Freedom Days

 One is pleasantly surprised to see so many celebrations of freedom these past weeks.

It is quite humbling to see what seems like the whole world turning out to celebrate one's two year anniversary of being freed from the dictatorial control of Supervisor Grand Chief K.

Yes, it's hard to describe the sense of relief one can feel when such a yoke is removed and one has to no longer kowtow to the completely unreasonable demands that actual work be done and projects be completed.

It is sad to no longer be "working" with the likes of Sister Serials, Psycho Chicken, Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum, The Maple Maverick, Lord of the Small Fries, Longstride L, Bomber Babe, LibraryBFF, Sidekick, Days of our Libraries, The Administrator, Roysgirl, Sonja Roster Queen, and Mr Prada - but they too had their incomprehensible demands that things be fixed, technology be made to work, procedures written up, and could one please stop eating all the cake in the staff kitchen.

So, here's to one's freedom, may it be everlasting!

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Catching up with Catch-ups

So, much has happened in the realm of The Tales since last post. Many catch-ups have occurred and One shall attempt to document them to One's usual fastidious level of accuracy.


On the Monday before Cup Day, One continued to catch-up with ones Hawaiian shirts, having too long neglected them until their recent resurrection for conference. The jealousy from co-workers manifest itself as an air of disdain and a pretended scoffing at one's sense of fashion.


There was a catch-up with Big J in the form of her return from extended leave to attend a three hour strategic reporting and specific duties realignment meeting. I guess she has to have hobbies in her leisure time.


In an effort to catch-up on our role-playing game progress deficit Pirate Dave ran Badger, Sneaky Pete and One through our weekly game until the early am. The deficit is now reduced to only several years.


Attending the annual SLUG conference with Sidekick afforded one the opportunity to catch up with Sis, MoneyM, and others in several entirely networky and educational bar and restaurant settings.


In preparation for Bomber Babe's big move to One's old desk at One's old branch, One had to undertake a cleanup of boxes underneath and draws full of spare parts. A nostalgic catchup with vitally kept spare 2005 technology ensued.


Hulk and One had a catch-up and board games with Miasmakat after it was revealed to Hulk that there was a trampoline there and it became mandatory to attend.


The evening then held a grand catch up at the 10th wedding anniversary soiree for Zombie Monkey. Having arrived post speeches it was hard for one to tell it apart from just a big piss up.
In any case, while one missed The Real Greg Dean, one was able to have a grand catch-up with the ZM himself as well as the first for 7 years catch-up with Illuminated G, Amoeba for our first catch-up in... months, and a 12 years in the making catch-up with Shreen.

Of course Illuminated G was up to his old conspiratorial tricks trying to claim that he and Shreen had never attended One's university at the same time - while my memory clearing has them both in the same group of uni friends, I shall not be a fool for your conspiracy!!


The final catch-up of not was for the farewelling of LibraryBFF heading back to whence she came as her stint as resources ends,  and BomberBabe heading to new horizons. It was also for welcoming Mr Prada into the resources - and possibly BFF - role, and Big J attended for the culinary catch-up opportunity.


Phew, now One is caught-up on the catching-up.
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The Gang of Lions

So here's a Caution for you all.

In the midst of one's Indefinite Leave one has visited one's doctor to see about a small lump that appeared on one's foot over the past half year.

Apparently it was caused by a gang of lions attack whilst walking. One can only surmise that, when working as a gang, said lions are incredibly sneaky as one has no recall of any attack incident.

Further questioning of the technician and some observant reading between the lines of her answer of "I can in no way give a professional opinion on that" confirmed that this affliction is the sole cause of my being behind on the daily step count front when compared to Sidekick.

And Longstride L.

And ElfBoy.

And Bomber Babe.

And Salsa Girl, when she remembers to wear her tracker.

Once one has recovered from one's hampering condition then there will be some real competition on the step front.
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Take Hulk to Work Day

(Settle down Zombie Monkey, this isn't a superhero-related post!)

So, two days ago one undertook an expedition with Hulk to the furthest reaches of the city in a long planned visit to one's locations of daily toil, various.

The plan may sound grand but rest assured I had Salsa Girl's full support in leaving her Hulk-less for most of the day.

Leaving at the bright and early, finally fully dressed and everything packed, stroke of half ten we played "Daddy why is that car next to us?" for our hour long journey.

Upon arrival we were beset by besotted librarians all cooing and oohing at the level of cuteness on display. Hulk received her fair share of compliments too.

Once the likes of Bomber Babe, Lord of the Small Fries, Big J, The Administrator, Groovy Spirits, and sundry others had received critical exposure levels we moved on to the next branch.

This was a more relaxed experience with Country Girl, Sidekick, and of course Days of our Libraries, all being wowed.

After a short long-rambling-walk to a nearby park and back, we were off again to our final destination.

This vastly underpopulated building saw us dazzle The Beaumaris Ballerina with advanced toddler-ness before Hulk decided we needed to take much of the library furniture home with us.

Disentangling from that situation I thought I was home free for jumping into the car and zooming home until a nearby playground hove into view and proceeded to engage us in a short half hour play digression.

Eventually we made our way back north to safety - and one of us was even able to sleep for most of the journey home.

All in all about the same amount of work was completed as any given work day.
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Cordelia's Honor

This volume, by the esteemable Lois McMaster Bujold, encompasses the first two stories of her Vorkosigan Saga of which one had heard many mentions but had yet to dip one's toes into.

Having read - and loved -  the author's Chalion fantasy series thanks to Vengeful Vic's rather effective proselytising about their greatness I was interested to see how her sci-fi stacked up.

Well thanks to the miracles of inter-library loans and the hard work of Bomber Babe I was able to have this copy expressed to me from the foreign climes of the Geelong Library service.

All in all it was an interesting read that, for me, never quite reached the outstanding level. I think it has similarities to the Honour Harrington military sci-fi series with it's main characters acting as a sort of competence porn as they so easily deal with outrageous situations while showing outstandingly inspirational leadership, judgement, and ethics.

Still a good read though and worthy of three and a half stars.
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Hulk Buba and the Forty Aunties

So the other day Salsa Girl and I packed up Hulk and her travelling requirements into the faithful vehicle and made the long trek southwards to visit one's workplace for the requisite showing off of cute new child.

Having listened to the tales her father had been spinning during her short life so far Hulk made sure to delay our departure - with feeding requirements and nappy changes - until there was no chance of encountering mean Auntie Supervisor Grand Chief K who makes daddy do all that hard work for no reason at all.

The downside of our delay was that our entry changed somewhat from the carefully orchestrated small group then meeting group to more of an everyone at once the moment we come through the door kind of thing. I'm told that the mass cooing could be heard suburbs away.

Young Hulk was quite blasé about being handed around from Auntie to Auntie, enjoying stays in the arms of the likes of: Auntie The Administrator, Auntie Big J, Auntie Lord of the Small Fries, Auntie Nurse Janet, Auntie Shirl, Auntie Alltogether Heather, Auntie Miss Amanda, Auntie Groovy Spirits, and sundry others in the parade of Aunties. I'm pretty confident from the empirical evidence before my very eyes that Hulk out-cuted Auntie Bomber Babe's recently acquired grand daughter.

Anyway after a reasonable stay there - and finding a disappointingly low snack level in the workroom we decided to head on to my spiritual home branch for a much less crowded meet and greet.

Upon arrival it was Auntie Days of our Libraries who monopolised the holding - so much in fact that Uncle Mr Prada didn't even have a chance for a hold of his own and had to stoically insist that he didn't need to prise Hulk from Auntie Days' arms as he wasn't affected by Hulk's overwhelming cuteness.

After that visit was over we had ourselves some cafe lunch and then made the long journey home to spend most of the evening trying to calm an inexplicably overstimulated Hulk.
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My Week of Cake

This year my birthday week has been focused on baked goods - specifically cake.

I started the dessert theme myself, as one often has to, by concealing subtle hints within my weekly update to my library staff concerning my projected whereabouts for the remainder of the week.
Here is an example of the level cunning subtleness I employed:

Tuesday Feb 2: At SAN library all day fixing computers and possibly getting surprise birthday cake.

At first it appeared not to have worked as I went a whole day without cake. However my Wednesday arrival at BEA branch was greeted with not one but two cakes - joy!
It seems that Devil's Advocate had supplied a largish piece of Emergency Cake in case there was a critical lack of cake in my system.
So having polished off the Emergency Cake I moved on to tackling the larger, yet just as delightfully chocolaty, cake supplied by The Beaumaris Ballerina. Some time after that I started fixing computers and other things IT in a state of cake-induced fugue.

Thursday was such a blur of meetings and schnitzel lunches and crazy weather that I failed to notice the lack of any cake-ish things.
This serious lapse from my compatriots was rectified on Friday morning when I stepped out of a morning meeting into a cake wonderland - complete with the second present (no wait Pirate Dave gave me some Dolphin Clips Thursday night - let your imagination run wild about what exactly a Dolphin Clip is...) I mean Third present.

See how happy I am with my giant RFID tag cake courtesy of Days of our Libraries
(couriered in secretly by Bomber Babe).

My cake euphoria carried me through the remainder of the day and into the evening where I caught up with birthday twin CC having drinks to celebrate her attaining a measly total age on the morrow.
I stayed only long enough to down a couple of drinks and treated the whole exercise as a training run for this evenings main event.

Now I'd best be off to gussy myself up for my time in the limelight tonight. After all there is such an awful lot of gussying to be done.

I'll end with a caution for you oh good readers of mine: with what BestFriendSincePrep has planned for this evening, and knowing his track record, I fear that this missive may very well be the last time you hear from me alive...
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... The Celebration of Brighton RF

Yes that's right we're halfway through Brighton's RFID tagging and running to schedule - take that Skeptic L, and you doubted me at the last SPUN meeting.

The celebration took the form of free nibbles and drinks in the staff room at the end of the day.
I am suspicious that there was a conspiracy to keep me away from the event with Bomber Babe unnecessarily calling me out to the library to fix the minor problem of no public internet connection - causing me to miss the best of the nibbles!

Once I joined the celebration it was quite a cheerful event with my personal highlight being this short conversation involving the newly blonded Big J.

Someone else: How do those two borrowers communicate?
Freeloading Phill: With the International language?
Big J: What, Esperanto? ... ... oh.

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... The Week that Was Suddenly Over

Monday - The Apprentice
My first day of being saddled with a work experience student who inexplicably was interested in Library IT. I took to heart the task of cautioning him about the detrimental effect if being immersed in LibraryLand. He was also initiated into the wonders of "Hey Phill!" problem solving for most of the day.

Tuesday - Corporate Drive By
The Apprentice started the day by asking me if I was going to start working soon, so I decided to punish him by taking him into the Council Corporate Centre IT department.
It didn't phase him.
So I took him to several of our branches in an attempt to overwhelm him with librarians and locations. He was made of sterner stuff than that and shrugged most of it off with a hmmph. So far he looked like prime IT material.

Wednesday - Road Trips, Meetings and Paperwork
The Apprentice and I traveled up and down the Seaside Road today to fix problems that were already fixed by the time we arrived at the branch. So far he was getting an excellent introduction to the life of an IT Man in LibraryLand. The next test was the IT Team meeting. The afternoon's meeting was attended by all team members and The Apprentice fitted (fat?) right in by nodding off in tandem with The Pragmatist.
After The Apprentice had gone home I stayed back at work diligently catching up on the paperwork that I was just not cruel enough to force an innocent minion to complete.
Whilst I was catching up on said paperwork, The Flibberty Gibbet, enabled by Supervisor Grand Chief K of course, made another stalking phone call. This time I was able to legitimately say I was working on RFID - it was a strange feeling, kind of itchy.

Thursday - Chocolates, Soccer and Snoozes
I was able to offload The Apprentice onto Sister Serials as a box unpacker while I attended the Service Coordinators meeting. We then spent the afternoon working out how to embiggen the print size of our slip printers and installing it on Bomber Babe's PC as a test.
The surprise of the afternoon was the box of chocolates The Apprentice gave me as a thank you for dragging him all over my little corner of LibraryLand. I shared them of course - it would have looked greedy if I'd eaten more than 80% of the box.
I rushed off to soccer delighted at being able to play in 32 degree heat for the second week running. The upside was that I scored the "last goal wins" goal by dribbling a kick over the line while we all watched on exhausted. The goal arrived right on target keeping me at a my goal every three months average. The post game recovery took a full hour but finally I was able to drag myself off home and then to ArchEnemy's for falling asleep on the couch during gaming.

Friday - SPUN and Branch Drinks
The morning was our free xmas lunch at Civica HQ preceded by the quarterly SPUN Meeting. I brought Mr Prada along as a minion to show my new stature as Mr Secretary but completely forgot to have him Fight Flibberty's minion in the pit, oh well there's always next time. I had a quick catch up over a glass of free wine with Madame President to cover where the exec was at and then headed out into the city.
After a quick drop by visit to Rugrat Twin's retail workplace I trained my way back to Sandringham.
After booting up my laptop I shut it down and we all headed off to the branch xmas drinks and dinner. It was a good evening with a cameo by Chanlib, and the evening seen out in increasingly slurred conversation with Mr Prada and Scully.

Saturday - A BBQ and Librarians Running Amok
A last minute BBQ with Fridgepower, Judgemingus, their spawn and several others left me rushing a little to make it to Miss Amanda's delightful residence for the Library Xmas Party soirée.
It was a very well attended event, with magnificent food and much joviality. I was able to meet the infamous infamous Mr Amanda, and noted the family resemblance when Little Miss Amanda called me the best customer for food trays.
The evening took a turn for the surreal later on when the Sing Star computer game was fired up. I tell you nothing compares to a 15 librarian chorus of Unchained melody - it almost killed Torchwood with hysterics (watching said fit may have been the best ten minutes of the evening).

Sunday - Legion Gathers
And finally I get to today. The clan was having a get together to celebrate several birthdays and my impending departure for Svetlanaland. No wait they weren't celebrating my leaving they were saying farewell. Handy Dad, Freeloading Mum, Legion2-4 and various partners were all there and we had a nice lunch before heading home for some much needed rest.


Hey I just found out that you can only have 200 characters of Labels on a blog post. Though the error message is confusing as it just says that you have more than 200 characters but not that it's only the labels that it cares about. I was thinking that I needed an Everything label for this post and now I had to trim out some of the less important tags.

... The Day of Meetings

After spending Wednesday night with Rugrat Twin comparing our holiday photos of Svetlanaland I had to front up at work for Thursday the Day of Meetings.

Meeting one was the Sandringham branch meeting. It was catered beautifully by Mr Prada with more muffins than you could eat - but not me, alas I had other meetings to go to so far too many muffins remained uneaten. Some work stuff was probably talked about while I was eating muffins.

My next meeting, with Bomber Babe, was shifted forward to the moment I walked in the door at Brighton. It was a five minute meeting - the sort were you are only vaguely disappointed in the lack of catering, especially if you are still full of the Sandringham bounty.

Hot on the heals of that came the completely un-catered Service Coordinators meeting. However without any provisions to take my attention I was able to follow most of the meeting and even deflect several more of Torchwood's attempts to undermine me in the eyes of the other coordinators.

Again I went straight into another meeting - this time with The Flibberty Gibbet on her semi (or is it bi?) annual visit. This one, while not catered did become a lunch at the local where I struggled to fit in a full entree and main on top of the multitude of morning muffins. TFG and Supervisor Grand Chief K were their usual well-behaved selves and we were only a quarter hour late back to work.


My short break between meetings became the rest of the afternoon to myself when Supervisor Grand Chief K decreed that our regular catch-up meeting was canceled as we had seen enough of each other lately. So I spent the rest of the afternoon getting some actual work done while my body slowly digested lunch - which it finished just in time for me to rush off to soccer.

Today, in contrast to the day of meetings, started out completely clear but quite quickly disappeared in a haze of odd jobs, system slowdown monitoring, and getting caught at desk helping the customers borrowers.

... The Stealing of Wireless Go-Live Day

Today the wireless-internet-hotspot-access-point went live to the public. There is still a bit of staff training and a few signs to go up but we had several happy customers. Miss Amanda did her best Mr Prada impersonation and created most of the documentation for staff. Supervisor Grand Chief K then cunningly distracted me with free sandwiches so that they could steal all the glory and run around signing up innocent laptop-using borrowers.

All of this happened while Torchwood and I were off at a council web site team meeting. We came back all inspired to double team some changes and updates through - and may finally replace Bomber Babe's photo on the web site.

... The Long Weekend Beard

Another week and a bit has flown by and been consumed by floorboarding with Handy Dad (finished last Monday - finally) , work, and a little bit of play.

The Queens birthday long weekend, a broken shaver, and lots of tradie type renovation work, have combined to provide me with a beard.
Said beard has elicited much response from the librarians with the stand-outs amongst the "oh my gawds" being Big J's dismissive "well it looks scruffy" and Bomber Babe pointing out that I must be glad that Svetlana is in Croatia and not here to punish me for growing the beard!

Growing the beard is one of those things that happens every five years or so and the last few times it's been quite interesting to see how many more white patches there are.

In any case here it is and you be the judge: Scruffy or Rugged and Manly?? (hint: Rugged and Manly)


Last Tuesday I was back at the Corporate Castle holding the help desk together while SoccerBuddy and CC had training on a day off for The New IT Geek. The evening's gaming was a week four hodgepodge of various games with BestFriendSincePrep traitoring his way to victory in the wonderful cooperative game Shadows over Camelot.
Wednesday I was back again and trying hard not to answer any corporate calls even to the extent of attending one of my IT Team meetings with Mr Prada, Genealogy Jane and Vikki. In the evening I had dinner and drinks with CC and friends at the local.
Thursday was a morning at Bea, plugging in a broken computer to miraculously make it work, and then marveling at the efficiency of Mr Prada as the tasks I'd delegated to him came back completed before I'd even had a chance to progress much further in my myriad post upgrade jobs. Afternoon was a meeting about the public IT training. Some last minute calls re wireless hotspot setup for the library caused my soccer appearance to be at half time.
Friday was more wireless install prep and a marathon session with Sister Serials trying to sort out Ogonek magazine in the library catalogue - go borrow some now to make it worth our effort.
And today was the finishing touches to the floors (except for a couple more spots). I also went for and fixed Freeloading Mum's computer and scored a free dinner!