 Hello and welcome to the third annual mistakes session formally titled a failure shared is not a failure learning from our mistakes. My name is Rebecca Gridley and I am joined today by my dear co organizers, Kari Rainer and Tony Siegel. Full disclosure, due to technical difficulties, both my introduction and our first presentation have been re-recorded and the remainder of the session has been edited. Kari, Tony and I, along with our presenters, are speaking to you from across the US and even from the UK. I would like to begin by acknowledging that the land on which I am standing is the territory of the Mohican, Golden Hill Pogusit and Wappinger peoples. I would like to thank them for their strength and resilience in stewarding this land and its waterways through the generations. For me, one bright spot in these very strange times has been the opportunity to explore these local landscapes with my family. Kari, Tony and I are very excited to be going virtual with the mistakes session today and to bring this event to the wider AIC membership. This is our third year organizing the session and I would like to take a quick moment to introduce how it came to be. In 2017, inspired in part by an article by Michelle Marin-Cola and Sarah Maisie, Kari organized a webinar for ECPN on the subject of preventing and learning from mistakes as an emerging conservation professional. Tony was one of the speakers, sharing a few of his own mishaps from over the years. However, as we all know, lifelong learning is an integral part of our profession and mistakes aren't just made by those who are new to the field. So with the momentum from the webinar, we wanted to provide a broader venue where we could share and discuss our mistakes on a regular basis and normalize this discussion. Thus was born the mistakes session introduced ahead of the 2018 Houston meeting in an article in AIC News. These sessions have had a confessional, cathartic and collegial tone with both humorous and emotional presentations by brave colleagues who have shared treatment errors, managerial mishaps and those disastrous accidents that we shudder to hear about, all with the goal of helping the rest of us to avoid repeating them. We found that a cash bar was a key ingredient to success in our inaugural session. So, while we are tuning in from different time zones today, I'd like to point out that it's Friday and it is five o'clock somewhere. So I invite you to raise a glass to your colleagues and to your own mistakes as we move through the session. Several of our speakers will be sharing cocktail recipes. I am drinking a chenar negroni, a twist on my favorite cocktail. Chenar is a bittersweet artichoke liqueur and is used as a substitute for traditional compari. In this spirit, pun intended, we have abandoned traditional speaker introductions and instead asked our presenters to share some fun facts about themselves along with a recommendation to help you pass the time phase of social distancing. I'll start us off. In my short-lived ballet career, I danced in the nutcracker at Lincoln Center for two years as a child. My recent favorite read is also New York centric, rules of civility by Amor Towles whose other novel, A Gentleman in Moscow is also excellent and particularly relevant these days as the main character is under house arrest. My co-organizer, Kari Rainer, has recently gotten more ambitious with her baking. Favorite treats that she's made so far include cinnamon date sticky buns and Meyer lemon bars. She's also rediscovered a love of mystery novels and especially recommends the crime series by Tana French, set in Dublin. Tony Siegel recommends reading Georgette Hire's Regency Romances by Candlelight and enjoys taking long romantic walks in the basement. In between giving Zoom talks, he and his wife Jennifer spend time in the yard communing with the birds on the feeder and laughing at the squirrels. And now on to our program. Our speakers will be discussing unfortunate accidents and errors in judgment as well as more systemic issues that result in mistakes. Kari will moderate our Q&A session at the end and then we will have time for further discussion where we will welcome your comments, reflections and ideas. If you're suddenly feeling inspired to share your own mistake, just let us know and we'll call on you at the end during the discussion. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce our first speaker, Lauren Fair. Lauren reports that she's been getting through quarantine by indulging in true crime podcasts and shows and like many has harnessed her mask sewing skills. Lauren, take it away. Hello, everyone. I am thrilled to be kicking off this fun event, which at its heart is about openness and sharing. And I'm happy to be sharing my story with you today. I'm speaking to you from my home in what is today called Westchester Pennsylvania, the original homelands of the Lenny-Lenape people. The Lenape are also the original stewards of the land upon which Winnipeg Museum, Garden and Library resides, the setting of the events that I'll be sharing. So without further ado, let's talk about mistakes. I don't know this for certain. But I would guess that every mistake we make has a root cause within ourselves. Only when we can identify this cause, examine it, call it out. Can we then learn from it? Otherwise, we'll be bound to repeat it. The tale I will tell today has its root cause, I believe, in efficiency or rather trying to be too efficient. I'm sure we all know what it's like to feel pulled in many directions by a variety of demands. As an objects conservator whose time is spent often chaotically between working in a museum lab and teaching in a graduate conservation program, task switching is an ever frequent reality, often occurring a dozen times in one day. As conservators, the reality is our treatment time at the bench represents a smaller and smaller percentage of our daily work lives. Switching in and out of treatment tasks can take a not insignificant amount of mental acuity, especially when switching into a treatment task that something from something very different, say answering emails or coming out of a committee meeting on gallery lighting. This can and should take time as well as awareness for when we are truly ready to take on treatment. So the root cause of my mistake I'll tell you about is my not having done this, not taking the time. And my story, title of my story is therefore called literally the worst thing you could do to a ceramic. So here's the ceramic before Lauren. I'll tell you more about what this object is in a moment, but for now know that it's a salt-plated stoneware, lidded jug in the shape of an owl and the lid comprises the owl's head. And here is the lid after Lauren. That's right, I knocked it off the table surface onto the floor. So we know the root cause and how this happened, but what are the physical logistics to play with? This ceramic is part of a 20, a group of 20 plus ceramics that were chosen for a show winter tour in 2017 called Treasures on Trial, the art and science of detecting fakes. Here you can see them on display and our poor little owl jug is in the right hand case, second from the left on the top shelf. All fixed up of course. To give you a better sense, here's a closer look at some of the ceramics in this, yes, quite quirky group. They're all jugs, figurines, or candlesticks and yeah, they're all fakes. Meant to imitate 18th century Staffordshire wares, these ceramics were used in a 1992 trial in London of a manicuse of having knowingly sold modern made pots as 18th century antiques. Much of the trial focused on determining the authenticity of these pieces. The collector of these ceramics, Henry Weldon, decided to keep them even after all evidence proved them modern gorges so as to keep them off the market. And in 1998, he donated them to winter tour. But let's go back to the scene of my crime. I think you can see in this picture part of the problem. Mainly these ceramics were incredibly dusty and needed light surface cleaning. I decided for the sake of efficiency to line them all up on one table. And carefully rotate them around, brushing with soft brushes and holding my no-fisk micro attachment to vacuum them. I did this with a spare half hour I happened to have in the course of my day. In hindsight, of course, it was an accident waiting to happen. Too much happening on one table surface, a brush in one hand, a vacuum attachment in the other. I don't even really recall how the lid got knocked, but I think we can all imagine it. I was trying to be too efficient. They only needed light surface cleaning, and it would be a quick treatment of the group. And the other thing that I have to wonder was, was I also thinking subconsciously these are only fakes? I of course hope that this is not true, but it could be. Would I have been so eager to be efficient if these were not known fakes? Because I'm a conservator, I can make it look like this lid was never broken. But because I'm a conservator, I have a unique opportunity to intensely intervene into the life of an object. I'm a human being with my own potential for bias, my own potential for stress, anxiety, overwork, and carelessness, and my own potential to do literally the worst thing you could do to a certain. So what have I learned from this mistake? Well, for one, I learned that I have a very understanding curator. When I told her what I did, her words to me were, we all make mistakes, and I know you feel more badly about this than I do. That has stuck with me, and it made me feel safe to be open and honest, not just with her and my institution, but also with myself. I also realized that my training prepared me really well for what to do when a mistake like this happens. It provided me with a framework in which I could act logically, despite my many emotions that were flying all over the place when hearing the crash. Mainly, though, what has been reinforced for me is the supreme importance of taking the essential time to properly prepare, both physically and mentally, for any treatment task. No matter how much time that task is projected to take, and no matter how minor it may seem. As a why is owl once said, or in this case, a Brazilian lyricist and author, why is patience so important? Because it makes us pay attention. Thank you, and I just want to acknowledge the people on this screen. Thank you so much. I'd now like to introduce our next speaker, Lorraine Finch. Lorraine says she is a brilliant top dancer. She works as a supporting artist in films and television, and will give a prize to anyone who can find her in fantastic feasts. She recommends people watch the Ealing comedies. Her favorite is Passport to Pimlico, and her special skill is that she can wiggle her ears. Lorraine, would you like to take over, please? Thank you very much, Kari. I appreciate that. Good afternoon, everyone, and in the next few minutes, I'm going to talk to you about when studio furniture and equipment goes rogue, all for the Calvin and Hobbes fans amongst you, attack of the deranged mutant killer monster, studio equipment, and furniture. So my first example comes from my work at the National Army Museum, and the removal of heat set tissue from a letter written by Florence Nightingale when she was at the Crimea. Heat set tissue is a tissue that's coated with a heat activated adhesive, and it was used in paper conservation for lining and repair. In theory, heat set tissue is reversible with heat, but as it ages it cross links and you need to use solvents. So going for the less invasive treatment first, I went to the cupboard and got out the spatula and the thermostatic control for the heated spatula. I plugged it in, switched it on, allowed it to warm up, and started working. I noticed a very strange brown patch starting to appear on Florence Nightingale's letter, and at the same time a very warm and burning hand. As I looked down at my hand, I could see the molten plastic from the handle of the spatula running down my hand. Thinking that really the last thing I wanted to do was drop molten plastic all over the surface of Florence Nightingale's letter, I moved my hand out of the way as far as I could and dropped the spatula onto the studio table, which then promptly melted. So at this point I'm thinking, I don't want to drop molten plastic that is still on my hand onto Florence Nightingale's letter. The studio table is melting. I need to switch off the heated spatula, but clearly it's faulty and am I going to get an electric shock from it? And the absolutely worst thing, conservative burns down museum. So the spatula and the thermostatic control had both been pat tested, which is the portable appliance test, which is mandatory in the UK. However, the portable appliance test only tests electrical equipment for electrical safety, that is, if the wiring is OK, what it doesn't do is test whether the thermostatic control is still functioning. And I can only assume that this is what the problem was. It was the thermostat that had become faulty. The result of this was a burnt hand, a permanent melt of the studio table and a permanent scorch mark on Florence Nightingale's letter. My second example comes from my work as a freelance accredited conservator. I was working on a life assurance policy from Walter Scott, and I was doing a backing removal. I was waiting for the backing to soften. And so whilst I was waiting for that, I went over to a set of shelves to check something in a file. Check the file, put the file back on the shelves, turned around to look at something in the filing cabinet, at which point my lizard brain kicked in and was quite aware of something moving beside me. I went immediately into the hunch protective mode. As the studio, as the shelves, decided to fall over, depositing all of the expertise on me, and all over the table, how the object was sitting. So whilst I was being showered with books and lever arch files and whatever other contents were on the shelves, and I was hurt, I was more concerned about the object. However, when I trained at Campbellwell College of Arts, they did run into the importance of good studio practice. And so I had covered all of Walter Scott's life assurance policy with blotters, apart from the space that I was working on. So with shaking hands, I went over to the life assurance policy, picked off the lever arch files, the books, and everything else that had rained down from the shelves. The blotters were dented, they were abraded, they had discoloration on them from the colors on the books. And if anybody, you know, lever arch files have got lovely metal bindings all the way around them. So there's some really nice significant dents in the blotter. However, the life assurance policy only had a couple of dents in it which I was able to take out. So the result of this was a cup of tea and a sit down with a biscuit because I was so shaken up. But after that, the shelves were screwed to the wall. But they're not going anywhere anymore. And I have since moved studios and I still use those shelves and they again are screwed to the walls. I'm now in a bigger studio so I make sure that there's nothing over the surface of my workbench. So there's nothing that can fall down onto my objects when I'm working. When I was talking about this to another conservator, a photographic conservator, they shared with me a similar experience. So they have a washing sink in which they wash their photographs. Over the top of this, they had a drying rack, the sort of thing you'd find in laboratories with pegs that you put your beakers and so forth on and your other glassware on. They were washing a photograph. It always happens when you're treating something. And at this point, the drying rack decided to park company with the wall that it was screwed onto. Depositing yes or no glassware over the surface of the photograph. The result of that was that the conservator has now moved the drying rack to a completely different part of the studio where if it falls off, it's not going to be an issue. They've also removed the shelves. And as a result of that conservator sharing that story with me, I now make sure that when I'm doing a wash, there is nothing over my object on any shelves that could possibly fall off. And in that vein, I hope that what I've shared with you over these few minutes have been useful to you in some way. And if anybody wants to contact me, I will put my email address in the chat and also my Instagram and Twitter handles. Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Nyla Bird. And in her spare time, Nyla loves elaborately painting her nails, recently picked up crocheting during the quarantine but is still a beginner. And as a tiny bird enthusiast, she recommends the National Treasure movies as a way to laugh and rant at the same time. Welcome Nyla. Thank you, Tony. I'm just going to share my screen. All right, can everyone see the presentation? Okay. Cool. So I would like to begin with a land acknowledgement. I want to acknowledge that I am presenting from the traditional land of the Lenape people, also known as Wilmington Delaware. I want to thank the Lenape people for their ongoing caretaking of this land, as well as the River of Human Beings, also known as the Delaware River. So today, I'm going to be talking about two examples of how objects situated in the wrong context can lead to their misinterpretation. I understand that these past sessions have been centered around admitting one's own mistakes, as some of the presenters did before me. So I want to be clear in saying that these mistakes are not my own. The Art of Erasure is an article that has been floating around in the online conservation community. So forgive me if I'm about to present on something you already know of. In order to not misrepresent any context surrounding the mistake I'm going to get into, the information I'm presenting about this painting is simply an abridged version of the full article. I have removed the conservator's name and pronouns for this presentation because the goal is not a public shaming of one person, but to recognize an example of a problem that can affect us all. The restoration work on this painting was done in 1988 by a local conservator. The conservator's job was only to bring out the artist's original style and content, which had diminished naturally with time. However, the conservator would correct something more than the ravages of time. By the time the conservation was finished, they, quote, corrected the character of the woman portrayed. Created in 1873 by New Orleans-based artist Francois Fleishbein, the painting portrays a woman of color who had been rumored to be Marie Laveau, the so-called voodoo queen of New Orleans. However, in 1976, The Times-Picayune published an article by a local art critic who boldly asserted that the woman of color portrayed was the artist's slave Betsy. These speculations were based on primary preliminary sketches of the portrait. However, this identification proved baseless and unlikely. What is more, there is no proof that the artist ever participated in the institution of slavery. Unfortunately, when the historic New Orleans collection, or HNOC, purchased the painting in 1985, the incorrect conjecture informed their perception of the work, which they consequently mistitled Betsy. However, the painting tells a different story. The portrait presents a young woman conservatively dressed in a shapeless black ensemble. She chooses elegant adornments made of silver, diamonds, and pearls, a bold yellow head wrap complimented by a voluminous lace rough collar fastened with a yellow bow. All her expensive accessories, access to lace in particular, was often limited to the white elite of the Atlantic world. The portrait makes the parent the sitter's beauty, wealth, and status proclaiming her agency in the antebellum world. Obviously not an enslaved woman. She is also not Marie Laveau. While Laveau may have been spiritually powerful and financially stable, she was not a member of the New Orleans elite and would not have been dressed in such finery. Why then have so many people repeated these absurd obsessions about the sitter and the portrait? To start with, New Orleans loves Marie Laveau. Everyone wants a piece of her, especially art collectors. Consequently, just about every single antebellum portrait of a woman of color has been identified as Marie Laveau at one point or another. The reality of life in New Orleans for a free woman of color was much more complex. Free woman of color entered into legitimate domestic partnerships with black, white, and interracial men alike. Though interracial marriage was illegal, white male partners could and did legitimize the relationship through paternity acknowledgments on baptismal records and by recognizing their interracial lives in their wills. Outside of marriage, women of color and antebellum New Orleans possessed a degree of autonomy unheard of throughout the rest of the United States. When Louisiana became a state in 1812, people of color owned half of the property in the French Quarter and women of color owned 70% of that property. There are cases of plantations owned and run by free women and men of African descent. Free women of color were given an impressive amount of agency in New Orleans, which they often used to resist racism, sexism, and the institution of slavery itself. When looking at this portrait, it's not hard to imagine the sitter amongst these fascinating women. However, the reality of her status has been hard for some to stomach due to the perpetuation of tropes and stereotypes of slavery. To imagine an interracial family as the head of a plantation would complicate our perceptions of the past. Perhaps this is why, when confronted by the painting in the late 80s, the conservator took it upon themselves to overpaint the entire canvas and in the process erased the sitter's lavish lace collar and yellow bow. They also altered the background color of the portrait from a cool gray to an eerie green brown. They overpainted the ruffles on her right sleeve and the details on her chair. They altered the contours of the sitter's hand, face, and head wrap. And finally, when releasing the work of a free woman of color back to the historic New Orleans collection, the conservator seemingly settled the debate and noted the painting as a portrait of Marie LeVaux. The HNMC was dismayed when they finally got the painting back from treatment. The restoration work was a work of fiction in the same line as the reductive narrative surrounding Marie LeVaux. This is distressing but hardly surprising. African American history is full of lies and omissions. So is women's history and southern history and American history and world history. If we permit these lies to be perpetuated, we skirt our responsibilities to our history and to ourselves. So the takeaway from that is that misconceptions and stereotypes about the history of Black people in America can lead to treatment mistakes and misidentifications which contribute to any ratio of the nuanced Black experience throughout American history. And I will post the link to the full article in the chat when the presentation is over. Moving on to my second example, during my first year as a conservation graduate student, one of my fellow classmates wrote a report on a Peruvian object that was incorrectly labeled as a feathered fan. Through consultation with a curator and textile conservator from Peru, the labeling was corrected to feathered plume. The plume is likely a part of a headdress as seen in the photo on the left. The plume also is constructed differently than the Peruvian circular feather fan on the right. I hope it is apparent that a fan functions differently than a feathered plume worn in a headdress. The miscontextualization of the plume, if not corrected, would have been taken all the way to the display case. Labeling an object as a fan misrepresents the context of the object and lets us perceive the object and its use incorrectly. Since correcting the mistake, the object can be treated and displayed for what it is and not what Western culture initially perceived it to be. So the takeaway from that is just to recognize the pervasiveness of Western culture and how that can affect our perceptions of objects. And given this, it's important to question the labeling that an object has been given. In the questioning process, seek out a second opinion from a different perspective whenever possible. And for those of us raised in Western culture who typically engage in Western objects, a second opinion is especially important when it comes to objects from non-white and or non-Western peoples. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Nyla, for that really illuminating presentation. I hope that this will provide great content for a discussion at the end and questions. So I encourage people to type into the chat box if you have something you'd like to say and we will call on you in the Q&A. Now our next speaker is Suzanne Davis. Suzanne is an archaeological conservator at the University of Michigan. Since she's not in the field this summer due to COVID-19, she's been focusing on hobbies, which include teaching herself how to shuck oysters, stabbing herself with oyster knives, eating cheese, drinking gin, gaining weight, and developing back problems. Suzanne, if you could please take the virtual mic. I'm gonna share my screen now. Let's see, here we go. I hope that that is working for you guys. And you can hear me okay. I can't actually see you right now because of how my own interface is working. So if it is not working well for you, hopefully a moderator will tell me. So thank you so much for having me. I am speaking to you from the kitchen of my home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It's on the traditional lands of the people of the Three Fires, the Ojibwa or Chippewa, the Odawa and the Badawadmi. And in acknowledgement and celebration of these Anishinaabe cultures, I wanted to start by giving a shout out tonight to the Zibiwin Cultural Center of the Saginaw Chippewa. The center's mission is to recognize, perpetuate, communicate, and support the cultural diversity and spirit of the Saginaw Chippewa and other Great Lakes Anishinaabek. So this is a really wonderful place to visit in person if you can. It's in the middle of what's now the state of Michigan. But even though it's temporarily closed due to COVID, you can have a look at their information and exhibitions online and it occurs to me now that maybe I should put this URL in the chat, which I can do after my talk here. Okay, so tonight I'm going to be sharing a story that involves multiple mistakes I made during an incident of sexual harassment and an archaeological excavation. So if this is a sensitive topic for you, you might choose to opt out of the next eight minutes. You can just mute your computer speakers, but it's not an especially disturbing story and I think it'll probably be okay for most people. So I'm going to illustrate it using emoji and I will be assisted in the retelling of this by a dry gin martini. So to begin, we have to rewind several years and you can just pretend we're traveling back in time as I switch the slide here. So when this happened, I was part of a team of about 10 people. There were six men and I'm showing them on the left with big smiles and there were four women on the team and I'm showing them on the right with slightly smaller smiles. We were working on a relatively remote site where we lived together in a large house and we worked really far apart from each other during the day but we like to hang out at night. We knew each other really well and in general everything was good and then one day a visitor came and he's represented here by an eyeball for reasons that will become apparent. So he was a well respected professional. He was a friend and colleague of two of my male coworkers. He was not part of our excavation team but he stayed with us for two weeks during which time he was supposedly doing his own research. So on the first full day of his visit early in the morning while I was working in my bedroom before anybody else was up, I noticed him outside, he was standing outside my windows and he was looking in at me and I thought this seemed weird but I thought maybe there was an innocent explanation and I just kind of pretended that I didn't see him and after a while he went away. Okay so on day two of his visit there he was again and this time I called out to him and I asked if I could help him in some way and he said no. So on day three he's back again and this time I asked him why he is staring my windows and he says and I quote I like to look at pretty ladies. Okay so here I think I should tell you that this man was not from the United States and I did wonder like is this culturally okay where he's from? But then I thought that was probably pretty unlikely because it seems like it's probably not okay behavior from like most places and I just told him I didn't like it and I asked him to stop like hanging around outside my room and staring in but he didn't stop even though I asked him repeatedly over the course of several days. So then I had to decide what to do. If I said something to the project director or to this guy's friends you know who were my friends I thought it would cause like a big volcanic fuss but I and I also wasn't sure like despite all of the fuss that I thought would happen I wasn't sure it would be treated seriously and I didn't have a roommate and during the day I was working really far apart from other people and I was a little bit worried that if I reported this behavior I could be targeted by this man who was a lot bigger and stronger than I was so there was kind of like a fear component there and I did feel always quite nervous around him like the behavior felt predatory to me. On the other hand if I didn't say anything he was going to leave in about seven days anyway at this point and then I thought everything would just go back to normal and it would all be fine sunshine and rainbows. So that's what I did I didn't say anything and he kept hanging around outside my room every morning before anybody else was awake and I just tried to pretend that he wasn't there and I tried to avoid him as much as possible I tried to not be alone with him in other parts you know of the day but I never asked myself what's happening with the other women on this project like I just assumed that I was the only person having problems and I just waited for this guy to leave but she eventually did and then everything was fine except that it wasn't so now fast forward to the almost present day and last year just this past fall I was asked to review a grant for a colleague before my colleague submitted it to the sponsor and my colleague had written this man into the grant proposal and was pairing him on projects with female graduate students and so now I felt like I had to speak up but I thought that nobody would take me seriously like I just wasn't sure that they would it didn't really know what to do and so I finally you know years after the fact I talked to the other women from the dig and it turns out that this man had behaved badly with all of them too so he followed them around while they were working he stared at them he said inappropriate things to them he asked them to perform really highly personal services for them and of course this was always happening out of sight because we didn't work in direct sight lines with each other so like me they they tried really hard to avoid being alone with him but it was kind of impossible at this site like me they never reported what was happening they never talked to anybody about it and although he had created a bad work environment for all of us we all wanted to avoid causing trouble but if we had been willing to speak up we could have helped each other out a lot and maybe we could have impacted his behavior and at least we could probably have kept him from being offered additional opportunities that might make other women vulnerable so here's what I learned it's better to speak up because others may be suffering too we were all really worried about causing problems especially for the project director but when we reported this officially which we did last year it actually worked out okay and most importantly we learned that we need to make better plans for situations like this because field projects are really quite different than most other workplace situations they bring together people who have totally different cultural norms you know from all around the world the participants are more vulnerable because sites are often remote and everybody is cohabiting you're all living together so here's some recommendations to deal with these things if your institution has a sexual harassment you know training thing that you can do like a video or something everybody on the project should take it if you if you can you should also really have a site specific orientation that covers things like what unacceptable behavior is because people may have really different ideas about that you want to make sure people know how to report problems and to whom and you want to be clear about what the consequences will be and have a plan for carrying those out if you need to and then you can give examples and talk through how they might be handled just to make sure that everybody is understanding it's helpful to check in with people regularly about how things are going especially if you're in a supervisory position because that gives people an opportunity to tell you you know one on one if something is not going well and then the last point number four it may not be that obvious but it's really important actually I learned after all of this that most serious sexual harassment and assaults that occur on field projects are perpetrated by visitors so people who are not on the staff they're not part of the regular research team instead they're people who are just passing through so you can easily eliminate this risk by just not letting these visitors stay with you the living quarters should be only for the research team who've had the appropriate training as described in numbers one and two and that's it so thank you for your attention I hope you can learn from my mistakes and I'm just going to say here's to all of you and I will now figure out how to stop sharing my screen here and go back on mute no thank you Suzanne I'm not going to wait till the comment section to tell you that that's really horribly offensive behavior and really glad you share that with us and okay I would like to introduce Debbie Ormond Debbie is going to share two mistakes with us collectively titled surface and tension Debbie is in a band she plays the ukulele and also loves to dance particularly bollywood style so welcome Debbie thank you Tony and also thank you to Kari and Rebecca for having this session I think it's it's a really valuable part of the conference and appreciate that you're letting us share our mistakes with you I also like to second Tony on saying how courageous you've been Susanna to share that story with us and thank you very much for bringing it again to our attention I think sometimes it's easy to when momentum of incidents happen they dissipate somewhat so it's really I appreciate that you brought that back up to all our attention thank you um I'm going to share this um gin homemade it's not gin it's ginger ale homemade ginger ale my husband made um it's in honor of the Tongva Gabrielino tribe and specifically an outwarp village outwater village in Los Angeles the recipe is very straightforward it's basically ginger and a garbage syrup and I'd be happy to share the method of how to make it it's truly delicious um so to you all I don't have um any powerpoint to share with you it's just going to be me um feeling quite vulnerable but these are two incidents that happened to me when I was um working in Amsterdam in a private studio and the first mistake entitled surface had to do with the strip lining of a very large canvas um wall painting with a green in color with a decorated painted border and um in the studio we had enough space to move all the furniture back in order to strip line this painting face down on the floor we took the protective measures we placed numerous layers of protective paper on the surface of the floor and silicone release paper we painted we laid the painting face down and um this was my first ever uh strip lining um we proceeded to apply beaver 371 or beaver gel um in the gel form onto the edges of this large canvas um onto the reverse of the canvas and thereafter we applied polyester sail cloth material um to use as the additional strips for the strip lining and we placed these down onto the edges and we heated up the um the irons to about 60 to 70 degrees centigrade which I think is about 150 or 60 degrees Fahrenheit um and proceeded to go ahead with the strip binding which entails applying heat and pressure um under with a silicone release paper in between the iron hitting the reverse of the polyester sail cloth material and we then placed once the adhesive had melted we then placed a cold heavy metal iron on it sort of heat seal the adhesive and we did this systematically there was four of us working on each of the edges and we did this systematically as we were going around the canvas checking lifting up the canvas to see if the surface was okay and um everything seemed to be going pretty smoothly until we came in the next day and we turned the painting around and we saw that all along the edges of this um um wall painting uh were tiny blisters which had indicated to us that we had applied far too much heat onto the surface and rather baffled us because um we all felt that we were working at um a consistent I think we didn't go higher than 75 or 80 degrees centigrade to try and melt the adhesive and so we were quite perplexed as to how this actually happened um so after much discussion we um decided to look at the surface that we were working on and we did some tests with the heat onto uh through some protective coating onto the surface of the linoleum which we found out later was actually applied directly on top of a concrete um floor so one of our thinking is that the concrete linoleum in combination had actually retained the heat so as we were moving on to the next feeling quite comfortable about you know having checked the surface and putting it back down that actually there was still heat retained in the surface and I wanted to share this with you because it's something that I think we do take for granted it's it's quite like light and it's a really important tool our surfaces on which we work and um but if it's if it's not investigated or it's not um sort of taken into consideration as part of the treatment some damaging things can happen and unfortunately when you when you blister paint there's very little you can do they were slightly scorched there was some possibility to lay down some of the blisters but it really taught us the um the importance of surface and it's something that I've never really forgotten so when Kari asked me do I have any mistake that's the first thing that came to my mind um something that we can take for granted but should always be aware of and and not take for granted because done as it is part of of the tools that we use when we're treating objects the second um mistake I'd like to share with you was also um when I was in Amsterdam in the studio and I was asked to remove surface dirt from an oil painting from the mid century mid probably 1950s we think it was a Dutch portrait um a portrait done by a Dutch artist and um it was quite colorful but it had a very thick surface grime layer on top um so having gone through my training I thought oh this should be relatively straightforward it's an oil painting surface dirt removal I did a small little test um on the side and felt pretty confident that saliva was going to do it so rolled my swab and quite confidently went in and did another little test on the area of the face um slightly larger than the test that I did on the on the edge and I was really taken aback by the difference in in color the shift was was really quite shocking and I immediately thought oh god there's something on this that I've removed that I shouldn't have removed and I really sort of whipped myself up into a frenzy thinking I I really removed something here that I I probably shouldn't have removed and what am I going to do so I thought okay go out for a walk stop go out for a walk so I did I walked along the lovely canals and I kind of thought okay how am I going to approach my supervisor about this and walked back into the studio and I saw that my colleagues in the predominantly German working in a Dutch studio were all sort of huddled around a table and they were sort of discussing something and of course my level of paranoia was particularly high at this moment and I thought they've seen the painting they've seen what I've done they're furious about it and I was getting more and more paranoid and shaky and thinking this this is it there was a lot of nodding of heads and gasping and I thought god this must be really serious whatever I've done must be really serious so I thought well I'll go back out again and I sat on the side of the canal and I thought I sort of prepared myself to be told that I had done irreparable damage to this painting and that they they were going to end my contract and that was going to be the end of my career and I'm not joking you I had to come to that level at that stage I then went back in had a quick look and I saw that they were still huddled around the table and this time they were a little bit more emotive there was lots of and oh my god so I then quickly went back out and waited for my supervisor eventually she sort of came out I had given her the nod to say that I wanted to talk to her and she kind of hushed me away so I thought oh build up on and try to build a picture here of what was going through my mind and I'll just take a sip of my ginger ale as I keep going and she came out to me and I sort of had tears in my eyes and I just said I'm so sorry I'm so sorry what I've done and she was like well what are you talking about and I said you know I've removed something on the face it's this huge white blob on the side on the cheek of this portrait and I'm really sorry I think I've removed something that's original and she then started to cry which procedingly then made me feel even worse and she hugged me and I didn't quite understand what she was doing and she said do you know what we were listening to in the studio and I said no I didn't speak German I didn't speak Dutch I immediately thought they were talking about me and she turned to me and she said do you know what's happened in New York and I was like I don't know what you're talking about the sun was coming down it was beginning to set in Amsterdam and she said something terrible has happened and the date was the 9th of September 2001 sorry the 9th the 11th of September 2001 and I still wasn't kind of capturing the whole enormity of it until I went back into the studio and everyone wasn't explaining to me what had happened and there was that moment where I have to admit there was a slight moment when she said what are you talking about have you not heard what's going on in New York that there was that slight moment of relief where I was like okay they weren't talking about me this is okay followed by a kind of like what what what have I been doing what have I been thinking I've been so absorbed in myself and and this issue and when in fact something much larger had happened at the same time and it's it's something that has really stuck with me and it's something that I really try to get across with colleagues and interns and volunteers that we work with that there is in this profession it can be all encompassing and it can completely take over any sort of rational thought but to keep it all in perspective and I think that applies to not only horrendous terrorist attack taking place but as Susana mentioned you know forms of abuse racist behavior that it's it's important to to keep in mind the bigger picture and my sister has always sent me this cartoon and it's of a little fly that lands on the moon and when the cartoon goes from one smaller picture to a bigger bigger and bigger picture until you see this tiny tiny little flea on top of a bald man's head and her words are always saying keep it in perspective Devi and that's just something I'd like to share I wanted to share with you all and thank you for your time and for listening thank you Devi for sharing that unbelievable story your storytelling skills are amazing you had me on the edge of my seat quite emotional um so we're going to have to move to the next speaker which is Fiona Graham Fiona's current address is her 29th she went to nine different schools on three continents she likes to swim ride and dance and she's also a readaholic she's inspired by humanitarians such as american paul farmer whose excellent biography mountains beyond mountains was written by tracy kidder uh Fiona if you'd like to share your screen we await your presentation thank you hi everybody okay there we go um hopefully somebody will tell me if uh you can't see this properly uh or if you can't hear me um right hi everybody and thank you for having me um and thank you very very much to Devi and to Suzanne and to all the other speakers um today for sharing their stories um I'm speaking to you from lovely Kingston Ontario Canada which explains the spelling of mold in this talk so um I also want to tell you here we go uh that I'm grateful to live and work on the traditional territories of the Anishinaabe and the Haudenosaunee peoples um I've been working in this field for a long time um 32 years in fact and I've made my share of mistakes uh this is the story of the most recent one at least the one that I know of there were probably many more I work in private practice in Canada primarily in the area of preventive conservation and in May 2019 I received a call from the museum for whom I'd done a storage plan the previous year to protect the far from innocent this museum shall remain nameless it's what I would call a mid-size organization with about 20 full-time staff the caller told me that two interns working in the museum storage room had discovered mold on some artifacts environmental consultants were doing testing but they wanted me to advise them on mold remediation measures for the collection I submitted a proposal to do an assessment of the situation and to provide them with a plan for dealing with moldy artifacts okay um of course I also immediately told them to get dehumidifiers into the room and to get the RH down to below 60 percent I told them that there had been no mold on any of the artifacts and storage when I was there the previous year um meaning that the mold growth had occurred since then because I knew that the RH rose regularly above 75 and up to 85 percent in the storage room I had recommended in the previous year's report that they installed dehumidifiers I'd cited the significant risk of mold specifically sure enough uh when I got their charts there the data showed that RH had ranged from 60 to 85 percent in the month of august 2018 with 13 days of RH over 75 percent they had not taken my advice and installed dehumidifiers and now they had a problem in order to give them an idea of how much it would cost to deal with the mold problem I needed to look at the art all of the artifacts and storage um what could be cleaned by museum technicians under the supervision of a conservator and what would have to go to specialist conservators for treatment and how many boxes would need to be replaced I knew exactly how many shelving units there were and the approximate number of artifacts per shelf I knew how overcrowded the room was and how little room there would be to work I came up with a time estimate for the assessment and I submitted my proposal and it was accepted okay did you hear me mention boxes well like most museum storage areas there were lots of boxes I had looked into some of them during the storage planning exercise and I had assumed always a very dangerous word that they were all packed according to professional museum standards some were the ones I had looked at um they had been actually it turned out repacked by museum program interns but the rest here is where I wish I had horror movies sound effects to play for you um I've spent a lot of time in small museums um volunteer run uh I have never seen such disregard for artifacts um textiles were crammed into boxes uh delicate archaeological points were thrown into boxes with heavy stone artifacts on top um dozens of delicate fans were crushed under the weight of heavy objects with disintegrating bars of soap thrown in for good measure there were hazardous materials left right and center thrown in with no warning labels on the boxes it literally drove me to tears and with most boxes stuffed the gills with at least four times more artifacts than I expected my time estimate was completely off plus there was the fact that I needed to give them a list of all of the collection care problems I had come across in order to highlight the extreme need for improving their standard of practice that meant my writing my report took longer than expected and I ended up spending a lot of time discussing human resource issues with the director so I think I made at least three mistakes here the first was not to underline in conversation and in writing but especially in conversation just how critical um the rh situation was how great the risk of mold would be if they did not install dehumidifiers immediately um how much damage could be done and how much it would cost to deal with perhaps I could have persuaded them to install dehumidifiers and prevent major mold outbreak second I really should have looked inside more boxes um but I honestly could not have foreseen this level of negligence based on my experience uh the result was that my fee which was based on spending five days doing onsite assessment was inadequate um quite inadequate for the 15 days it actually took me to look at every artifact um obviously this impacted all the other contracts I had going last summer and um also my sanity because this was not a fun job finally uh because I forgot to add a contingency to my bid um I could have been out of pocket for a lot of money um 10 days of fees plus expenses I did manage to negotiate an extra few thousand dollars from the point but I ended up at least five thousand Canadians short so my lessons learned um what did I learn from this miserable experience well at my first conservation job in 1990 there was a fire at the museum and um I became somewhat of an expert in sit removal from collections as well as a vocal advocate for sprinklers and museums after this experience I am now as terrified of mold as I am of fire and I will devote an equivalent amount of energy to advocating for dehumidification um of course I've always known it was necessary to avoid damp conditions but there's nothing like firsthand experience of disasters to make you completely paranoid so uh then of course I will look inside boxes never again will I assume that um they are packed properly I mean I'm going to I will continue to assume that museum workers I'm dealing with are professionals who know what they're doing but I'm going to follow that up with checking the boxes the drawers and the cabinets um I'm also going to not forget anymore to add contingency fees to proposals this is something for the movies out there um I also learned that um I can work in full PPE if I have to but it is not fun mold is gross and I never want to have to deal with it on a large scale again um and that's it uh thank you for listening and I hope this is a tiny bit useful thank you so much Fiona great talk all right we're moving on to our next speaker Ariel O'Connor Ariel grew up in Houston Texas and a family with show dogs afghan hounds in Italian gray hounds and knows the real people they're imitating in the movie best in show she has been a modern and ballet dancer since age three a connoisseur of banana flavored candy a lifelong hater of cilantro and in 2003 was almost arrested in Siberia trying to buy malachite from the Ural Mountains Ariel please take it away true story so this evening I am drinking a negroni excuse me you were in me drinking a negroni I almost made a negroni I am drinking an aviation I switched pincheter uh creme de violets it's delicious and I'm speaking to you hold on zip I'm speaking to you from my neighborhood near the national cathedral in Washington DC so my apartment is visible through the two towers in the distance and this area is the traditional territory of the nicochank and the pescataway peoples and I gratefully acknowledge them and all the vibrant native communities who make their home in what is now called the district of columbia I'd also like to acknowledge the labor of people who were enslaved and constructing the historic buildings in our city including here in the white house and the u.s capital and in particular for this group of conservators I want to acknowledge the craftsman Philip Reed Philip Reed was an enslaved man who was instrumental in casting this bronze statue of Andrew Jackson outside the white house in 1853 and because of his knowledge and skill this was the first large outdoor sculpture ever cast in America sorry sorry I was muted sorry I'm late sorry to bother you sorry for this last minute inquiry apologies for the short notice apologies for this brief response apologies for cross posting I just want to mention something I'm just sending you a friendly reminder sorry the slide doesn't have any images sorry these images are hard to see sorry I missed your text sorry I was muted these are hard to hear right these are hard to say in a row but these are all phrases that I have said and I have emailed and I have heard colleagues say over the past six years that I've worked at the Smithsonian I work here at the Lunder Conservation Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and one of my favorite parts of my job is that we have a really robust internship program we have interns and fellows we have pre-program and graduate and post-grad and I first started noticing the over apology use with our pretty early pre-program interns who apologize for everything they asked for and everything that they needed to do their job with and I had to declare the objects lab an apology free zone but in hearing it and others I started to hear it all the time to me I searched my gmail for the word apologies sorry yeah 745 emails came up I searched my work outlook for the word apologies and sorry 3,747 emails came up some of these are duplicates because it searches through responses but even so this is an insane number it still bothered me in the pre-covid before times I would hear it in meetings from and emails and from colleagues I'd hear it in myself I started to hear it in myself I didn't at first and I downloaded this plugin they have it on on gmail it's called the just not sorry plugin and it will highlight when you work use the words just or sorry and it will actually tell you why it's undermining your message in the email but now in the COVID online world I hear apologies more than ever my friends and colleagues are working out of their closets actually working out of their closets they're taking care of children and parents and grandparents and pets and we have back-to-back zoom meetings and our technology never works and our dishes never ever go away and everyone apologizes for all of those things and I'm here in the mistake sessions because I do it too and the more I hear it in other people the more I recognize it in myself and I became really curious about the research into over apologizing and I want to share a few of the things that I've read recently with all of you if you think that you hear people who identify as female saying I'm sorry more than people who identify as male you're right women apologize more than men do according to studies such as this 2010 article in psychological science it's not that men are reluctant to admit wrongdoing the study shows which is interesting research found that men apologize less frequently than women because they have a higher threshold for what they find as offensive behavior a reminder that in the last FAIC survey 2014 77.4% of our field identifies as female I'm not surprised then to hear that all of these apologies are coming all the time in our field I want to acknowledge their cultural differences around apologizing and my Canadian and Taiwanese and Japanese colleagues have shared with me their different ways to use apologies I went to grad school in Buffalo I had Canadian professors and friends and I heard sorry a lot and I love this CBC quote about Canadian politeness and apologies because every Canadian knows deep down that half the time we apologize we're apologizing for the incompetence of the other person it's a true story in Taiwan my Taiwanese friends told me that it's about the greater whole instead of the individual in this article in BBC quote the western notion of sorry is far too limited how you so can also be a feeling a sensation a code of conduct and a whole system of thought that permeates through Taiwanese culture my Japanese friends have told me they have at least 20 ways to apologize in Japanese I think this is amazing and only 10% of a word like Sumimasen is an apology 90% is used to show respect and politeness and honesty and I think these are all beautiful ways to use apologies and I want to acknowledge and I want to acknowledge that in my assessment of apologies I'm really talking about American culture and my experience in the American workplace why do we say sorry before you say it what are you saying it for here's a common group of reasons that people especially your people people who identify as female might say for the word sorry might be reasons for saying sorry to demonstrate compassion and empathy a lot of people use sorry as a shorthand for sympathy it's wonderful to have this kind of compassion but often you don't need to apologize for things that you can't control how often do you hear people say things like I'm so sorry you were late because the New York City traffic could you say how frustrating that you were late because the New York City traffic to fill the air sorry is used as a filler word the same way that um and like and and those kind of filler words are used it can happen when we're nervous but it loses its meaning absolutely entirely when used this way so try being okay with silence in this case to interrupt many people many girls are raised to be very polite and that translates to the work environment as well and depending on your particular organizational culture or your work environment interrupting with an apology can actually lower your status especially when other people don't do the same so pay attention to how your co-workers do this and if they interrupt with apologies and who does and who doesn't to keep the peace you might want to be warm and nurturing and agreeable and we often use sorry to maintain the social harmony to reset a conversation maybe after an argument or an uncomfortable moment and sometimes this is warranted but sometimes if it's not sorry can represent some regret or some shame and it can make you look weak if that's not your intention there's a desire to be likable often this is seen in women more than men attend to apologize because you want to seem likable there are stereotypes that come along with strong women at work this is even more true for people of color in the workplace and often we're taught from a young age that we should try to please everyone so we find ourselves apologizing for something that might be anything that might be displeasing to someone else whether it has anything to do with us or not it could be insecurity could be this embedded insecurity if you put sorry before your word it negates the power of the word that you say next and it lets the listener know that you're not completely comfortable communicating and of course that you know to say and to actually mean sorry there are plenty of times when it's absolutely appropriate to apologize at work and I think here the key is not to say sorry but to express why you're sorry a sincere apology can go with the reason behind it and it's much more powerful one alternative that I'm trying to use is instead of saying sorry I'm trying to say thank you so instead of saying sorry I'm late I'm trying to say thank you for waiting for me if you had an email that there was a mistake in a document instead of emailing back sorry about that type role why don't you say thank you for catching that or sorry about this technical challenge on zoom why don't you say thank you for your patience and for my last slide what do I want right why am I here why am I why am I talking about this in the mistake session really I want everyone to know that it's okay if you don't respond to my email or my text right away that's fine and I don't know I don't need to know why I don't you know I don't need to know what's happening in your life I know that everyone at home is trying to work and take care of children and pets and your own mental health and it's it's okay it's okay unless you've actively delayed something or you've truly made a mistake can we all agree to stop saying this I will challenge myself with the following and I encourage you to do the same search your inboxes and texts look at how often and why do you use these words you look for sorry apologies and just if you can watch video recordings of your talks tally up the times that you use these words including filler words like um just like maybe you can ask a trusted colleague to do the same for you if you feel comfortable let a colleague know that they've used them in meetings or talks in a non-blaming way after the event especially for interns and fellows if you catch yourself take it back mid-sentence if you catch yourself saying sorry say nope I'm taking that sorry back I didn't actually mean it you can try using positive alternatives like thank you and finally if you use the word sorry include the reason that you're sorry thank you all for listening thank you tony and kari and rebecca for organizing it thank you to the colleagues who've talked through all of this with me and who have shared the times that I've said these in meetings I appreciate your honesty and thank you all for listening and cheers cheers ariel that was fantastic thank you so much um okay I have a few words to say in conclusion I would like to ask you to join me in acknowledging and paying respect to the traditional custodian of the land on which harvard sits where I work which is the traditional territory of the massachusetts people and is a place which is long served as a site of meeting and exchange among nations today's beverage has been because it's a little empty now a gin and tonic which is my staple favorite and has served me well um and you know I just want to say this has been such a wonderful wonderful event thank you all presenters for your bravery and willingness to share and thoughtfulness and everything just fantastic so um mistakes and accidents are inevitable in any endeavor pilots have an expression good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment we are all on this path and if we can help eliminate it for each other uh let's do that much of my conservation work and probably yours and has involved a retreatment um and like all conservators I've often found myself looking at poorly um uh done work and artifacts that were damaged by generations of previous restores and said to myself what were they thinking and how could they have done this um the next thing I say to myself or I've trained myself to say to myself is what am I as a conservator doing now and that people in 20 or 30 years will say what was he thinking in other words what am I blind to now what are my current you know uh blindnesses in considering my own work when I've asked my question um of this question of myself in the past I've typically been thinking about materials and techniques and treatment methodologies and also um how at times the profession writ large has been carried along with such ill-considered um enthousiasms as using poorly studied damaging and often reversible materials and techniques the wholesale de-restoration of ancient marble sculpture for example the harsh removal from pal paintings of every trace of non-original restorations the routine relapse uh relining uh wax relining of paintings etc uh but now I think we must begin the work of considering different kinds of mistakes in our profession systemic institutional exclusionary that we have also been sadly blind to or have simply turned away from the mistakes in our society that have excluded many people of color from our profession as reported in the new york times and elsewhere the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced doctors and researchers in all countries to acknowledge and share their treatment methods errors and successes in unprecedentedly fast and often uncomfortable ways the tragic killings of black citizens this year and earlier in the protests going on now have caused us to make a similar and difficult but equally urgent confrontation of the embedded systemic racism in our own country and in many others our profession our places of employment museums other institutions are also engaging in this work of self-examination and reappraisal we see this in the brave frank and often uncomfortable conversations in our AIC community fora in our workplaces with colleagues and in the media it is timely and right that our framing of mistakes for this event has been enlarged to include historic and current mistakes in conservation racial equity and in exclusion harassment and gender issues i'm heartened that some of the strongest voices i read in AIC fora publications and have heard in talks come from young emerging conservators including and especially those of color their bravery is an example for us all and gives me hope for our future thanks for listening and let's get to work thanks for those closing remarks tony we do have about 10 minutes or so still for some questions and discussion um i understand we have uh i think sarah ridell wants to share a mistake and after that let's take um take some questions and discussion sarah could you unmute yourself yeah hi everybody um uh this has been a really great session thank you all um i feel a little self-conscious that this is a little humorful um after some really weighty and really important conversations um but i was really thinking about um what it was like to be an intern and how pressure filled that is for everybody and one of the mistakes i made was being a little bit too much in my head i was working in a very busy lab um with uh fantastic people who were very focused on their work and i the point of my tweezers slipped and i made a small tear in a manuscript um and i said whoops just happy of the day is and and um kept my head down and i heard suddenly a complete lack of noise everyone in the room held their breath and they all turned to me some of them are on this call today and they may they may remember this and i just looked up and i saw and i said oh it's okay i can fix it just um so i think for me i remember this because i do know how to fix things and if i don't i figure it out um and also these mistakes are really human and they happen and i just thought i'd share that with everybody and um i feel a little self-conscious about it but honestly i remember it because it reminds me i'm human in these really pressure filled professions so thanks thank you for sharing sara and others if anyone else would like to share a similar kind of story please go ahead and say that in the chat box um let us know you want to speak if you have any questions or comments please um again please mention that in the chat box and i'll call on you um we can take a few questions that were asked previously that um weren't able to be addressed uh there's a question that came in for susanne a graduate student asked did um the male um uh creep the person who was um who uh was sort of perpetrating these unfortunate behavior did he end up getting the grant that you um that you had to review i don't think so so i think he was taken off the grant yeah and i will say that um my male colleagues i don't know they didn't respond exactly the way that i thought they would so they really um were shocked they were all shocked they all took it really seriously but i will say that a number of them kind of tried to explain this man's behavior in some interesting ways like you knew they were sort of like oh he was interested in you and he was just really shy and that's all he was showing it and i was like he was interested in all four of us like really like that was the thing like i've seen mella shaking her head yeah so you know there there was some um there was some interesting kind of like trying to i don't know be okay with it but um but you know they they did all take it really seriously and uh yeah and i guess i didn't i didn't totally expect that so that was good i am two more genius in right now so i might be happier than i would normally be but uh yeah but no god didn't get the grant and um yeah so that's the that's the end of that story i guess thank you again for sharing that i think it's so so important to hear um and and really thank you for speaking up about what happened um i know uh there's a question for nila from rebecca um rebecca if you'd like to unmute yourself so nila i know you're a graduate student so you're immersed in training right now and thinking very critically about what you're doing i'm wondering we're all given these guidelines and um rules of how we should handle objects and how we should be careful around objects to avoid things like what happened with lauren but perhaps there do you think there's another component of training that is integral and important for us to consider in these times for avoiding the kinds of mistakes that you discussed today should it be something that's part of graduate training should it be something that's part of continuing education do you have any ideas as you i think as you thought about these two examples that you'd like to share with us um yeah i have so many ideas that i've been expressing with my program um so i can just say that lots of things are underway without getting into too many details but one thing i want to say that you might have seen me talk about in the um a i c forum is the objectivity and subjectivity in conservation and i think we really started to like think we're being objective and like think we can leave our emotions at the door and like think that all of that is fine but that's not true and i just really want us to like be able to acknowledge that we're human and we're people and we have our own biases and that's okay and we don't have to be robots all right but like i think in being really transparent with that and including that in um you know reporting and documenting that might even you know make future generations curse us less they might say oh hey look at least i see where they were coming from i get why they did this now so that's that's sort of my um my hope for the future in in conservation and uh one other thing i wanted to say in regards to ariel's presentation is that i recently um came across i think a post on instagram or something that was talking about how lean in feminism is out and how women like shouldn't try to be more like men in a sense and so i want to challenge men to apologize more um i think women apologize too much and i think we can definitely fix that and be more transparent about that but at the same time i want to challenge men to like lower their you know offensive standards and apologize more thank you nila i i secretly every time i'm somewhere and i get bumped into if it's a man and i hold it and i don't say sorry and the man apologize in my head i go but you're you're so right thank you for saying that awesome um we have a few questions um sort of more practical ones for piona um piona do you think they would have paid your full fee had you included in a contingency fee and um were you working alone or with the team for remediation and this person commented thank you for your honesty i found it very useful um okay so i think i've unmuted myself um the answer to the first question was that um uh i don't know um if i i don't know if they would have allowed a contingency as part of their um their process if uh uh it probably um i probably could have argued for one based on the urgency of the situation and the fact that um i wasn't able to um to assess the extent of the problem um before putting in my proposal um i live in a different city and uh so i think um um there's i i don't know probably 50 50 um chance that i would have got that they would have paid the contingency um and then i was working by myself uh for the most part the the two um museum interns who had uh initially that discovered the problem um were available to me for a few hours here and there uh but to be honest um i i could actually get through it faster on my own because um i of my teaching habit i when i was working with them i kept stopping and explaining things to them um so and and the the spaces were so tight that um uh it was uh it would have been it it slowed everything down to work with other people so i didn't do the remediation i just did the assessment um and then they went out to tender with base with base using my the information i provided to them um to get um uh a company or an individual to um to tackle the remediation and um i'm not sure where that's at now uh due to covid but it's going to be a it's going to be a at least a couple of years worth of work for a you know four or five people it's we're talking about 10,000 artifacts wow well thank you for clarifying um i know there is a comment or question um directed at ariel about the links um some of the links that you uh discuss yeah i i pulled this out for time but i'm going to share my screen again with you all here are a couple of uh links of things that i was watching as i was prepping for this so you can take a screenshot or take a photo of this i'll also share my power point with organizers so they can get it out to you but these are two youtube videos that i really highly recommend the one on the left is actually a pantene commercial called sorry not sorry it won a lot of awards it sparked a lot of conversation it's only a minute long please go watch it please please go watch it the other one on the right is a tedx talk called how apologies kill our confidence uh by dr. Maya Jovanich who's a sociologist and then here are a few of the articles that i was reading that had some really great recommendations i cited them under each slide but if you want to go there many many more you can take a screenshot of this as well or google the articles great thank you so much ariel um we i think have unfortunately reached our time limit i believe um but i want to say thank you again huge thanks to all of our presenters thank you to everyone thank you to sarah for stepping up to speak about your mistake thank you to everyone for your great comments and questions and engagement um you know we're so glad you attended if you have thoughts of how we can improve this event in future years we hope to hold this again uh if you have thoughts of resources or um other types of programming we could do surrounding this topic please let us know we would love to hear from you it's we've sort of kicked around ideas for this um but would really love your thoughts on what will be um valuable to our fields so with that i think and unfortunately we're out of time but um thank you all thanks everybody thank you everyone we hope to see you next year in person yes