Pansies

As an example of my boss's great planning abilities, I was told Thursday that I were to lose five staff members working part time in the stacks right away and that I were supposed to start training one new person the next working day to replace those five. As a matter of fact, the new person (a man, luckily) was the one who told me. Not my boss. When she finally did, she sent an e-mail. What a magnificent way to manage staff issues. By the way, it normally takes two years to train someone new to the extent that he can do 80% of the tasks. This has been a very busy week and we have just barely made the deadline (which is at noon). Everything takes much longer time because the new guy has to learn the hard way. It's learning by doing in the stacks, there are no written instructions.

The weather has been very nice and sunny, but the air is still a little cold. I got the chair and small table down from the attic and placed it on the balcony. Today I also bought some pansies for the flower box. It looks so much nicer there with some other colors than grey concrete.

Yesterday I decided to go to the new mall in Malmö in the afternoon. It's called Entre and is a fairly large glass building near one of the main bus terminals. There was basically one store that I found interesting, a Danish shoe store. The rest of the stores were the same as in other malls. Some spaces were empty and it didn't seem to be completely finished. I wasn't that impressed by it. It didn't stop me from doing some shopping, however. Just a top and a cotton dress.

Today I didn't have any desk duty. The manuscript reading room was closed in the afternoon because all the staff members were summoned to a meeting in another building. We were told that the library's financial state was not good, that we had to answer the opinion poll sent to us and that the document regarding strategic planning had been delayed. We already knew all this and we did not really care to hear about it. The entertainment part of the meeting was a group of school children who sang several songs, both in Swedish and English. The day ended with a scholar who gave a somewhat confusing lecture on a book she had written about women who had survived the concentration camps during World War II. She had contacted the women 50-60 years afterwards to ask about their memories. It was a terrible account of nameless cruelty, like so many of these books. We must not forget.