Apples, pecking order and party

It looks like we are in for another steep learning curve.  Our supervisor is coming from Canada on Monday  and he is ‘going to fix things’.   Guess he might start by picking up the apples that fell out of my apple cart.

We got our results back and there are three items that need fixed.  They are called ‘tif’ files and I really have no idea just what they are.  Each of the books that we took apart to digitize is the proud owner of one ‘tif’ file, but the numbers that the reviewer gave for each of the files, exceeds the number of the last page that we digitized.  So, I guess we are in for a steep learning curve and there was nothing in the Black Book about ‘tif’ files.  So where do we go from here?  It takes courage and faith for this one.

 "Faith in something greater than ourselves enables us to do what we have said we'll do, to press forward when we are tired or hurt or afraid, to keep going when the challenge seems overwhelming and the course is entirely uncertain."
~Gordon Hinckley

We also did not receive our shuttle back this week.  Perhaps it is in a FedEx truck trundling through the center of the USA trying to find Maine.   Someone should tell him that Maine is pretty, green, lots of rain, rivers, ponds, lakes and miles of shoreline that  entertains the Atlantic Ocean each time it is high tide and anxiously awaits its return during low tide.  It’s the place with Lobster spelled Lobstah!

In any leadership position there is always someone higher up to help keep the lower echelon in line.  It appears, from my experience, that it matters little what error was committed, there is always someone higher up who suffers reprimand for the lower echelon performance and so he takes out his frustrations on the ones lower that he – mostly because he can.  I can illustrate this from a cartoon that I found soon after I arrived in Japan.  It shows a series of fish swimming in the water.  The really big one I labeled as the Mission President, the next one was representative of the Mission Assistants, then comes the Zone Leaders, then the district leaders, then the senior companion and the last fish is the tiniest of all and he is the newly arrived greenie or green bean as he/she was called in Japan.  Thus the hapless little fish is the recipient of the collective frustrations and is usually at a loss to filter out just what was the problem in the first place.  Sometimes we feel the same way doing this digitizing here in Maine.

In the poultry farm genre, it is called Pecking Order and is alive and well in just about any group of people we care to join or study.  The way to get to the top is called Politics which is something like playing Wizards Chess in Harry Potter or even a rousing game of Quidditch – watch out for the Bludgers.

The office staff in the Archives are going to have a Christmas party lunch next Wednesday.  I thought it was going to be a pot luck, but Art the Archiver says that they are planning to call out for the food.  To the uninitiated, calling out means you call the restaurant and if they have delivery, it gets delivered (don’t forget to cross the delivery boy’s palm with silver) or you can go and pick it up yourself.  In any case, he wants to have ‘pulled pork’ which is loaded with bar-b-q sauce in this town.

I am sad that Anne will not be there.  It is the day of the anniversary of her husband’s passing last year. This is a very hard time of year for her.