Borås visit

Last week I left work at noon on Wednesday and went by train to Borås. I spent a long weekend with my family there. My sister and her husband celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary by going away to a country inn, so my mother and I were taking care of the kids. We also got to celebrate later, when we all went out to a fancy restaurant for a delicious salmon meal. There was also time to go shopping a little, my mother brought me to an outlet store at one of the mail order companies. There were surplus goods and returns at extremely low prices. Sadly, no clothes in my size, but still interesting to see. I got two tops on sale at the mall instead. We did the usual flea market store round, plus one store I had never been to before.The kids kept us busy with playground visits, lego building and other games. I returned home Monday.

In order to use the remaining vacation days, I have to take every Monday off the rest of the year, so I got back to work Tuesday. When they started telling me what had happened during my absence, I put my hands over my ears and told them I didn't want to know. I wonder why things always go wrong when I'm not there. People got sick and none of the others knew how to print the requests, apparently. Even though I showed them that particular task last week. I have now spent days writing a very detailed instruction, to prevent that from happening again. To add to the mess, our patrons complained about requested but not retrieved books this week. We investigated it, and the technicians noticed that some requests get lost in cyberspace... They were able to fix it after a few days and we also got hold of the missing ones, so all the books are delivered now.

We were rather surprised to learn that we were affected by the US federal agency shut down. The largest fulltext database in education, ERIC, was made unavailable during that time. The entire situation was somewhat odd and we watched the developments with amazement.