Fingers in pies.

So like I said yesterday, I have my fingers in a few pies. The biggest and most important is that I've been working at the Discovery -teque for about two months now, and I'm enjoying it. I'm working Front of House, which means that I'm one of the girls with the radio on her hip, and that I discreetly watch you for your whole day in my museum, and leap to it if you annoy me and I want you out.

It's fun. I enjoy it. To begin with, my feet hurt so bad after every 8.30-5.10 shift that I had to spend a good half an hour rubbing them when I got home each evening or they would still be sore when I went to work the next day. I hate having pressure-sore feet. It's horrid. Nothing makes time pass more slowly, and nowhere in the world can time move more slowly than in a quiet museum.

The people I work with amuse me lots. There's one girl in particular that I've made a bond with, and when we're both in a shift together, we spend the whole day winding each other up. [I'm at this point here, right now, where I'm trying to decide whether I ought to disguise my life, even though there is only the one person reading this blog. There is the possibility that other people may, so perhaps I should.] Anyway, this girl, she makes me laugh. We get on really well. We started at the Disco at the same time, and we just linked to each other quickly. There were four girls that started at the same time: me, Prancer (that would be the girl that I prance around the museum with -- see what I did there?), Gossip-girl and Curator-girl. These nicknames amuse me. They're very apt.

I'm coming around to Gossip-girl eventually, although she alienated herself to me to begin with. She is a gossip, you see. I have no time for gossips. (That's not to say that I'm not one. I am. But this is private. Ish.) She never gossiped about me, but she did about my friend Prancer, and that just put me off her. Still, I spent a couple of days with her last week the way that I spend my shifts with Prancer, and I kind of saw that she's not as cocky as she appears to be. The reason why she's "Yes, sir, no sir," with the seniors is not particularly because she's wanting to please, but because she's nervous. Still -- I'm wary around her. I'm conscious of what I'm saying all of the time and that she might repeat it.

Curator-girl had a few shifts and then stopped. She got a temporary position as a Curatorial Assistant. So for two months, the other three of us have been working together with the whole team, getting to know them, letting them get to know us, and she has been "upstairs" in the offices. There's a very real divide between Them and Us in the museum, and it's depressing. I enjoy what I do, but I don't want to be Front of House my whole life. This is supposed to be a temporary gig that is my way into Museum Services. The snobbery is pretty much only one sided: Front of House staff don't tend to think anything bad about Office Staff, at least individually, until they do something or say something unfair. For example -- last Tuesday, I worked late covering a gallery opening. Some woman asked for help disposing of the leftover food and drink. She had already put it into bags, but needed access to the basement, which only Front of House staff has, because she didn't want to leave it for one of us to take down in the morning.

This sounds like a nice thing, right? She wanted to save us hassle, and to stop the food from smelling overnight. Well, I took her down to the basement. I carried half of the bags. I opened the doors. I went into the bin room and put up with the smell and slung her bags in for her. When we were going back up to the public areas, I saw a trail of orange goo. After a few steps I bent down and poked at it and went "oh, it's still wet." At that point she thought it good to tell me that her bag had been trailing it since we left Turbinia. Her tone indicated that she knew it all along. She was very "*shrugs* Someone else will clean it up!" about it.

Stupid woman. That someone else is me. She pranced off and got to go home, and I had to stay back another twenty minutes -- keeping the whole Front of House team another twenty minutes -- mopping up a trail of sweet chilli sauce that led from the middle of the museum, past two lifts, through TWM reception - staining the carpet - down some stairs, and onto the newly painted basement floor.

...that is the kind of attitude that annoys Front of House staff. She could have told me that the bag was leaking as soon as she noticed, and I could have put another bag around it. Or she could have put the lid on the damned pot of sauce before throwing it in the bag in the first place. I'm constantly taking phone calls from Office Staff asking me to come and get a parcel from their office and take it down to be picked up. They get snarky when I, usually politely, explain that it's not my job to be their courier. I take parcels up to them when they arrive, because they look messy if they're just left at Reception. If there was somewhere tidy to keep them, I wouldn't bother. I do not run around after them, doing all of the things that they can't be bothered with. Don't get me wrong; I'm sure that they're busy too. But they could be polite and say "When you have a moment, would you mind popping up and getting this parcel for me?" They'd have a far better chance with that kind of attitude than "I have four parcels in ___ office. You'll need a trolley." It's those people that get the "I'm sorry, I'm Front of House staff. I need to stay Front of House. If you'd like a parcel taking to the Transit Door, I suggest escorting it to the lift, and then escorting it out of it again *hangs up*" answers.

That was quite a rant, but my opinions aside, there isn't much scorn from the Front of House side to the Office side, it's generally the other way around. Apparently, once you're Front of House, it's hard to climb up into anything else. ....so, that's just what I wanted to hear.

Curator-girl is apparently coming back to our team. That'll be good, because although she did appear a little bit snobby with her "I'm not here to make friends!" (she actually said that) attitude, she was nice enough. She's going to be behind, though. She's going to annoy the seasoned Front of House staff with her questions. She's going to annoy me with them.

So out of the four of us, I think I'm the most settled in. I just kind of get on it with. Prancer is a darling, but she floats through her shifts without doing any real work. She'll do something if she's asked to, but won't just go and do it. Gossip-girl isn't liked by a few people and is dismissed as a gossip and/or brown-noser by the rest. Curator-girl hasn't been around enough to be settled in. I'm very sure that there are opinions made about me, too, but if any of them are negative, I'm yet to hear them.

I will, of course, be crushed when I do.