It's Always More Complicated

What is this that this thing is, when, okay, one is aware of all the woozing and grumbling about the various delivery services, but here is the ROYAL MAIL being pretty bad.

Yesterday I had an email saying they had delivered a parcel.

There was no parcel.

I looked at the proof of delivery and behold, that was Not Our Front Door they were sticking it through, it was the wrong colour and one could see the corner of a glass panel (ours is solid wood).

So I went on to their site to try and delve a bit further and, my dears, it is HORRENDOUS, one suspects it is designed to make people Just Give Up.

For example, the 'contact us' link, that actually goes to a 'Help and Support' page that lists a whole range of possible contingencies that one has to sort through to discover one that matches the occasion.

And once I had come across the Advice relating to item (presumably) misdelivered to wrong address, advice was, to contact the sender.

I have no bloody idea who the sender was being as how I was not even expecting a Royal Mail delivery, have been back over my emails and texts and no, I did not receive any previous message involving that particular tracking code.

There is a passing allusion to possible scanning errors.

The only means of contacting them is by phone, and when I tried, and had made my way through the menu options, the wait to speak to a person was 50 minutes.

I am leaving all this pro tem in case a) it was misdelivered and gets put back into the system b) it never actually existed in the first place.

But, really.

And in other, perhaps more minor (?) annoyances of Modern Life, what is this thing that this thing is of 'Cooking Instructions on Back of Label'? that you then have to detach, in the hope that it will actually come off in one piece that one can actually decipher....

ETA Parcel has now turned up, either in today's post or popped through letter box by neighbour to whom it was delivered in error.... Is friend's book I was in anticipation of.

In the course of Current Research I have acquired scholarly (well, that's what it's intended to be, it's issued by a university press, so) edition of a novel by somebody who was Much More Famed For Other Things.

I have not only writ upon This Person, fairly extensively over the years, I have writ specifically on this fairly dreadful novel, which, I may add, I originally read as a photocopy - remember xeroxes??? - of the copy in the university library of person who had asked me to contribute a chapter to an edited volume about it.

Does this get mentioned in the introduction? Is it cited in the bibliography? Is it 'eck.

Introduction also perpetrated Errour that I took issue with in that article and in other places concerning whether V Woolf alluded to the novel in A Room of One's Own - this is a real stretch and I am prepared to bore for Europe on the reasons why your case does not hold up.

So I am in a bit of a miff of outraged vanity here, only slightly mollified by having come across - by doing a spot of due diligence, Unlike Some People, she huffs - two articles about a somewhat obscure novel I'm writing on, one of them, by a strange coincidence, by the very editor of aforementioned edited volume, what're the odds, eh?

(Though, fairly neglected early C20th women writers, actually, it's not that improbable.)

Though people doing The Right Way To Read Books is a perennial Thing, no?

This was a bloke (of course it was a bloke) saying Read all the books you already bought before you buy any more.

I BEG your pardon?

The books I already have are not the books forthcoming from my favourite authors that I am looking forward to.

The books I already bought can sit there until I feel moved to read them, and in a lot of cases I bought them for very miscellaneous reasons - I had heard about them and thought I ought to give them a try Some Day, which has not yet come - possible future research relevance - make-weight volume to make up a promotional 3 for 2 or whatever deal - somebody mentioned the title/author and I was interested enough to pick up a copy but it slid down the actual priority pile - it was on SALE -

(On the latter, I adduce in evidence the copy of V Brittain's The Dark Tide which I have had since time whereof the memory of oursins runneth not, and only finally got round to last week because possible research relevance.)

Books are not interchangeable things.

I suppose that this joyless edict would also preclude re-reading.

What is it with people and reading and DUTY and sucking all the joy out of it? Does he get out of bed practically before he's gone to bed, have a kale smoothie and then do X amount of cardio on a treadmill while consuming an obligatory number of daily pages of READING-STUFF?

Somebody tell him to curl up in the window-seat re-reading something comforting &/or frivolous.

A fairly interesting article on the revival of the Book of the Month Club - not quoting the massively naff headline - but there was one passage when I was going END TIEMZ B HEER!!!:

[T]he Club is fueled partly by an active presence on social media. Members regularly post photographs of themselves — or their pets — with their purchases. Also popular are “book bentos,” artsy photo displays of club books arranged with objects relating to their themes or subjects.

Y O Y???? In the time it takes to do that, you could be reading.

As a palate-cleanser, here is some shelf-porn that seriously presses my button to ring my bell: 16 Floor-to-Ceiling Bookshelves That Will Make Your Jaw Drop. This pretty much gets it (though who are those philistines who have objets d'art in space where they could fit MOAR BOOX?), unlike the various poncey interior design notions I have ranted about over the years, where clearly the persons designing them never read a book and treat the whole question as one of aesthetics.

[Links via umadoshi]

My dear rdrz will have heard me (for lo, they B heering the whingeing on the Moon) rant about certain popular works of history, sometimes by people who have some kind of relevant scholarly credential (and sometimes not) that have the pernicious effect of getting some complete misapprehension into the water.

And sometimes, at least within the scholarly community, you have people who NO BETTER undertaking the somewhat tedious task of historical revisionism (e.g. come on down, Helen King!) and bright or less-bright young things become apprised that you cannot take the popular and much-cited works as gospel, for, lo, they GOT IT RONG or left pertinent facts out, and so on.

The trouble with popular works of history is that quite oft, they fall into the hands of individuals who are perhaps not applying the critical methods that one trained in the discipline would apply, or do not realise that this is just one case in an ongoing debate, and sometimes, o deary deary me, they write plays or produce films (in the case of a certain canard, both) which are claimed to be based on HISTORICAL (or perhaps we should say, HYSTERIKLE) FACT.

I see that somebody has made a play out of Lauren Slater's Opening Skinner's Box (2004): which was, at that time

condemned for perpetuating – or at least failing to refute – the myth that the father of behaviourism, BF Skinner, tested his theories by keeping his infant daughter in an environmentally controlled box.

SIGH.

I thought I'd also posted about one or two egregious examples of playwrights/novelists ripping off historians' work without attribution and letting it be thought it was ORL THEIR OWN WERK, but can't find the posts if so.

I have been besought to contribute to a Radio Programme, the negotiations and arrangements for which are being conducted by an intermediary (Press Officer).

Apparently the actual producer has been trying to contact me -

- BY PHONE -

- on a landline number which I am not currently anywhere near.

Honestly. If you would like to speak to somebody, rather than conduct an exchange entirely in text, could you not EMAIL like a modern person to find out when they are free to chat to you and at what number?

Recording is supposed to be happening on Monday, details not, in fact, communicated to me directly but discovered in an email chain.

***

Also pissed off with the postman, who put a card through my door WITHOUT RINGING THE BELL concerning a parcel I shall now have to retrieve from the sorting office.

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.

Okay, I got to Toronto Pearson in good time and managed to wrastle successfully with the self-check-in machine, except that it printed out the baggage tag from an unanticipated aperture, against which my case was leaning, and this crumpled it to the extent that at bag-drop she printed out another one.

And, oh, it looks so cool to have those free iPads all over the place + charging stations, and I sure do appreciate those, but, O Toronto Pearson, for the best part of the two hours I was sitting there I completely failed to access your free wifi on my own tablet. I would be informed that it was connected, and go to the log-in page, and this would just hang there and not, actually, enable logging in. Bless, I say, the wifi on the Airport Express Bus.

However, I did manage to access a rather good margarita.

But Southern Comfort Reserve no could haz, alas.

I had one of the worst possible seats on the plane - when I did the online checkin, which I did about an hour or so after this had opened, there was absolutely nowhere else I could shift to, woe. I was right at the front of the economy section. As far as I can see, the only, if not entirely insignificant plus to this is being able to make an expeditious exit upon landing.

Otherwise: emergency exit row: check. No seat in front under which I could stash my handbag, so it had to go in the overhead locker, which was quite inconvenient: check. Bang next to the loo: check (perhaps there was some slight upside to this, but on the whole, especially as I was on the aisle seat, not). Opposite the cabin crew area at the front of economy: check. In a draught: check. I.e. all night people coming and going, lights coming on and off, etc etc.

Plus: the seats did not recline.

What with all this + the itching, I am surprised I managed to get even a bare hour's shut-eye.

Nor were my troubles over when I arrived at Heathrow. Somebody nearly went off with my case before realising it was not one pertaining to the group they were with, while I stood there waiting and waiting for it to come round on the carousel. Fortunately I spotted it on the other side where the group were amassing their impedimenta.

Partner had managed to get to Terminal 3 in time to meet me as I got through Customs, but o dear, the Heathrow Express was having a real morning of troubles.

Anyhow, home now, unpacked and two loads of washing accomplished along with various urgent matters of life administration.

Trying to stay upright until it is a reasonable time to go flop.

'The most-awarded single malt whisky in the world'

Awarded, we ask, to whom?

I think you mean 'award-winning'?

And plz not 2 get me started on the insidious creep of 'to gift' as a verb, when there is absolutely nothing wrong with the good old-fashioned 'to give'.

About 2 weeks ago I ordered a book from The Book Depository and foolishly forgot to check the 'do not post to billing address, use this one instead' box, so when I checked the order I perceived that it was winging its way towards my home address.

Allegedly.

Being a paperback it might just have fitted through the letterbox, or at the very least, one would have expected a 'tried to deliver, you were out' card.

Neither of which has eventuated.

I contacted TBD who say the book was indeed dispatched on the date given, check with the Post Office.

Hollo laffter.

The Royal Mail website gives as phone no for the local sorting office (which, as I am sure I have mentioned heretofore, is right at the opposite end of the postal district and inaccessible by public transport) what turns out to be the general PO phone menu line, which leads one a merry infuriating dance through various options none of which quite fit, and the most likely of which simply produces a recorded message of quite remarkable lack of helpfulness. There does not seem to be any option to speak to an actual person, not even staying on the line after a tinny voice mentions that you've failed to hit any of the options offered.

I find a local business directory type site that provides a number for the sorting office, which is either permanently engaged, or, even more likely, off the hook altogether.

So far, so frustrating.

I also have a side-bet on either the book itself, or the 'you wuz out' card having been delivered to same numbered house in parallel road, since we get a certain percentage of their mail in error, and there have been one or two occasions when I suspect our mail went to theirs, and they were away (massively over due date credit card statement).