What do you want to do when you grow up?
We’re both into our thirties, and sometimes we still ask each other about things ‘when we’re grown up’.
My parents are probably of the last main generation when you did make that ‘decision’. We’re in one where yes, you can do ‘just’ one thing all your life, but where you could quite happily have five different careers in a working life, and it would be fairly acceptable.
All of this makes it quite fun looking at other people’s jobs, and a good opportunity for this was a recent documentary as part of a series on ‘The Museum’ aka the British Museum in London.
I have a soft spot for behind the scenes things, finding out how things really work. So now I know there’s a few more jobs out there (in addition to being a curator, for example), including: renovating very large heavy gates; being a ‘spider man’ cleaner and fixing things at roof height; or on a more more long-term level, devising a huge storage system that won’t melt down or damage the objects that are to be housed in it, which may corrode, break, dislike fresh air, that kind of thing.
Another reason for thinking about it was yesterday, suddenly having two references to linguistics, my main subject at university. One was seeing my former director of studies, Bob Ladd, appear in an article in the Economist – go Bob!
The other was meeting a distant relative for the first time, who is doing sociolinguistic study of Sorbian, a language spoken in the south-east of Germany, and of the issues for those who still speak it.
All of a sudden, I was using terminology that had not been dusted off for around 10 years, and rather enjoying it.
My relative is having to make decisions on whether she takes a particular research path, and ends up having a ‘life’s work’ form of project with this particular language. On ‘The Museum’, the storage guy is probably facing a similar kind of project.
It can seem slightly unreal in a world where more staff at my work are still planning changes. Part of me would like that kind of job for life – and I’ve worked with two people who retired only within the last couple of months, who did exactly that.
Part of me would like to revisit some of my old haunts, in terms of things I loved to do, and see what they are looking like these days.
And part of me wouldn’t mind doing something completely different, unrelated – or more than one something different.
But also, I understand the privilege of being in a society and a time where I am able to choose – and to have job opportunities at all rather than mass unemployment, for example.
Other people’s jobs? For now, a day just to be at home sounds good…