I'm plenty eager to get out of the swamp that Alabama has turned into these past couple of weeks. Endless rain, temperatures in the mid-eighties. The sun struggles to clear a bit of sky every afternoon but the thick gray clouds are too much for it. We get up every morning to look out the window and see if the lake is splashing over the dock yet.
Twenty-one years ago tomorrow I was at NLM presenting the results of our evaluation of MEDLINE on CD-ROM -- a radically new concept at the time. It was there that I first spoke about the "inept, but satisfied, end-user." I flew straight from DC to Colorado and while sitting on a panel just a couple of days later, heard the woman sitting next to me use the same phrase, which she'd heard "just last week at NLM." It apparently escaped her that she'd heard it from me.
That's when I figured I'd better write it up. The brief essay appeared in Medical Reference Services Quarterly the following spring and has by far the most citations in Web of Science of anything else I've ever written. In Australia a couple of weeks ago, Diane mentioned that she still uses the essay in the classes she teaches. I'm proud of it, and amused. Who'd've imagined that tossed-off phrase would have such staying power?
I'd flown over the Appalachians a few times by then, but I'd never seen the Rockies. In the van on the way from the Denver airport I was quiet, just watching the scenery. My first morning in Breckenridge, when I first opened my eyes, I looked out the window to see the mountains touched by the dawn light. And I lay there, for a long time, without moving, as the light crept up the hills, changing the colors from purple to orange to gold. I hadn't known until that very moment that "purple mountains majesty" wasn't a poetic image. Just a literal description.
It was my second MCMLA meeting and I was beginning to make some of the friendships that have lasted now for decades. That was the year I met MEY on the dance floor. I was wearing a shiny green sharkskin suit and red deck shoes. It is fortunate that few pictures survive from those days.
As far as I knew at the time, I was quite happily married. And yet it was only seven years later that Lynn and I got married at an MCMLA welcome reception (we were even listed in the program). In twenty-two years I've only missed one meeting, choosing to go to Brazil for the ICML congress in 2005. Last year we had to leave Cody early, when the call came about Lynn's mom, but I still count it as having been there.
It's the perfect blend of professional and personal. A few years ago, when I got to the registration table, I found there'd been some kind of a mixup and they'd never received my payment. The woman at the desk gave me the registration packet anyway, saying, "Oh, nevermind. We know you're here every year." Of course.
Comments