76 Trombones in the Grand Parade?

The Street Parade for Blacktown City Festival was inspirational, in many unimagined ways. As each of the 'floats' and groups went past, an overwhelming desire to sign up with the Scouts was quickly followed by wanting to learn the bagpipes, join the Emergency Service volunteer brigades, take up gymnastics, and - I swear this was true albeit only for a few fleeting moments - learn Punjabi.

Mind you, I don't know why each and every vehicle with claxton and/or sirens had to give full voice only when at the closest possible distance from my ears. And why every human tank had to make sure they were walking at inverse warp speed in front of me. Or maybe it only seemed that way? Nah. There must have been a huge meeting somewhere last night, where my photo was distributed and an orchestrated complex set of maneuvers was planned and executed with great precision. Those of you who are thinking that it's just the nicco withdrawal talking better not let me hear you.

Highlight of the day was most probably having a 'chat' with our state Premier (sort of like the US equivalent of governor, but with less visible security). Particularly since I was able to provide my personal gratitude for his kind donation to our school library last year. Mind you, he did seem a little lost for words when I casually dropped the fact that the library budget was once again completely depleted, and less than half way through the year ...

And the stocktake begins ...

Yep, tomorrow stocktake ("inventory") starts for the Non-Fiction location. Having spent the last 4 months culling/weeding/deselecting, it's down to a mere 7K-ish volumes. Five days, 2 people ... hmmm. With one person scanning and the other screen-checking (with regular swapping under OHS), that's only 1400 books/movements per day, on and off shelves.

Over a five hour period (six hours, less 20 minutes morning break and 40 minutes lunch break), that's 280 per hour, or 4 per minute. But allowing for an average of one in ten resources - which was about the going rate for Fiction last year - having a problem that will require approximately 5 minutes to correct (eg catalog error, incorrect spine label, invalid barcode) that's an additional 140 books x 5 minutes work time. That's only another 12 hours work, or a little over 2 additional days.

If the equipment doesn't fail, the network doesn't go down (two power surges in the afternoon on last Friday), no one stops for any reason, like they die or something ...