On Monday, March 8, the Catalog Dept. mail boxes in the central corridor of the Galvez modular collapsed. They had been mounted to partitions along the wall of the corridor, but the partitions had not been secured to the wall. As no one was hurt and the situation has been corrected, we can now look back on the episode with some amusement:

     Jean Kan was showing Brian Kunde where to leave materials going out to the branches by I.D. mail. They left "Arnold Schonberg, 1874-1951: Lebensgeschichte in Begegnungen", a huge folio volume destined for Music Cataloging, in the appropriate mailbox and turned to leave. Whether that large volume, the fact that boxes of computer paper had been removed recently (were they propping-up the partitions?), or the fact that it was Monday, as Richard Blute suggested, or a combination of some or all of these, caused the mishap is hard to say.

     In any event, the whole line of mail boxes tipped over with a resounding crash. Attempting to stop them from tipping over was like arguing with an elephant. In their descent, the mail boxes took out three empty card-catalog cabinets and tore away part of the rubber baseboard. The wreckage completely blocked the corridor between the Copy Cataloging and Catalog Maintenance sections. Staff flocked to see what had happened, but the diversion was cleared away within 15 minutes and, on Tuesday, Bains Moving staff rebuilt and, this time, bolted the mailboxes to the wall. (By the way, the Schonberg volume came through unscathed.)