25 May
2010
25 May
'10
1:17 p.m.
All I can say
is it was like that when I voluteered at BP. With a couple
of twists. Firstly, there were no spare parts (not even common things
like fuses) kept in stock. And secondly there was no budget to go and
buy such parts. So if you wanted a part you took it from the nearest
machine (!). Secondly, the policy, as docmented in some of the
explanitory texts, was that when a machine was donated it was plugged in
and turend on to see if it worked. I think you know my views on that.
It's one thing for a non-knowledgable e-bya seller to turn on an old
machine to he can sell it as working (if it does) and get a higher price.
But a muesum should take rather more care than that!
Did you offer to help raise funds for missing parts? Did you offer to
improve their documented policy and process?
Seems to me that you didn't like what you saw, assumed *somebody else* was
in charge and that they had "got it all wrong".
Do you know what's better than pointing out problems? Offering solutions.
You seem to make the assumption that there were malicious Powers That Be
I don not believe it was malicious. Just clueless.
conspiring against you and your firmly held ideals.
I'd be happy to wager
that everyone was involved in a learning process. That there were no big
pots of money being poorly allocated, and spent on executive lunches when
things like fuses were desperately needed.
I never said there were. But they were charging the public an admission
fee. That money had to be used to pay various expenses, and if there
wasn't enough to maintain their exhibits properly then IMHO there was a
degree of mismanagement. Not fraud, I do not believe for an instant that
anyone was pocekting the money, but mismanagement.
And it was certainly very bad practice to just take parts from anotehr
machine. Oh,m sure I do that all the time in my workshop -- but then it's
my machine and I know what I've done. It's less amusing to come back to a
machine in the museum after a couple of weeks, find fuses missing and
nobody knows what happened to them (it's particularly unamusing when you
spend an hour trying to find a fualt as a result...)
-tony