It's Always More Complicated

Okay, I will concede that AITA reveals previously unplumbed Things In Woodsheds.... that I think might boggle even Aunt Ada Doom.

But honestly, this one.

He asked me if him and his girlfriend could use my house to give birth at. I didn't even know what he was getting at at first but he explained to me that their apartment doesn't have a bathtub, is too small for an inflatable pool* and it would attract too much attention if the birth was there and the neighbors will likely call the authorities.

But quite apart from wondering what is going through these people's minds that they are worrying about the neighbours calling the authorities and not all the things that can go wrong during childbirth????!!!! -

- there is also present a theme that recurs in these posts of people making, as if it is quite reasonable, the most unwarrantable demands upon family members/friends/room-mates/fellow-students/co-workers. Because I really do not think it is An Okay Thing to ask your brother or sister to give up their house (when you, the other sibling, do not have a des res yourself capable of accommodating a birthing-pool) for the duration, and doing what appears to be pouting when he expresses qualms, and their mother going 'awww, be nice' (doesn't explicitly invoke 'sharing' but I am reminded of those 'we will let your sibs/stepsibs run amok with your possessions because Sharing Is Good' complaints).

Are they going to pay for any clean-up necessary after the event, we wonder?

*Which we strongly suspect is just a kiddie's paddling pool and not a proper birthing pool, anyone up to take a bet?

Have been feeling grouchy all week, in fact this probably dates back to last week, and I could doubtless attribute some of this to still not feeling quite the thing, trying to get back into exercising and finding that really modest amounts knock me out, plus, possibly incubating a cold...

But I depose that it is infuriating if, several weeks ago, when being solicited to contribute a blog post for A Particular Day, you suggested that your colleague had just informed you of a nifty thing that had recently been digitised which could form the basis of a highly relevant post -

- and that when you are, not exactly with a merry song on your lips, sitting down to doing the late-evening opening stint of supervising rare materials users, just before the long bank holiday (which was chiz, chiz, enuff in itself, no?)

- you receive an email saying can you do this for next Tues, which is the Particular Day in question -

- and point out that, hello, long bank holiday weekend, colleague is away for the next week, but you will do your best to try to hustle something up on Tuesday morning in spite of this inadequate notice -

- and you do that thing and get it in by lunchtime -

- and then they get back to you saying O HAI, decided to go with someone else's Particular Day-relevant post -

- no?

On top of which, various demands via academia.edu and elsewhere for copies of either ancient, ancient papers of mine, or for copy of a book which only came out in the last few years and is still in print and widely available.

Okay, I am aware of that thing about people trying to retain a foothold in academe and not having access to journals and generally unsatisfactory libraries for research purposes, and I sympathise.

But I do not think it appropriate to expect somebody to upload to academia.edu a book which is a textbook in a series from a major scholarly publisher, rather than a self-published treatise, amirite? Major scholarly publisher might just get somewhat pissed off.

Also, if it is an article or chapter, it is not necessarily a moment's matter to send it. Somebody asked me for the full version with refs of a piece that's on my website, and while I did have a file of this, it was nearly 20 years old, did eventually convert into a recent version of Word, but although it has all the refs, had lost the numbers. No, I was not going to faff to put them in, because, really, I've addressed pretty much most of the matter in that paper in published works.

I was prepared to scan a chapter of mine from a book that came out in the mid-90s, until I discovered that it was Harvard references, i.e. synoptic cites in brackets in the text, to full details in a consolidated bibliography for the entire volume at the end. This one I couldn't even find the old word-processed file.

But even when I do happen to have a scanned version already, and bop it off to the requester, do I get a thank-you? do I hell.

Today I was doing the Saturday shift - at least it was the LAST, yay. One reader arrived nice and early, unfortunately had ordered their material just that bit too late yesterday for it to have been produced, ooops; and then nothing until just gone 5 minutes before closing time, when I had already locked everything up, someone comes in saying they've just joined the library, didn't realise when we closed on Sats (what is the info on the website for, I ask?) could they just glance quickly...?

In the empty hours between I was fuming over the latest iteration (something like the 4th round) of the Why Did I Agree To Do This? chapter, the one with extremely tight word limits but nonetheless the editors keep coming back and asking for bits to be further developed, additional refs to the literature, etc.

It's none of it the end of the world or massively serious, but boy is it irritating, especially cumulatively like this, grumble, grumble, grouch.

I suddenly (it seems suddenly, anyway) have a whole cluster of Stuff happening in the last couple of weeks of February and the first couple of weeks of March.

Partly this is due to confluence of work-related events in which I am involved, and personal academic-interest related events, which are all, of course, being organised by people who are not in consultation with one another. Not to mention person finally coming back to me about a conference they approached me about last September and then went so silent I wondered if it was happening at all, asking for a title, stat.

Plus, a person on my kinship network asking me to do something with an end of Feb deadline.

I can haz AAAAAAAAARGH???

Not being able to go to the Springtime in the Rockies conference is looking more and more like a relief rather than a disappointment (at least, I am disappointed, but am more and more thinking that this is a year in which I do not need that extra hassle).

At least a couple of these things don't seem to require me to write a formal paper, just to engage in Learned Exchanges with other scholars.

Nonetheless:

AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHH.

It's annoying enough when people I know (from really close friends to people who only know me as a name on a mailing list), who are aware of where I work, get in touch in the hope that I will do some library research for them, given the facilities I have access to. The annoyingness does vary: doing a quick search on online Oxford DNB for specific person for close friends whose institutions are too tight to subscribe, no problem, checking a rather complex specialised printed biographical resource with rather scanty info to go on, for someone I've never met, really rather a problem.

But what peeves me even more is when people say 'could you get somebody' in Library to do whatever it is. A) I don't have minions, I have colleagues, and B) even if I did have minions at my beck and call, I probably wouldn't want to be asking them to do something that is way beyond (because of complexity, time consuming nature, vagueness of info provided, etc) what we would normally do as a remote enquiry. Except perhaps as a personal favour and I'd be reluctant to call in these very often.

So I end up doing these tasks myself, feeling snarky ('So, why didn't you take down exact references/dates when you did the initial research?').