Who you’d rather not see in a library, is the fire brigade. First, there was an annoying smell, then an annoying noice: smoke had set off the fire alarm at the end of my day of work in the library. The most likely source was an overheated copy machine, not your average fire hazard. What if this had happened after I’d left from work? The fire brigade would have been alerted and have turned up anyway. They had arrived within a couple of minutes on this occasion, so what. The most annoying thing, however, is that the next day the copy machine repair man couldn’t find any trace of overheating, let alone fire, and refused to take the machine away. “There is no precedent for this in any of our machines”, so it didn’t happen. I know it did. Every day since, I have pulled the plugs on the machine, even if I wasn’t working myself, just to be on the safe side. A machine will never put trust in you, unless you pay it the attention it’s due.
