Working at a small school with deeply ingrained vocabulary and a student population of only a couple thousand, you get pretty used to the way email questions look and feel when they come from students. So this morning when I opened a message and it just felt off, somehow, I took a minute to do a little investigating. The email I’d received said:

Dear Ms. Jastram,
I am doing some research on colonial Latin American literature for my honors thesis and I came across a book that just came out this year and our library does not have it yet.  The title is: __El discurso colonial en textos novohispanos: espacio, cuerpo y poder__ by Sergio Rivera-Ayala (Tamesis, 2009; ISBN:9781855661790) Is it possible to purchase it?

Regards,
[name],
Senior Student
Carleton College

First of all, our seniors do “comps” not “honors theses.” Second, they tend to assume that we know them by their senior years (which we generally do), so the signature seemed odd. And finally, it’s very rare for students to request books here, just generally, unless we’ve already exhausted our InterLibrary Loan options.

The kicker came when the registrar confirmed that we have no such student enrolled here.

Apparently someone is hoping to drum up sales for this book by impersonating students. And here I thought those handwritten letters from authors were a bit much… This is another whole level of “a bit much.”

Several years ago I met Greg Schwartz at my very first Computers in Libraries conference, and I’ve had the pleasure of renewing that acquaintance at various conferences and online venues since then. (If any of you ever get the chance, I highly recommend being acquainted with him.) Back when I first met him I marveled over how many people he knew. I quickly found that if I hung out with him, I’d meet half the people at whatever conference we were attending and have a blast doing it. This was true even though I’m normally pretty bad at meeting new people and am usually uncomfortable doing so.

Last year I got to hang out with him more than once, and I started to notice a pattern: he’d enter a space, scan for people he didn’t know, and go strike up easy conversation with them. Incredible. This is precisely the opposite way I normally enter a room. But he never seemed to come out of these encounters the worse for wear, so clearly it wasn’t as dangerous as it looked… so I decided to try it at my next social function. I entered the room, told myself to be Greg, and introduced myself to someone I’d never met.

Lo and behold, the trick works. It’s pretty tiring, but I haven’t died from the experience yet, and in fact I’ve met quite a few people. Not everyone was destined to become my nearest and dearest friend, but the encounters have all gone relatively well. Now, every time I have to go into a situation where there will be lots of people (particularly people I don’t know) I take a minute before entering the room to channel my inner Greg.

Little by little over the years I’ve met many people I admire and like, and I’ve tried to take their best qualities into myself. I channel a couple of my co-workers when I need to be thoughtful about instruction or negotiate politically charged situations. I channel Steve when I try to move beyond thinking “that might be a good/funny/important thing to do/say” to actually doing or saying it. I channel my dad when I need to deal with difficult people. And the list goes on and on and on. I rarely live up to my models’ examples, but I usually do a whole lot better than I would have otherwise.

On my best days, I’m a patchwork quilt of all the best parts of all the people I’ve gotten to know over the years. And that includes many, many of you. Thank you.