Had a good morning at work – Wednesday’s are always pretty busy although I do work with my most annoying colleague on my every other Wednesday :roll:. I felt all efficient working on the counter for the first hour and a half, answering the phone and reserving books and everything, then I had tea break with one of the senior staff followed by an hour with her talking about how it’s all going and doing the pre-training brief for tomorrow. She is the woman I know from Reading Group and is fairly new to the job herself, although she has worked in libraries for years. She lived in America for 10 years and has a daughter doing a Fashion Retail degree so has a rather different concept of customer service to the staff in the library who have been there for 15 years! My training tomorrow is in Customer Care which will be interesting, given I have previously written and run Customer Care training programmes for up to 15 staff at a time :lol:, we talked about what I think I’ll gain from it with me surprising her by telling her I will still learn something from tomorrow and am actually really looking forward to it if for no other reason than to get a better understanding of the slant and focus of Customer Care from such a different angle. Clearly the Customer Care focus in retail is sales generating related whereas in a library it will be rather different. We also talked about my personal struggle with the pace and culture change and my slight frustration with the lack of commercial awareness focus and, ironically customer care. All interesting stuff 🙂 and of course refreshing to be having a proper grown up conversation which is not related to my novelty value as a Home Educator ;).
Home for a pleasant couple of hours with Lucy and all the children including some jigsaw puzzle making and general chit chat. Reminded me again Lucy that we really must sort out some time to dedicate to chatting away from children altogether 😆 They left, I fed the children and then Ady arrived home in time to come with us to drop Davies at Badgers and pop round to see my Granny for an hour. I thought Scarlett was utterly charming while we were there – she spent ages looking at all the pictures in her lounge, including loads of me as a child, my parents wedding day, our wedding day and various other family snapshots, then she played with a load of elephants that Granny has on her fireplace. Granny did a lot of that frustrating ‘ooh, how many elephants is there then?’ type stuff which Scarlett (more power to her 🙂 ) either ignored or treated with disdain, prefering instead to speculate on what the elephants were made of (ivory mostly!) and then telling us about how mammoths were extinct but actually they hadn’t died out altogether because elephants were descended from them – which for me was rather more impressive than lining them all up and counting to six 😆 We left there laden down with sweets to bring home and the promise of a ‘really special present next time you come with Davies too’ which pissed me off both in the whole ‘you must come to me to recieve this bribe’ and also the whole buying affection thing too. Why do so many grandparents do that? They offer sweets or gifts every time they see a child so that eventually the child comes to just associate them with the sweets rather than being pleased to see them and then gets considered rude or greedy or spoilt when they ask – really quite rationally – where their sweets are next time they see them. A child will so innocently be thrilled to see someone who engages with them, loves them and showers them with attention, but if you keep ‘training’ them to be happy to see you because of what they get from you rather than just being happy to see you then of course they will learn that lesson. 🙄 Might start to call in there a bit more regularly though as it is just round the corner from Badgers and on evenings when I have to take Tarly it makes far more sense to sit in her house for an hour and drink tea. Won’t give up my hour to myself to sit in the car reading and eating sweets when I don’t have to take Tarly though :lol:.
We collected Davies who had learnt more about first aid, recovery position and resucitation and then home for them to go to bed. Granny had also given them a book each so they had them as bedtime stories. Tarly was asleep really quickly but Ady had brought home a Hornby train set and the original Mousetrap game from a charity shop which we were busy setting up so we called Davies back downstairs to show him them resulting in a rather late night for him. 😆
I’ve photocopied and posted all the relevant paperwork for my laptop so that is all in hand and now I’m off to bed, I’ve training to attend tomorrow you know :).
Yes! Yes! Yes! About Grandparents (or rather Great-Grandparents). My children so obviously love kisses and cuddles more than sweets and biscuits yet they still shower them with sugar! Although even I’m falling into the material love trap. Often I bring something home from Tescos, discounted clothes or toys from the one pound boxes, and this morning Rebecca woke me up to ask me if I’d brought anything wrapped in a carrier bag for them. So I lied and now it’s hidden in the cupboard. It’s just not the same giving something thats been asked for.
Comment by Lucy — 03 February 2007 @ 12:48 pm