Here in Exotic Research City, there is an important archive. In this important archive, there is a Very Grouchy Archivist.
I´m sure many of you have encountered the VGA before. He or she seems to delight in snarling, denying you documents, and generally refusing to be helpful. If you get something wrong, she or he barks at you. VGA here has yelled at me before -- I mean really, really yelled -- for a rather minor infraction (followed him into his office when I was supposed to wait outside). Otherwise, he has mostly ignored me. I´ve been told that he dislikes both women and Americans,** as groups. Fortunately, other personnel here have been generally helpful.
Yet, for the past three days, VGA has been positively friendly towards me. Helpful, accomodating, all that. And it wasn´t that he was having a good week, because I heard him out in the hallway on Thursday, yelling at someone for 3 full minutes. But to me he´s been nothing but kind lately. For example, when I made a petition to see one of the normally inaccessable documents, he came upstairs after it was delivered to him, and when he saw it was me, he said "Oh, it´s you who requested this" -- but he said it in a good way. He even smiled at me once.
I am officially suspicious of this behavior.
**Although I´ve been told that he despises French researchers even more than American ones.
10 comments:
I finally figured out the key to the Bodleian's infamous BBB on my third research trip there: Tell him something he doesn't know (which ain't easy). After that he was polite and occasionally friendly.
Maybe you did that with your VGA?
Very weird, but maybe his reason for treating you differently is completely innocuous. I wouldn't worry too much.
Sounds like you are in!
He's possessed. Go with it.
;)
How odd. Perhaps unbeknownst to you, you've managed to pass some mysterious initiation rite?
I suspect it has something to do with initiation rituals--you came back, you survived the first round, you're tougher than he thought, and as a returnee, you are no longer the lowest on the totem poll. But don't take if for granted--they can still turn on you if you presume too much.
I think Bavardess may be onto something here: When I saw him the first time this visit (my sixth or seventh to this archive), the subject came up that I (finally) have a book coming out, and that I would of course be mentioning the particular archive and its personnel in the acknowledgements, since more than half of my documents had come from there. Perhaps I am now, finally, a real scholar.
How nice. Maybe VGA has seen too many people come and go? Anyway, when I was doing dissertation research, I was working through some files that were not in great shape. What the archivists would do sometimes was to put particularly fragile pieces in tissue paper, then tell me not to touch it, but I could read it. Then they would label the box "unfit for production". If I wanted to make up references, no one could ever check them...
He's going to turn you into soup.
It occurs to me that he might be taking you seriously now that you've shown up multiple times. I've noticed working in Spain that sometimes they don't take you seriously until you've showed up like 5 days in a row; then you become a 'regular'. It's great that he's being helpful now - but how frustrating generally that one gets documents (or not) depending on how the archivist feels about you on any given day! Man, writing this makes me miss the archives! (PS I'm the anon from over at historiann - it does sound like we've worked in the same archive!)
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