Working from home or not! Museums!

Granddaughter Number Two reports having a fraught time getting herself onto the office to work this morning. Her usual bus company’s drivers are on strike and so she had to walk some distance to catch a different bus, run by a different company, to the tramstop so that she could then catch a tram into central Manchester. She’d already been up early to walk the dog as the rest of the family has gone off on holiday leaving her in charge. Sometimes she is able to work from home; it seems to depend on which shift they put her on. Granddaughter Number One always works from home, with only a once-monthly requirement that she goes into the office. It suits her fine. 

According to this article, though, some firms are insisting on a return to the office, rather than having their employees work from home. However, according to Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economics professor and a longtime researcher of working from home, the change in working patterns is here to stay. As he sees it “The future of the office is you go in for only two or three days a week, and when you’re in, it’s about meetings, trainings, presentations, lunches, events and connecting. The office is for socializing. At home is for one-on-one Zooms and analyzing and thinking.” In fact he reckons that the trend towards working from home was already starting and would have been a viable thing back in 2015 (but not in 2010, when presumably the technology would not have supported it). The pandemic lockdowns just accelerated the process. 

Some jobs don’t lend themselves to working from home of course; teachers, nurses and doctors, hospitality workers and so on. Now, imagine you work for a museum. You can’t actually work from home but you might like to take some of your work home with you and so you start squirrelling away bits and pieces and sneaking them home with you. After all, you are most likely to work in a museum if you find old stuff really fascinating. And that seems to have been the case with some but certainly not all of the stuff that has been disappearing from the British Museum. 

Knowing how hard it is to keep track of which books and CDs and DVDs we own, I can understand how some museums might have difficulty keeping track of their exhibits. After all, they’ve usually got more than they can ever display at one time. Some people, like the writers of these letters to the newspapers, have sprung to the defence of museums, most of whom I am sure do a good job. Others are saying that the Greeks are using the current scandal as a further argument for having us return artefacts to them, stuff like the Elgin marbles. A reasonable argument: if we can’t look after them properly we should perhaps send them back where they belong.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!