Groundhog Day

Ooh look, it's Monday all over again. Dump this, mail off that, take this to the cleaners --- didn't I do all this yesterday? All the places I called and left messages for are now calling me back ---- unfortunately, while I was driving to school. Nothing like the tension of "oooh, I have to get that, now!" while changing lanes on the freeway and knowing you're still 10 minutes away from your destination. Luckily, I can call them back.

And it wouldn't be the same thing all over again if I wasn't once again thwarted, although this time only at some turns, not every turn. I have dumped stuff at school and used the grad lounge for database access. Except... why can I not get this object? Ok, way back when I perused things for the diss, I had to use their microfilms for this object. And I spent a month of one summer reading through everything and printing lots of shit (luckily, they were instituting new printer/scanners and had not yet figured out how to attach the copy card reader to them for payments, so I just printed all sorts of piles of interesting crap for free. Back when I sent the "final" edits for this article, they wanted me to confirm some things, and I know I came in here and voila, discovered that they had digitized my archive. But now I cannot find it anywhere on line.

And to make things worse, when I just went to talk to the microfilm people, they disavowed any knowledge of my microfilms. After much bitching at them and asserting that I knew what I was talking about, they admitted that yes, perhaps they owned microfilms of them in the past, but the definitely do not now. (Dude, I remember using your microfilm readers for a month straight. Do not imply that I am stupid or cannot remember back five years!) They have been doing a huge purge of microfilms in recent years as stuff gets digitized. WTF??? But then where and how do I access my digitized stuff? I could swear that back in March I just went zip, zip and there I was looking at pages I needed. Now the journal wants me to verify exactly where the break across pages comes and I cannot for the life of me figure out how I checked it last time. Unless I am imagining this memory and just randomly made up page numbers and breaks? Arrrrgh!

I do have my photocopy pile (see why I do not throw things out???), but I know the problem I had in the past was that I was very sloppy with scanning full pages and did not always catch page numbers or the very bottom of the text columns, just the parts I thought I was going to write about. If this is a lesson to anyone about to do diss research, it is that you can not be too anal about documenting where and what you are looking at. Unless it's the lesson that stupid people are going to eliminate all your microfilms when you are not looking. Again, arrrrrgh!