What does your museum role say about you?*

It is readily accepted that, in the museum world, the only people you think are normal are the ones that you don't know very well. But does the role you play in the museum say something about you? The following is based on the staff and volunteers at the Museum of Unreason. Any similarity between them and the rest of the human race is entirely coincidental.

Museum Marketing - Outgoing Alcoholic - you possess a degree and had the reputation of being rarely sober and throwing excellent parties at University. Your general belief is the job requires more of the same. You are ambitious and believe that you can drink your way to the top. Also, you believe that the marketing budget is never big enough and that if you handed over all the cash to the marketing team and employed competent sales employees 'they will come'.

Museum Sales - Paranoid Loner - you don't possess a degree but had the reputation of attending all the same parties at University as the museum marketer before dropping out. You avoid customers like the plague in order to work on the 'strategy'. As a result you have a very low golf handicap and you hate the marketing department for wasting all the museum money.

Museum IT Specialist - Uncontrollable Geek - you have no detectable personal life but are in complete command of everything that happens at the museum. Possibly foreign, or at least in possession of a language degree, because no-one can understand a word you say. You even have acronyms for acronyms. The Chief Executive comes to you for advice and does everything you say.

Museum Accountant - Fearsomely Insane - you talk softly and wield a big spreadsheet; immune to gossip, office politics and disorganisation. You are approached with trepidation and your extreme personal wealth is probably the product supreme income efficiency.

Museum Human Resources - Grim Reaper's Less Pleasant Younger Sibling - you are rarely seen, except when bad news is expected. Your ability to seemingly float along the corridors is often commented upon. Nobody has ever seen your reflection in a mirror and as a consequence you are never invited to the pub, but you know all the gossip - how?

Museum Manager - Spineless Cutthroat - you are in your job for life as you're unemployable elsewhere. You measure success by the number of meetings held and decisions avoided. But, you are still invited to the pub, if only to pay for the drinks.

Visitor Service Officer - Cheery Suicide Risk - you are perpetually torn between having a break down and sleeping with the manager to get a promotion. Your relationship with the public is 'complicated' and you feel undervalued by the senior staff. However, solace is found in excessive shopping and cocktails.

Museum Curator - Insecure with a God Complex - you are the blue riband employee of the organisation. You are the most valuable person in your own mind, but the most expendable in everyone else's. To justify your existence you simply mention 'accreditation' and 'backlog' and retreat to the stores for a week when in reality you actually are running a restaurant on Corfu.

Museum Chief Executive - A Lucky Lucky Bastard - you got to the top because you thought you would, but your inability to use a computer, or know what accreditation is, suggests you are more lucky than brilliant. You have innate good sense to move on before your cock ups are noticed and the museum is forced to close.

Museum Volunteer - The Willingly Unwilling Martyr - you know the museum wouldn't function without you, staff knows the museum doesn't function with you. You know there are useful things you do, the staff know all the things you don't/won't or can't do. You know the staff are ungrateful but you are careful to let the staff know you are doing everything for free and giving up your free time to do this.

*This blog was written sometime ago and following the latest staff review the museum volunteer is now the marketing/sales/visitor services manager, the Chief Executive has 'moved on', the accountant has retired to Worthing, the human resources manager now runs authentic ghost tours in Milton Keynes, the curator hasn't been seen for some months and the IT Specialist was actually found to be a Bulgarian immigrant looking for work who thought the museum was the local YMCA (he now runs a car washing service on the High Road). In the meantime I continue to fulfil my role as museum manager with due diligence and professionalism.

10 Words to Cut From Your Writing*

In my constant efforts at self improvement I was drawn to an article on 'lean writing'. The thrust of the article suggested that you could easily cut out 10 unnecessary words from your sentences. The words in question were:

Just
Really
Very
Perhaps/maybe
Quite
Amazing
Literally
Stuff
Things
Got

I'm sure you have written a sentence with all of them in before. I have.

'Just a short note to really thank you very much for all the quite literally amazing stuff you've donated to the museum which we've already got, so perhaps you maybe want to retrieve your things from the skip out the back''

Now try that sentence without the unnecessary words.

''A short note to thank you for all you've donated to the museum which we have already, so you can retrieve it all from the skip out the back'''

It works! So not everything you read on the internet is bad advice.

But the larger point is that we can be prisoners of our language, free up some words and free up your mind. Can this liberating effect be applied to museums? What words can a museum do without? What would be the effect? Here are some suggestions in no particular order:

Backlog
Accreditation
Trustee
Friends
Curator
Concession
School
Conservation
Object
Volunteer

Abolish those words and instantly your museum is a happier place. You don't have a backlog! Yippee. No objects and no conservation issues means we don't have to have a curator, instantly creating savings. With no concessions you can charge full price all the time. You'll have no friends (nothing new there), but no trustees telling you what to do either. They just turn into greying busybodies and therefore indistinguishable from the paying public. With no volunteers they'll just become unpaid staff, and therefore you can now sack the staff who have the temerity to ask for pay - yet more savings! No school groups means no graffiti in the toilets and no headaches at the end of the day from all the noise. Finally, no accreditation and heritage nirvana is surely reached while the dustbin will be full of unloved and unused paperwork.

Just reflect on that for a moment and don't pretend that I'm not offering you a seductive vision of the future for your museum.

I might apply this to my personal life, and after the week I've had I'm going to abolish the following:

Rain
Queue
Tax
Breathalyser
Fine
Mortgage
Arrears
Cholesterol
Erectile dysfunction
Hangover

Happy Friday 13th to one and all!

*http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/229369

New Year's Resolution: Clear that backlog

Happy New Year dear reader.

After a Christmas break watching reviews of the year which singularly failed to mention the museum crisis in this country I began thinking about starting 2012 off as positively as possible given that the world is apparently guaranteed to end on 21st December 2012. This gives plenty of time for the conscientious museum professional to meet his or her maker with their museum meeting current accreditation standards.

So here is my to do list.

1. CLEAR THE ACCESSIONING BACKLOG ONCE AND FOR ALL. I can't allow everything to be destroyed in a global apocalypse without being properly recorded.
2. I realise I am unable create the time to do it myself, so I will apply for small grant funding to employ part time staff to clear the backlog.
3. In the current circumstances money is thin on the ground so I will instead recruit new volunteers and train them up to do it.
4. I don't have time to train volunteers myself. So I will recruit fully trained registrars as volunteers thereby cynically using the glut of recently unemployed museum professionals.
5. All unemployed registrars will still want paying and have already set themselves up as consultants so I will create four backlog clearance timetables based upon objectives 1-4.
6. I don't have time to create four timetables, so I will simply re-write the collections management strategy to reflect the available resources to clear the backlog.
7. Sod it - I'll just call it all a 'handling collection'.
8. Bugger - objections from the Education Manager means I will ethically dispose of the backlog, or failing that sell the stuff on ebay.
9. Bollocks - museums don't want to increase their collections and the trustees don't want to be seen to be selling their stuff.
10. Hire a skip and hope nobody notices before 21st December.

Happy New Year