Typical Day

Typical Day

Alexandra Pithecus is a curator at the Shmoop Museum of Unnatural History. With a master's degree in anthropology, she's an expert on the evolution and social relationships of mankind, as well as on when you can find the best sales on shoes at Anthropologie.

She starts her day by leaping out of bed at 6:30AM (she's a morning person, and annoyingly so), grabbing high-octane coffee and cruising on over to the museum at about 7:30AM. She checks and responds to her emails while chewing her tongue, then makes a few phone calls to other curators/private collectors about some of the pieces the museum would like included in their upcoming exhibit—Homo erectus: Why It's Okay to Laugh.

She's trying to get a hold of an early Homo erectus skeleton that was located in Ethiopia. Scoring that artifact would be a big win for the museum, as complete skeletons of this type are exceedingly rare. For now, all they have is a Homo erectus pelvis, and while certainly interesting, it doesn't make for a thrilling display. About all you can tell by looking at it is that the hominids birthed by the owner of the pelvis must not have been very big-brained.

Alexandra then spends about an hour cataloguing some of the items in their "From Monkey to Moron" collection into the museum's database program. Today's job is to plug in various identifying information about the prehistoric tools that the museum has in their possession, including a miscellany of adzes, atlatls, and arrowheads. Yes, a lot of prehistoric tools and weapons started with "A." It was a long time ago—they were still working their way up to the "B"s.

After a quick lunch, Alexandra hops in her car and drives downtown, where she catches a 2:00PM symposium on vestigial tails. She heads back to the museum afterward and spends some time working on an article she is writing for an anthropology journal.

She then takes a little stroll through the museum, checking up on the exhibit that will be opening tomorrow and making sure that all signage is clearly presented and entirely accurate, and that all objects in the collection are presented in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

She notices that one figure in the "Neolithic Exhibit" is holding a ceramic pot that wouldn't have been around during that period, so she has to remove it and then check the records to see which dimwit made such an error. By doing a bit of digging, she finds that she herself was the dimwit. Ah well, she must have been having an off day. Nobody's perfect.

The driver of that truck? Definitely not perfect.

Alexandra clocks out (not literally) at around 8:00PM and heads home, stopping on the way at Anthropologie for a pair of half-off pumps.