Induction and recall

My Favorite Librarian MFL was working for The City all through Coronarama. With all the branches closed, a lot of her colleagues were on furlough: you can't re-shelve the returns if nobody has taken any books out this year. But someone still had to make out the pay-dockets each week and, for various reason of accident and happenstance, that someone was MFL. Which was all good experience [if she ever wants to be a protestant, that Work Ethic 101 will be handy, like] and being there built up a fund of goodwill through the service. Earlier this year, there was a much delayed round of promotions, and that commitment, competence and banked goodwill paid off as an extra letter MFSL (S for Senior) in her job title and a bit more wonga in the pocket. The next step in her rise, and Rise, is to complete her MLIS [Masters in Library and Information Studies] research thesis which will qualify her for the next promotional stage. My ambition genes were shot off in the war; so it's nice to see other people doing things differently.

If I actually know you, dear reader, I may pull on your coat later to complete the survey, the answers to which will be the bulk of the data analysed for the MLIS.

My current ear-book is A Life in Trauma by Chris Luke [blurb] a/the long-time consultant in Emergency Medicine at Cork University Hospital. Dude saved A Lot of lives while toiling at the bloody coal-face of critical care in Dublin, Edinburgh, Liverpool and Cork. I'll get round to reviewing the whole book later. One of the tips and tricks that he attempted implement on his watch was to take an extra 2 minutes at the end of each treatment to write down on a card: a) what the trouble had been b) what A&E had done about it and thrust that into the hand of the patient on discharge [to home, a ward-bed, ICU or the streets as appropriate (*)]. The reasoning is that normal folks are too stressed to hear what the doctor has to say, not least if it includes words never heard before: 

• "scaphoid"? 
• "pyrexia of unknown origin (PUO)"? 
• "contusion of the zygomatic arch w/o fracture"?

Last w/e we were chatting à la zoom to The  Librarian MFL about working at the book-face in a branch library. A colleague was held up as exemplary because when a new customer registered for a library card, he was careful to elaborate all the wonders to which the card entitled them. Not just borrowing books and looking at the newspapers, you may be sure: libraries embrace a far wider range of services nowadays. Triggered by my recent book, I suggested that a word-tsunami of available services could well be a wash [wash-over; TMI!; wash-out; waste of time]. Why not, I said, make a little credit-card sized executive summary of Library Services in bullet-points and a readable font?

Why not, chimed in The Beloved, design a book-mark with the same information?!

High-fives all round!!

(*) It is never appropriate to discharge a sick or injured person back to the streets but it happens every day - because Capitalism.