Words (almost) fail me

Loyal readers (all two of you) may recall I volunteer at the local historical society museum. As part of my volunteer duties, I let myself get suckered into serving as the Secretary. That in turn means I get to tote around the museum's Tracfone. Don't recall if I ever mentioned it before, but the museum got rid of its land line a few years ago when we realized that (a) most of the time that phone would be ringing in an empty building (when open hours add up to barely 8 hours a week you know there's not going to be anyone there to answer it), (b) even when we were there if it did ring it was basically a personal call for whichever volunteer happened to be on that day or a telemarketer, and (c) it was costing almost $1,000 annually. Granted, the phone service did include Internet but we almost never used it.

We did the math and figured out that if we invested in the best smart phone Shopko had in stock for Tracfone at the time we could cut the phone expenses by at least 75 percent annually, maybe more. Then we learned we could transfer the landline number to a mobile, and that was that. Changing the phone number had been the one thing making us hesitate. So back in 2016 we made the switch. When the museum is open the cell phone stays at the museum for the use of whichever volunteer is there. When it's not, it lives with the Secretary. Me.

Minor digression. One of the advantages of the cell phone is we were able to get a Square so now we can take plastic for payments. No more listening to visitors say "I'd love to buy this book but I don't have enough cash." Not a problem, we say, and people either whip out the Mastercard or start to stammer. Fun for us either way.

Anyway, I do tend to check the cell phone daily. It has the EBay and Amazon Seller apps so I can see at a glance if the museum has sold anything (we sell stuff that doesn't fit into the museum's mission on EBay and new and used books through Amazon). I can also see if anyone has left a voice mail.

So yesterday the phone said new voice mail. It was midday, more or less. What do I hear? Someone asking for a special tour, one by appointment, for her group. They had just gotten into town, were here only for the weekend, and were wondering if someone could meet them at the museum basically ASAP. What the. . .?? On our website we do say "by appointment." We also say it on the sign on the door. The sign on the door says "seven days advance notice." The website isn't quite as specific, but what do people think "by appointment" means? You don't call a doctor's office and say you'd like an appointment for five minutes from now.

I am kind of wondering just who she thought was going to answer the phone when the museum was closed. But that's a different issue.

I am happy the phone was turned off when the person actually called. Otherwise the caller might have gotten to hear "Are you fucking kidding me? It's a gorgeous sunny Saturday in July and you expect one of our volunteers to drop everything immediately? Hell no."

Would I have tried to set something up for them if  there had been more than a few minutes notice? Maybe. I've been kind of losing patience with the public recently so it's a toss-up. I'm still liking doing the cataloging, but for sure my tolerance for humans is dropping rapidly.

There are days when I admire my self-restraint

Yesterday was one of them.

We recently had a person walk into the museum to volunteer. She's in Baraga temporarily, her spouse is on a short term assignment, she accompanied him and discovered living in a motel room for a month can get boring fast. So she stopped by the museum and asked if there was anything she could do. Of course we said yes. There's always the boring stuff like cleaning fingerprints off display cases and swiftering the floors. And she's literate, which suggested she could help with tasks like proofreading the finding aids or doing whatever the equivalent of ground truthing the finding aids against the actual files might be called. We've got her help for a few more days; she leaves Baraga on Friday.

The finding aids, incidentally, aren't true finding aids quite yet. They're a work in progress. The first step in creating any finding aid is figuring out just exactly what you have. Once you know that, then you can decide the best way to organize things, what categories would be most appropriate, and what is actually worth keeping and what can go into the round file. Back in 2012 when the whole finding aid project began there was nothing, no guide whatsoever to what might be lurking in the "archives." The vertical files were a mess. Not only were things stuck into folders rather randomly, there were two sets of filing cabinets: "Jim's stuff" and the files anyone was free to dig into. It wasn't a huge amount of material -- a total of 17 file drawers in all -- but it was a mess.

Since then, working at it for a few hours at a time one or two days a week I've gone through the files, merged Jim's stuff with everything else, and created an index that now runs about 300 pages long and is still growing. If someone walks into the museum now and wants to know if we have anything on a particular subject, we can pull a 3-ring binder off the shelf and tell them to take a look. It's far from done, definitely still a work in progress, but for sure it qualifies as better than what we had before. Once it's been cleaned up a little more, I'll convert it to a PDF and throw it up on the museum website, but that's probably not going to happen until next year. Before I do that, there are categories that need to moved around, stuff that needs to be either condensed into one file or expanded into multiples, and a reconciliation done between what's in the Archives on PastPerfect and what's listed in the finding aids.

I also know it's got issues. There are typos. There are inconsistencies in how things were entered as the index/finding aid evolved. For sure it needs a good proofreading because like most people I have a really hard time spotting my own typos and bloopers. So yesterday I made the mistake of asking our newest volunteer if she could do some proofreading.

Major mistake. Turns out the woman is a talker. I had computer stuff to do, some minor (filing the museum's 990-N for the 2016 tax year, which ended for us on June 30), some a little more complicated, and I really did not want any interruptions. No such luck. I thought proofreading would be a nice silent task for her. I told her to just highlight everything she saw that struck her as odd or as an obvious error and not to ask me about every bit of weirdness. No such luck.  Every misplaced piece of punctuation, each inconsistency in style, generated a comment or a question. Lots and lots of commenting on the inconsistencies, way too many suggestions on how we could have done it better, and in general way too much noise coming from that side of the office. You want to annoy a former professional copy editor really fast? Suggest to her that she doesn't know how to do bibliographic entries.

The good news is she's still alive.

The bad news is she's coming back this afternoon to torment me some more. I decided that in the interest of getting at least part of the document proofread I can live with the color commentary.