Work for me today. Ady had been supposed to attend a meeting this morning so I’d arranged for Dad to have the children in the morning rather than the afternoon but at the last minute yesterday afternoon Ady’s meeting was cancelled due to snow so he was just doing local price surveys (a bit like mystery shopping and a fairly large part of his job role – at the moment, it is forever changing) and able to take Davies and Scarlett with him so had them all day.
I’d been intending to walk to work – I should walk more often really anyway as it is just a 15 minute walk but I am so often laden down with books to return on the way there and books coming home on the way back, not to mention the chance of weather being bad and dark on the way home in the winter that it rarely happens. But I’ve not moved my car from the drive since Tuesday evening and our road and all of the roads I drive to work down are side streets that have not been gritted and are therefore great big ice rinks. But Ady and the children dropped me off (sticking to main roads) instead.
I was greeted with the news that as phase one of a three phase budget slashing exercise the opening hours are being ‘rationalised’ which will cut staff costs aswell as lighting/heating costs of buildings. It all makes perfect sense and as someone who only works 11 hours a week I am unlikely to lose more than about 2 hours a week – if anything at all so I am not personally likely to be affected that much but of course the knock on effect on morale and customer satisfaction might prove more of a fall out. Our opening hours are planned to go from Monday-Friday 930am-7pm (with early closing at 1pm on a Wednesday) and 930-5pm on a Saturday to Monday -Friday 10am-6pm (including Wednesdays) and Saturdays 10am-4pm. As my hours are one morning a week (alternate Wednesdays and Saturdays) 9am-1pm and one full day a week (alternate Thursdays and Fridays) 9am -5pm I will obviously lose at least 45 minutes twice a week on that basis which might put me to 9.5 hours a week rather than 11. But I suspect I will be asked to modify to a greater degree than that and there has been talk of hours being totally thrown up in the air and started from scratch. The first stage is a preference form for staff to request hour cuts and specify which libraries they can work in. Given we have very much built our weekly commitments around my working I am actually quite inflexible and certainly don’t intend travelling to other libraries but in the scheme of things this is fairly minor trauma and certainly won’t be keeping me awake at night while I wait to see what the eventual outcome is.
I did the banking, went to the bank, did some work on my display, was supposed to run Baby Rhyme time but unsurprisingly noone came along to attend it. The library has been shutting at 3pm and 4pm each day this week due to snow and the decision had been made to close at 4pm today so it felt very short given I had a late lunch from 1pm-2pm. I did some time on the Enquiry Desk and the Counter and spent some time chatting to one of the librarians. All of the borrowers coming in today seemed in jolly moods and as one of my colleagues said ‘it feels like that odd time between Christmas and New Year has been extended with the snow and kids off school and the library closing early’. It did very much have that novelty feel about it today.
Ady and the kids came in at about 3.45pm to collect me having had a nice day together including having to be towed out of a snow drift in a garden centre carpark (shades of the Shell Island incident from what I gather), fish and chips for lunch and general enjoying being together :).
We came home and got a fire lit and then Ingird arrived. She is Tom (Ady’s soon to be ex-work mate, pheasant dealer and all round thoroughly nice bloke)’s girlfriend and also works with Ady. Tom has been skiiing and was due back on Wednesday but his flight into Gatwick was cancelled so he came back tonight instead. As we are only half an hour or so away from Gatwick Ingrid came here after work before heading off to go and pick him up. So we had a nice couple of hours of her company :).
I finished reading Davies and Scarlett which we’ve really enjoyed and Ingrid liked so much she asked if she can come round for stories every night :).
Davies and Scarlett went to bed, Ingrid left to collect Tom, Ady and I had baths and ate pizza and I’m looking forward to a complete weekend off with nothing at all planned or arranged or scheduled :).