I'm not a mind-reader, you know."
"Err, sorry. I was, um... gathering my things. Um, Newtown shops thanks."
"Where?" he snapped.
"Um, Newtown? The shops?"
"How many sections?"

Now, I know it's a three section fare, but I'm not buying into that game. I choose, instead, to play the part of a dumb tourist.

"I'm sorry, I have no idea. Someone told me the Newtown Park bus would get me to Newtown."
"Yep. We go that way."
"How much?"
"Light's changed..."

He pulled away at warp 10, sending me skittering down the aisle as the bus propelled itself into traffic. When he was up to crusing speed, I eventually found my balance, and wobbled my way back beside of the driver to pay my fare.

"Two dollars," he growled.

I dropped a five dollar note in his change bowl. Grumbling, he proceeded to steer the bus with his knees, lifted up his change tray with one hand, pulled the note from the bowl and slipped it into a pile in his money tray with the other, then put the change tray back down and handed me the change, at which point there was an almighty crunch, we jolted to a halt, and I flew into the bus's windscreen.

We'd side-swiped a taxi that, for reasons only a taxi driver might explain, was straddling two lanes of a main thoroughfare in rush-hour.

"Bloody Christ!" swore the bus-driver, leaping up and jumping past me to the street. A bit dazed, I staggered to the end of the bus and took a seat, where I ended up looking straight down on the taxi the bus had just hit. The damage actually wasn't too bad. The rear-view mirror had been pretty much severed from its stalk, and there were a few scratches on the side of the car itself, but nothing too drastic. The bus-driver and taxi driver still proceeded to have an animated discussion on the rights and wrongs of the situation, punctuated with arm-waving and some finger-pointing. The problem with the sort of trolley-bus I was riding though, is the fact they all run on the same overhead wires. So when our bus had pulled up, every other bus down the line had to stop behind us as well. After a couple of minutes of sitting in the same spot, at least a couple of dozen buses were stuck behind us. The arguing public transport providers were bringing the city to gridlock with their petty traffic ding. It took at least another ten minutes of remonstrations and finger-pointing before someone produced a pen and paper and details were finally exchanged. Our bus-driver returned to his seat, fuming. He spotted me at the back.

"You!" he yelled, pointing.

I pointed at myself. "What? Me?"
"Yes! Your ticket!"
"Oh, sorry."

I walked timidly to the front of the bus, all eyes upon me. I got to the front and he thrust my ticket at me. I took it, and, naturally, he took the opportunity to turbo-boost out into traffic again, sending me tumbling back down the aisle, all the way to the back seat I had just come from.

He kept it up all the way home: insane hot-rod style take-offs from the lights up to top speed around corners and straights alike, followed by tooth-loosening braking as we came up to any stop. One poor mum, her hands full of various baby appratus and a tiny wee baby, was only just saved from disaster by vigilant fellow bus-travellers, who helped catch her when the driver accelerated away the moment only seconds after taking her fare. My muscles ached from the constant exertions in battling the g-forces.

But still, without fail, as every person alighted from the bus, they would yell out...

"Thanks, driver!"

Kiwis, so polite.

Mrs Liddesdale - my boss, called me into her office.

It was first thing Thursday, and I had got to the library still suffering from a head-cold. I had spent the entire weekend recovering from the vodka-fired hangover I had inflicted upon myself on the previous Friday night. Josh called in the middle of my most self-pitying misery on Saturday evening, and we had an 'off-the-blog' discussion (you only need ask) which, while I can't report the details of, can say made me feel a whole lot worse.

So, after spent Saturday and Sunday purging the hangover and emotional turmoil from my body, by Monday my immune system had only just started to change focus and to try and battle the cold. It was proving a hard struggle. The base of my nostrils were red raw from the repeated wiping I had been giving them with cheap toilet paper. I had moved through the start of the week at the library on auto-pilot, barely keeping on top of my workload. So when Mrs Liddesdale called me into her office, I thought I was just in for a little pep-talk, or, at worst, a 'go home and get some sleep'. Little did I know where it was going to go...

"Natalie," said Mrs Liddesdale, "close the door please."

Ugh. No, not now, I thought, I feel terrible. I closed the door. Mrs Liddesdale looked nervous too - something was afoot.

"Natalie, I just have to ask, were you actually sick last Friday?"
"Yes."
"But did you go to that event? At the bowls club?"
"Did you read my blog?"
"Yes. I mean, some people here do, and for that reason, I need to know if what you were really out drinking on Friday afternoon after you'd called in sick."
"Well, I suppose, yes. Yes, that's true. But the rest of it ..."
"Thank you Natalie. Mrs Darjeeling had asked me just to confirm that fact with you."

Mrs Liddesdale gestured me to sit. I sat, taking the chance to empty the contents of my nasal passages into yet another wad of sandpaper-textured toilet paper.

"Natalie, Mrs Darjeeling has also asked me to remind you of some of the discussions you've had with her regarding the appropriateness of what you write. Now I, for one, don't want to see you getting into trouble. But, really, I mean, you seem to be incriminating yourself. I don't understand it, Natalie, why?"
"But it's all made up Mrs Liddesdale, really."
"But obviously not all of it. You did go to that event at the bowls club?"
"Well, yes."
"And the drinking? The fact you were at a party after having called in sick?"
"Ah, yes, well, guilty. I mean it was stupid in retrospect."

Mrs Liddesdale looked at me. She wasn't jumping in to disagree, and, indeed, nodded for me to continue...

"I didn't realise this cold would linger like it has. It won't happen again."

Again Mrs Liddesdale urged me on with her eyes...

"Err, so ... so, yes, I apologise. I'm sorry."
"You don't really have to be sorry to me. Natalie. Really, it's yourself that you're getting into trouble. I am going to have to talk about Mrs Darjeeling about this, and it will be added to your personnel file."

Added to the file? Since when have they had a file?

"Can I see my personnel file?" I asked.
"Well, yes, of course. Just ask Mr White in Admin."

As soon as I can, I thought.

"Now," continued Mrs Liddesdale, "I know Mrs Darjeeling has told you about the possibility of a written warning. This won't warrant one. But if I were you, I'd certainly be trying to keep my head down for a little while. Really, you needn't be giving people excuses to go after you at the moment."
"Okay."
"Thanks Natalie."

I left her office, and headed straight over to the Admin department to get my file. Mr White reported it wasn't there - Mrs Darjeeling had requested it earlier. I was told it wouldn't be available to me until tomorrow.

Denied information! A most unseemly knock-back for an information professional! I skulked back to work - a shift on returns, with ... of course, Josh.

What a day. Could things get worse?