The Curse of the Labrador Duck by Glen Chilton

Author:Glen Chilton [Glen Chilton ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443403948
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

EVERYONE IS ENTITLED to a bad day now and then. Once in a while, for reasons completely beyond your control, a day goes wrong from beginning to end. On a morning with an important meeting, your water heater dies without warning and your hair must be washed in cold water in the kitchen sink. Your cat gets sick on the carpet. Your nose begins to bleed for no good reason. Pixies move your car keys from the hall closet where they are placed carefully every day to a dark corner of the laundry room. Not that keys would do you any good because your car has a flat, and the spare tire, checked just last week, is now inexplicably flat too. There is no predicting such days; these things just happen, and you comfort yourself by humming tunes from Broadway musicals. You are a nice person and, being a nice person, you don’t want to make anyone else miserable. But try as you might to keep it all to yourself, your bad day takes on a life of its own, and when you finally get to work, you pass it along. And as long as it doesn’t happen too often, no one really minds.

But when bad days happen to the same person again and again, and that person makes an art form out of passing along their bad mood, a reputation is in the making. Some miserable people lose their friends, and some lose their jobs, but some manage to hang on and pollute their immediate world. In some cases the poisoned atmosphere can linger, even after the poisoner has moved on to new challenges. This is my theory to explain why some workplaces have a reputation for being uncooperative and inefficient year after year. Everyone knows it, but no one knows how to stop it.

The Zoologisches Institut der Universität Tübingen was digging itself out from under a reputation for being uncooperative and inefficient. When I had contacted the museum about ten years earlier, asking about their Labrador Duck, cooperation and efficiency were nowhere to be seen. The response to my first letter warned me that the curator was extremely reluctant to respond to inquiries because of “internationally organized gangs” that had stolen specimens from the museum. I passed along contact details for well-placed persons in the world of ornithology who could vouch for my honorable character, but this effort did not elicit any response. The response to another request two months later explained that I could expect help shortly. In this case, “shortly” meant “never,” and, in the end, I couldn’t even get an acknowledgment that the museum really had a Labrador Duck. Luckily, all of that had changed in the interval, and my new contact, Dr. Erich Weber, was being entirely enthusiastic and cooperative.

The trip from Frankfurt to Stuttgart was on a state-of-the-art ICE train. The interior was painted in soothing shades of blue, green, and aubergine. The WC had a lovely floral scent and was nicer than any I have visited on an airplane.

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