It is interesting to learn what constitutes a job in this world. Things that one would never think of as a career having a niche need. For example, I had a friend that was studying his native language for the sole purpose of being able to be a government translator. He needed to know all the official terminology. Of course, after he explained it to me it made perfect sense. However, I never would have thought of it before.
It got me thinking of my own work history. Had I ever had a job that seemed, well, a bit odd? My mind supplied the answer. I once spent two years cataloging seashells.
I learned that there is a whole discipline devoted to the study of seashells, called conchology. Now, if you are a conchologist, you are probably reading this with an air of disgust, as in “of course there is! How else would you be able to classify seashells?” For the rest of us, this line of work might seem a bit surprising.
For this job, I was entirely self-taught. In the grand scheme of the museum, I was just one tiny little part. Over the years, donors had bequeathed their shell collections to the museum, and they had simply been unceremoniously dumped into storage closets. They were so easily forgotten that dozens of employees walked by the closets every day and never thought to wonder what was contained within. Therefore, when I indicated an interest in tackling this project, the general response was “have at it.”
I was supported primarily by a curator that fashioned himself a researcher, who renamed his department from Technical Exhibits to Scientific Exhibits and hoped that by cataloging the collection it could be used as a research tool for conchologists studying our region. I also had the backing of the Director of Education whose staff were the primary candidates to make use of the collection as teaching tools. Moreover, of the General Curator whose tendency towards pack-rat habits was the one who was responsible for this cacophony of paraphernalia in the first place.
My curator gave me a “lab;” a converted darkroom fitted with a repurposed computer, a microscope, a selection of brushes and dental tools, an old but serviceable digital camera, and empty binders with lofty titles of Biological, Geological, and Anthropological Collections. To be fair, the museum’s collection did extend beyond seashells to a respectable collection of stone tools from local midden pits, and native stone brought in to augment an upcoming renovation. None of the binders remained empty.
Nevertheless, I spent most of my time evaluating the whorls, ridges, and teeth of seashells. I learned the term periostracum and its importance in the protection of the creature within. (For those interested, the periostracum is the outermost covering of a shell protecting the delicate calcium carbonate shell whilst the creature is alive. It often flakes off after death and is in fact removed for commercial sale of seashells, being that it is often brown and fibrous and not particularly attractive.) I learned the minute differences between the number of whorls defining a species. I learned how to write on a grain of rice, a skill that cannot be underestimated. (I never actually wrote on a grain of rice, but I am sure I had the skill to do so.) Part of the cataloging process, once I identified the object, is to label it for future retrieval. The labeling needs to be unobtrusive, non-damaging, and removable. And when said object is no bigger than a thumbnail, ridiculously small. I was blessed with both a steady hand and inherently neat handwriting.
For years I worked part-time in that small office. More than once I startled my co-workers by emerging – the room itself, much like the closets, was an often-overlooked door. (Another disadvantage of a dark room office – when you arrive at work huddled under an umbrella, and when you leave, the sun is shining brightly on a blanket of snow.) I allocated my small budget to build a foldable wall-mounted table with a ruler border, a supply of non-porous solvents for labeling, and lots and lots of Tupperware for storage. I designed moveable shelving to fit in the closets, lovingly built by the most fabulous handyman volunteer to ever offer his services. When not building closets, he himself functioned as a live exhibit creating duck decoys. I won a grant for non-living biological collections, which more than tripled my professional library. I even got my very own intern, who designed a database for my primarily hand-written catalogue.
Eventually, I moved out of the darkroom, securing a full-time position at the museum managing the inventory of the living collection – a much more involved and visible position, with a brand-new set of challenges (at least none of my shells ever ate each other). However, every time I go to the beach, I still identify every shell I see, investigating its whorls, ridges, and teeth, and mentally cataloging as I go.
Photo credit to Dagmara Dombrovska @ Unsplash