Caveat Lector

Not to make you all endure the entire story, my already-late-night flight to Ruritania got delayed two hours owing to engine trouble, so I arrived at my first day of interviewing more than a little punchy. (And y’all can just guess which toe my carryon decided to slip out of my hands and fall on. Just guess. It’s taped and doing fine, even with the new shoes, which is a minor miracle.)

The gentleman I mentioned in yesterday’s post was actually at the airport to pick me up despite my after-midnight arrival. Now that is above and beyond.

I’m not even going to speculate on how well things went today. I did my little dog-and-pony show (In Which Dorothea Proves She Can’t Stick To Written Notes, More’s The Pity), talked to lots of very nice people, got a sense of the library and the atmosphere, and ate much too much at dinner. (So did everybody else; I wasn’t being a pig, honest.)

Without a sense of the competition, I don’t have enough information to guess, really. (Which is how I’ve been on this all along, nothing new there.) I do think that whoever gets and accepts this job is a very lucky person. It’s definitely a “big” job, a job with lots of scope and lots of room to maneuver. It’s big enough that it makes me feel a little small, though I think some of that is garden-variety new-librarian jitters, and rather more of it is being used to taking small jobs and making them big jobs, rather than being presented with a big job at the get-go.

I can’t say too much more that’s specific without accidentally identifying Ruritania, which I still think would be unfair to them so I won’t do it. I will say that it’s a lovely place, both the campus and the surroundings, with a library I was taking lots of mental notes about—there’s not a single sensible trend from the last ten years or so that they haven’t picked up on. (Well, maybe one or two. But it’s truly a stunning library.)

But however this goes—whether they make me an offer or not, whether I accept or not—I’ll never regret having come. I’ve met some great people I hope will become colleagues no matter what happens with this particular process, I’ve had a lovely time, and I really couldn’t be more pleased.