My PhD has been about Endnote a lot lately. Since I started it’s pretty much all I do. I felt like I couldn’t read anything until I got a grasp of how to use it, after all, I’m sure I will have thousands of sources and I don’t want to lose track of them. And this new technology is absolutely fascinating to someone who had to manually track sources and create several annotated bibliographies and manually type up bibliographies… and now boom! this does it all for you. So six months later I think I’ve gotten it down, well for my current requirements that is. And then last week I opened up my Endnote library of 120+ sources and as it began to synch with my online account, I suddenly had over 4000 sources. It wouldn’t stop. I was terrified. Can you imagine having to manually delete 4000 duplicates of all your sources to ensure that you weren’t deleting the wrong thing? I was very close to throwing in in the towel and re-training myself on Mendeley. But I couldn’t.. I’d come so far with Endnote. And then I discovered it was only duplicating one source 4500+ times. So I deleted them. I was back to my original number of sources. And I synched. And they all came back. And then some. AAAAAAAAAH. I deleted the source over and over again from online, from desktop, and to no avail, it just kept reproducing, multiplying, taunting me.

It finally dawned on me that all I needed to do was empty my recycle bins online and on the desktop, and this corrupt horrible nightmare of a journal article was never to be seen again. I think I quoted it in an earlier assignment so I may have to just go delete it from there and find a new source for the same information because really, my last four visits to the library have been about destroying this source, I can’t let it back into my life. It’s over. And to think I almost broke it off with Endnote because of this one faulty article. I’m sorry endnote, but you are forgiven, as long as that terrible friend is out of our lives forever.