More Words of Inspiration

Visitor Services

Rome built a great empire by killing all those who opposed them. Those they could not kill they built a wall to keep them out.

If you can stay calm, while all around you is chaos...then you probably haven't completely understood the seriousness of the situation.

Management

Doing a job RIGHT the first time gets the job done. Doing the job WRONG fourteen times gives you job security. 

A manager who smiles in the face of adversity probably has a scapegoat.

Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

If at first you don't succeed, try management.

Prioritisation

INDECISION is the key to FLEXIBILITY

Digitisation

Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity. 

Teamwork

Teamwork means never having to take all the blame yourself. 

Never under estimate the power of very stupid people in large groups

Time Management

Never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid altogether. 

We waste time so you don't have to

A snooze button is a poor substitute for no alarm clock at all.

Interpretation

Plagiarism saves time.

Inspiration

Hang in there, retirement is only thirty years away

The beatings will continue until morale improves

When the going gets tough, the tough take a coffee break

In the End

Aim Low, Reach Your Goals, Avoid Disappointment.

Inspiring the troops for the new Season

March is nearly upon us and thoughts are turning towards the new visitor season. As usual I have been preparing my inspirational speeches to the new staff and volunteers recruited for the summer. I find that plagiarism saves a lot of time. With a few slight adjustments they can be made to work.

e.g. "Friends, staff, volunteers, send me your biscuits" 

I understand academics have a problem with plagiarism, which is why they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to say the same thing in a different way. The difference is they don't have a proper job or troops to manage, in which case plagiarism becomes your friend.

I wonder what you think about the following speech to welcome the season's new volunteers.

"Good Morning. You volunteers now have the privilege of serving under the meanest, toughest, screamingest volunteer coordinator in the Museum sector. ME!
Now, I don't want you to consider me as just your coordinator. I want you to look on me like I was, well - God. If I say something, you pretend it's coming from the burning bush. Now, we're members of the proudest, most elite group of museum volunteers in the history of the world. We are volunteers! Museum volunteers! We have no other function. That is our mission and you are either gonna hack it or pack it. Do you read me?Within thirty days, I am gonna lead the toughest, volunteeringest sons-of-bitches in the world. The Museum of Unreason Volunteer Crew will make history come alive, or it will die trying. Now, you're  with Frank Unreason now, and I kid you not, this is the eye of the storm.Now, a museum is a team - it collects, conserves, interprets, educates as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that stuff about individuality for the newspapers don't know anything more about real museum work than they do about fornicating. Now, we have the finest acid free paper and monitoring equipment, the best spirit, and the best volunteers in the world. You know, by God, I actually pity those poor visitors we're goin' to deal with. By God, I do. We're not just gonna welcome the bastards, we're going to kidnap their living hearts with intuitive interactives and home made cream teas. We're going to make those lousy visitors enjoy themselves by the bushel."

I am indebted to Bull Meecham in 'The Great Santini' (1979) for inspiring this speech

Self censorship versus honesty - Warning Explicit!

When I was planning my blog about Philip Larkin and his poem 'This Be the Verse', I spent some time thinking about how I would approach his 'tricky' words. As anyone involved in museum interpretation knows I had to think about my audience, the age of the readers, the likelihood of causing offence etc. Would a warning be needed? Would I go for The Guardian newspaper approach of liberal full spelling honesty, or the faux censorship by removing some of the letters and replacing them with '*' without actually obscuring what the word actually is. In the end I assumed the readers of my blog were basically illiterate and and it didn't matter what was written so I thought f**k 'em and ploughed on regardless. Well not really - my decision was the product of logical thinking.

Why bother obscuring a word without actually obscuring the full offensive violence that it incorporates. It is a cop out. If I wrote 'Donald T***p' rather than 'Donald Trump' does it lessen all the offensive idiocy that that name implies? Not in the slightest. But if I genuinely tried to remove the offensiveness that he embodies I would end up writing  '*o**** **u**' then we are reduced to gibberish. You see it is tricky.

But me being a clever genius sort of person. I asked myself, what would happen if I used '*' to just obscure normal words - what would happen? Here is a small sample below of quotes by famous people given the Museum of Unreason treatment (the actual words are shown at the end of the blog).

1. "Those who dare to f*** miserably can achieve greatly" John F Kennedy

2. "The greatest accomplishment is not in ever f***ing, but in rising again after you f***." Vince Lombardi

3. "Great acts are made up of s**** deeds" Lao Tzu

4. "Only passions, great passions can elevate the s*** to great things" Denis Diderot

5. "I have learned to use the word '**********' with the greatest caution" Wernher Von Braun

6. "All great thoughts are achieved by w**king" Friedrich Nietzsche

7. "Behind every great fortune lies a great c****" Honore de Balzac

The answer is it makes them really filthy - be honest with yourself it does.

What about replacing the word 'fuck' with a less offensive term such as 'enthusiastic sexual intercourse'. That seems to imply a more high minded approach to the subject. So lets apply this to the Philip Larkin himself. What would the opening line of 'This Be the Verse' now look like - it won't scan, but that's not the point I'm trying to  make.

'They indulge in vigorous sexual intercourse with you, your mum and dad'

I really don't think Larkin had incest in mind when he wrote the poem; and yet again trying to move away from the original word makes the meaning even ruder.


So the answer to the self censorship conundrum is now clear. To use the word 'fuck' is a true and honest approach. To use the word 'f**k' is the product of dirty mind making minds even dirtier. To alter the word entirely changes the meaning and will probably land you in gaol.

You can thank me later.


The original words
1. fail
2. falling & fall
3. small
4. soul
5. impossible
6. walking
7. crimes

Very Witty Oscar

It is a little known fact that when Oscar Wilde attended Oxford in 1874 he volunteered at the Ashmolean Museum as a room steward in the Cast Gallery. It was there he met General Pitt Rivers and it was an even lesser known fact that he encouraged him to open a museum with his collection on the basis that it was, 'unspeakable and uneatable'. It took 10 years for Pitt Rivers to be convinced of the basic inedibility of his collection and open the museum. Yet Oscar Wilde was given no credit for all the effort.

In later years when in exile it is thought he yearned for his salad days checking displays for excessive humidity levels with his whirling hygrometer.  His last recorded words were in fact,

 "I could resist everything except condensation."

In the Trinity College archives in Dublin there are early versions of his plays. Lady Windermere's Fan's working title was Lazy Curator's Air Conditioning Unit. Wiser counsel prevailed upon him to change the plot to a case of suspected marital infidelity from an argument between curators over the lux levels on a museum's collection of watercolours.

"We are all in the stores, but some of us are looking more closely at the light levels."

is now more famously remembered as

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." 

In fact many of his famous witticisms had their museological elements removed to appeal to a wider audience. Lord Alfred Douglas 'Bosie' was in fact the Dr. Watson to Wilde's Sherlock Holmes, writing up his activities and 'improving' them for posterity. I know this because I picked up one of his unpublished notebooks in a charity shop in Paris last week and it jots down Oscar Wilde's original words before Bosie got to work on them.

"All museum managers become like their chair of trustees. That is their tragedy. No curator does that is his"

"Accessioning is a serviceable substitute for wit"

"To love one's collection is the beginning of a lifelong friendship"

"No unethical disposal goes unpunished"

"Museums are far too important ever to talk seriously about"

"Only dull people are brilliant at interpretation"

"There is only one thing worse than being a curator, and that is not being a curator"

"A curator's object is his autobiography, an interpreter's panel is his work of fiction"

"Visitor services is simply the name for our attitude towards people we don't like"

"If one cannot enjoy visiting a museum over and over again, there is no use visiting it at all"

"Object labels are rarely pure and never simple"

"The exhibitions that the world calls immoral are exhibitions that show the world its own shame"

"Museums are meant to be loved, not understood"

"Some museum volunteers cause happiness wherever they go, some whenever they go"

The literary world's gain was the museum world's loss.