Jobs

I made a quick comment on the earlier post that elicited a few comments, and it got me thinking about jobs-

I have an interesting one. It isn’t one of those fields you enter for love of MONEY but for love of the job and the things. As many of you know when I’m not getting goofy with y’all I work for a small museum.

In the museum field small usually means that the staff is the equivalent to five or less full timers. We have an educator, director and myself. And I have the bestest job of all! Here, I’ll prove it to you. In the last few days I’ve: conducted tours, worked with an artist, found dead people, played with 50-70 year old baseball gloves, brought in a collection of kids games that covers two generations, ordered new merchandise for the museum store, trained a volunteer, handled technical issues, updated the website, and handled a double booking in the community room. See, coolest job in the county.

Let me give a little detail about some of the more interesting parts of that list.

Tour- We had 22 seniors from a senior center about 80 miles away stop in for a tour. They were fun!!! Asked questions, told stories, and bought stuff in the store. Thankfully they bought some of the items that had gone to third markdown. I love adult tours. The background they want is on the community itself and I don’t have to do a lot of the explanations I have to do with kids. No one asked what the Civil War was, or a wagon trail, or had to have a soda fountain explained to them. This was nice and left me time for the juicy details about lives, loves, and deaths.

Artist- Most artists are odd. Not meant as a slam just an observation. This one is one of the most down to earth people I know. She does amazing work with her specialty being horses and wildlife. One of my favorite stories she tells is…. They were at a show when a blind man and his companion approached them. The companion asked if the blind man could touch the statues of the horses. He had heard about horses his entire life but had never met one and didn’t get what all the fuss was about. She thought this was a wonderful idea. The gentleman had tears in his eyes by the time he was done, after all he had just “seen” his first horse.

Baseball Gloves- Each item in a museum has a specific number that we all the object ID number. Yep, we museum folk are a crazy group. We use a specialty database to track our objects. Which means I have to instantly become an expert on every object we have. Fortunately once I have the information entered into the computer I can forget most of what I had to learn.

Kid Games- The parents are moving into town so they are cleaning out the house. I like it when people do that, I get some interesting things. This time it was toys. Two generations of toys: Claudette Colbert paper dolls, Candy Land, an early ViewMaster, Tinker-Toys, and a coloring book from 1944 were just a few of the goodies that came in today.

So, what is your favorite thing about your job? Or maybe if you could do something else what would it be?

edited to add: I apologize to the grammarians amongst us for the excessive use of colons and commas, but they make me happy. 

120 comments July 18th, 2007