New Year, New Responsibilites

In the first week back, I finally finished up the values I had been estimating (let me again say that these are rough – I’m in no way a professional appraiser and my employer is aware of that!). There are few words to describe the relief that washed over me when I input those last numbers. I love Excel and the things it can do, but when you’re really only using it to create tables and not to crunch numbers, it can be very tedious.

            My debut back into the real world outside of the office chair involved an army of mannequins. 50 of ‘em, for the upcoming exhibition. My FitBit certainly didn't mind the activity, but we've needed to be a tad more creative with space since then.

             There have been some other changes, as well…

I’d like to call it a vague sort of promotion, but really it’s just a change in focus for what I do. I am now the Dirty Room Princess. If I haven’t explained what the Dirty Room is, it’s essentially a separate storage location also located in the URBN Center. Its name comes from the fact that it is quite dusty in there, and many of the boxes haven’t been touched in a long time. Before the URBN Center was built, and before we had the generous support of Robert & Penny Fox, all of our objects were spread amongst a few different storage locations.

If anyone has ever moved to a new house, they might understand where I’m going with this. When you’re unpacking and getting settled, there are always going to be boxes that are opened last. The boxes in the Dirty Room are those. A pair of interns really headed up focused effort on figuring out exactly what’s in the room over the summer, and the project was brought back to life when one of them came by to visit. She’s now teaching me her system and I will head the project from now until the end of my Co-Op period…Which means when she leaves I will be the new Queen. ;)

I want to reassure you all that we aren’t being irresponsible. The Dirty Room sounds like a pretty bad name, but it’s really more playful than anything else. Dust is to be expected when you have old things sitting in old boxes for an extended period of time, especially when we haven’t always had the technology in our current main space.

I really enjoy poking around in there, though. While I’m a little tired of seeing wedding gown after wedding gown, it makes the funky things we come across even cooler. For example, this printed cotton dress is from the 1800s and we had no idea it even existed! (That’s also what happens when filing systems change over the decades).

Next week will only have me around for 2 days, but I’m excited to see how far we can get in looking through more boxes and potentially making some cool new discoveries…even if I do have to wear a mask and googles.