Tally

• Number of times kicked in metaphorical teeth last month by TPL management: ④

  • If we include Foderick: ⑤

• Frontline staff on whom management turned the screws: ②

Improvements! at! the Browsery!

Under its new manager, the TRL Browsery has seen more upgrades in the last ten days than at any time under the régime of the previous manager.

Thin smiles

I was at a branch reopening. I think it was Gladstone. I look up and I see I’m about to bump into Jane Pyper.

Thin smile. “Hi, Joe,” she says.

I say hi and offer the usual congratulations. You know, I continue, when you hit your 100th branch it’s going to be a really big deal.

It will be? she asks with a stone face. Yeah, I tell her, explaining that 100 is a highly symbolic figure. And you’re gonna need to throw a way bigger party for that one, I tell her. I want you to book Aerosmith.

Thin smile.

What else Mike Foderick isn’t

Apart from a lobbyist.

• Vice-chair of a Library Board that negotiated a new contract without strike action

• Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler

• Able to secure funding for increased open hours

• Able to avoid reduction in collections budget

• Absent from improper list of incumbent mayor’s preferred board and agency candidates

• A demonstrated regular library borrower

• Able to follow discussions of self on the Internet

• Unassailable

I’m basically going to stop complaining about the Reference Library Browsery for a while after having been actually listened to – a first – by its new manager.