Data Entry Pains

The great thing about having an internship is that, generally, it allows you to do work that you may not get the opportunity to experience later down the line. My internship with the museum is exactly that. I used to joke that I'd probably be hauling boxes or getting things down from shelves for the museum, but.

No.

I'm re-numbering the largest private collection of angels.

And let me tell you, it's not my thing.

Everything has already been separated. I think. I've been typing in numbers into Excel for the museum for the past couple of weeks, and as glad as I am to be able to help, it's not quite as glamorous as the readers at home may think it is. I've gotten to know the number-pad on my laptop very intimately these past few weeks. The biggest hurdle is finding a way to actually engage myself enough with the information to type up the numbers. Podcasts and my Netflix account are the best things to remedy boredom, as they're entertaining to listen to while I plug in numbers. I've been going through the document to allow for a common parlance to be used (such as what materials the object was made from in the form of keywords), which has helped matters some. Excel is really easy to use, but isn't always the best of programs if you need to edit a document and not have the field you were editing get accidentally wiped. I can see why it's used by accountants, but I wish there was a cheaper option for small museums like my internship.

Mostly, I work from home, or from my favorite cafe. Being at home means I tend to relax far more, so getting work done entails cracking down on my bad habits. I like the cafe because it makes me feel like I'm engaging with a wider community, while also allowing me delicious opportunities for coffee or food that I don't have to make myself. Likewise, it makes me feel like a real college student-- you know, the ones that talk about Margaret Mead or evolutionary biology over coffee, or the ones that prominently display the fact that they're reading Moby Dick outside a college curriculum. Those types of college students. (The ones everyone likely hates in secret.) Recently, however, there's been a heatwave, and I've been moderately ill, so my input isn't as great as it should be. But it's getting along.