Caveat Lector

I took the day off from work in hopes of hitting a few museums downtown, or perhaps the zoo, but since the sudden transfer of the Pantanal to the eastern seaboard created a tremendous transit mess in DC today, better I should stay home and pontificate a bit.

I’ve been thinking about my adventures with whuffie. I don’t have as much as I once did, which in itself is a lesson: whuffie is context-dependent, and if the context disintegrates, you can’t always transfer its whuffie to another context. Nobody in libraryland actually cares that I used to be a content and standards developer for ebooks. That’s just the way it goes, with whuffie. Clinging to stale, outdated whuffie only makes you look outdated (and dumb enough to be unaware of it) yourself.

You can also outgrow old whuffie. I took a freelance job that was offered me based on my old ebook whuffie; I said “no” to it several times because that just wasn’t where my heart was any more… but finally I said yes (being nervous about the whole no-job-yet thing), and I shouldn’t have, and it hasn’t worked out well for reasons having nothing to do with them and everything to do with me. The last few pieces of the experience have been so disheartening that I have an invoice for them that’s been hanging fire for months because I don’t have the cojones to send it.

A lesson I should have learned faster than I did is that while being sought out for your whuffie is nifty and flattering, it isn’t always salubrious. I shouldn’t have taken the job Steve Potash offered me; it was offered solely on the basis of my ebook whuffie. Steve didn’t have any plans for me—he didn’t even really know me—and I didn’t have any (practicable) plans for OverDrive. While the whole trainwreck had a lot less to do with Steve than with my inability to cope productively with the horrendously vicious micromanager he had running his conversion department, it wouldn’t have happened at all if I’d been smarter.

So I’m telling you: when you get a neat offer, find out why it’s been offered. Secondhand whuffie, the “I’ve heard of you!” syndrome, is insufficient reason to accept, even (perhaps especially) if you’re desperate. Mismatched expectations (on both sides) make huge messes.

To make that concrete—I’m cool when somebody says “I’ve been reading CavLec for ages, and love it!” Anybody who can read CavLec for years and still like me pretty much has to be my kind of person. No comment on whether my kind of person is a good person or a bad person—you’ll assuredly find folks who’ll take either side of that question. But my kind of person isn’t likely to be shocked rigid at sight of me, or put off by my general style, or wholly unaware of my take on things. My kind of person and I are likely to get along famously and do good things for each other.

“You were recommended to me by X,” however, needs a little work. Did this person actually check me out? What does s/he actually know about me? Is s/he just looking for a warm body with basic articulatory skills? (Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing in whuffie-driven academic librarianship; I just like to know first.) Fundamentally, am I there because I know something, or because my name supposedly lends lustre? I distrust the latter motivation. Your mileage may vary.

One positive about academic conferences is that the review process dilutes the role of whuffie in the system. Sure, it doesn’t hurt to have a big name when you’re submitting a paper proposal—but it doesn’t count for everything, either. A good paper by a relative nobody can and does get heard.

In a way it’s rather nice to be starting over again on the whuffie scale. I can be reasonably certain that such offers as I get these days are genuine, and the friends I am making in the profession will be my friends a long time. I do have a couple-three friends from ebook days still, but a lot of those relationships, I now see, were superficial at best.

So be careful of whuffie. It occasionally bites.