more on lockers

Essentially the issue with the lockers (i.e. at the SLV – see below) is that there aren’t enough of them, you have to pay for them, and it can take time finding free ones. I think those are the three main problems.

Basically, the area at the front of the SLV where once you would go to leave your bag and be given a token which would tell the bagchecker where the bag was, is now a cavernous hall half filled with lockers arranged in open-ended squares. Each bank of lockers, three high from memory and three banks per square of course, has a touch screen that enables access to a locker.

First problem is that if you have a lot of locker users, some whole banks of lockers may be booked out, a fact that is not immediately obvious until you spend time interfacing with the screen (which itself may involve queuing). So you may have to go to a few screens to find a bank of lockers with free lockers.

Second problem is you have to pay, which just sucks.

Third problem is there is a little area between the main part of the locker and the locker door which, for some reason, cannot have anything in it or the locker will malfunction. Being the tetchy shit I am, I can never see the reminder not to let things stray into this space without being reminded of one of my first experiences of these lockers, when I could not get the locker to open and had to get assistance from, you guessed it, an assistant. As she opened the locker with a thingummy she told me that what had probably happened was some part of my bag or whatever I had in the locker (actually it was a dismembered baby’s head) had strayed across the line. When she opened the locker, it was clear that this had not happened and my stuff was stashed securely up the back of the locker. Nevertheless little miss smugarse (or, to use her official title, Little Miss Smugarse) saw fit to point to the line and to inform me that things could not cross it or the locker doors would not open. No wonder I hate those shitty rubbish lockers when I get patronised meaninglessly like that.

I know this all comes back to a character fault I have previously identified in myself, that I feel like I own the library because I have been going there since I was a pre-teen (also it was where I wrote Monkey Grip). So that I really should have a gold card access allowing me special privileges in the library and the executive washroom and the executive sharps deposit box. But it also comes down to a character fault easily identifiable in the library, via which commercial enterprises are allowed to leech onto an enterprise that should by rights be allowed entirely to fund all its services through the perfectly rational and reasonable tithing of the mentally ill (i.e. gamblers) rather than tugging at the change purses of ordinary decent taxpayers, blah blah I’ll stop now.