But man, as I was dumping out shop vac after shop vac of water in an attempt to rescue some art, I kept thinking "I have a masters degree for THIS?" And while I feel bad for my friends who work in the finance industry and their stress, I know they would never have been expected to do something as lowly and gross. And crazy enough, just when I thought it couldn't get much worse than schlepping disease infested water out of a disgusting 100 year old basement, I got the following email from another museum compardre
So we have a termite problem at our museum. Every fall when we get our super hot super dry weather they get really bad. They come down from the light fixtures. It actually sounds like its raining in my office as the fall to their deaths around me.
2 comments:
Oh my god, Anna! That totally sucks! I have never been more sick than when I worked at Numismatics. There's also something to be said about lack of temperature control. Once, the heater in my office stopped working and it got down to 56 degrees for a while. I got the flu and THEN got strept. Not to mention the whole "sick building" thing. Even the big budget museums are low budget. Unless you're in the military collection, and you get some money. I think they all assume you work in museums because you "love" it and are blind to all atrocities because you just looove it so much. You should be honored to be the one to save those works of art, right?
Also, I totally agree that those of us who work in museums have the weirdest jobs ever. I think I did more bizarre things at the Des Plaines History Center than I do now but still. This past month I moved an 81 pound pumpkin (twice), create a scarecrow that looks oddly like ET, ordered $400 worth of Smarties and Dumdums, scrubbed dried worms hidden in caked on mud off a stone floor, and continued to seriously reconsider why I am not a member of the Teamsters Local considering how many times I move boxes of crap from one place to another. Though nothing is as horrible as the termites and the sewage. Those are both horrible! We had a ton of flooding in September, but luckily it was just rain and lake water (hence the dead worms).
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