Alien

Back to work this morning after just a few days away, only to find that some kind of alien craft has crash landed in my library! Our new self-serve machine, all bells, bows and flashing blue lights - very Star Trek! Actually we've had a rather cardboard-boxy model self-serve machine now for some time (this is just an upgrade...) but, despite all the assurances about customer choice and freeing up time for less mundane work, I'm afraid I'm still very much of the mind that the creeping machinization of our services is really just mainly an excuse to cut jobs in the long term, so this feller and I spent the morning eyeing each other up suspiciously...