For others

I was chatting to Dau.I The Book the other day. For a read-all kid, she's done well for herself and was about to move to a new branch of the Dublin Library service. She was in reflective mood, and mentioned that, a while back, she'd brought in a reasonably compendious bicycle repair kit and left it behind the desk. I thought that was a brilliant example of mission-creep: if The Man wants us all to leave the car at home and travel healthy, then it's a good idea to allay people's anxiety about getting a puncture far from home. Why not have Libraries, a public facing, widely distributed, open in the evenings (someplaces, sometimes) the place where cyclists can fix a puncture?

I was running ahead of the intention a little here, because the spanner and tire-patches were primarily for co-workers, 50% of whom arrived most days by bike. Nevertheless I thought that kit was pretty cool as an unexpected contribution to the common good. Others please copy? 

The apple falleth not far from the tree?  Shortly after we returned to Ireland in 1990, I needed a screw-driver at work. There wasn't one to be found. The next Monday I brought in a rackful of different varieties of that handy implement. Being me, I added an ironic label "The Bob Memorial Screwdriver Rack". Over the next several years, all of these tools found irregular use among my co-workers: fixing bikes; putting up shelves; opening paint-tins. I can't remember which end-of-contract clean-out brought the rack home [as L in a dark  corner of the tool-shed], I'd happily have left it.

I did leave my privately collected [beg borrow steal indent-in-triplicate] co-worker-available key rack behind when I wrapped up at The Institute in 2020. Those keys were all 'owned' by particularly needy colleagues and the one-stop-shop for keys to all the labs on the science corridor was thrun in the dustbin of history. It's like the flapjacks I made on the irreg'lar through my eight years at The Institute. They all got ate. Several people said thanks; several asked for the recipe; to the nearest whole number, zero people reciprocated with home-made anything in any month while I worked there.

Didn't ever turn me churlish and huff off about the one-wayness of the cookie traffic, though. If you start thinking about such small-small t'ings as being transactional you'd be tempted to stop. And then where would we be? Flapjackless! . . .and having better teeth, probably.