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Re: Archival humour



Some of these were right on the mark, especially:
>
> 8. The appearance on your desk of an old, cardboard grocery carton full of
> soiled papers, with a cabinet just visible at the top sends your heart
> racing.
>
> 9.  You see the obituary of a prominent Canadian, and the first question
> in your mind is "who gets the papers?"
>
> 10. You have a graduate degree and are paid about the same as the
> 22-year old who repairs your computer.
>

Number 10 is oh-too-painfully true; the story I always tell regarding
#9 is about the Tater Tot King; one day a few years ago I was
looking in the obituaries and there was one for a guy in Idaho who
was notable for being the person who invented Tater Tots, that
extruded food made of potato parts that is consumed by zillions of
kids, at least down here.  So I told the paper folks (I was by then in
charge of photos and films) and urged them to contact the family,
after a suitable mourning period of course--although there's a fine
line, how soon is too soon, and what if they decided to ease their
pain by ridding the house of reminders of the dear departed?  So at
my urging my colleagues finally did contact the family, and to
shorten a story, ended up with quite a bit of papers and a donation
to help process them!  The only bad part was in the course of this, I
told my oldest daughter how tater tots were made and what
"extruded" meant, and she refuses to touch them to this day.

Or maybe that's a good thing,


Roy Webb, C.A.
Multimedia Archivist
Special Collections
J. Willard Marriott Library
295 South 1500 East
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah   84112
(801) 585-3073  //  fax (801) 585-3976
rwebb@library.utah.edu

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