Testing Testing, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.... ?

On Saturday the museum had their test event. This basically means that we took guinea pigs (meaning the University of Utah employees) and let them tour the museum, while testing fire drills, lost children, broken scanners, and messed up tickets.... it was quite a day. It was fun getting to test everything though. Up to this point I have just been sitting at the front desk, watching the IT people try to program our computers with the proper software, and hanging up on people when I accidently press the wrong button on our massively huge phone... oh, and sitting through hours of training... that's been fun....

Anyways, so we got to test out the museum. I started out with a giant scanner that took me back to my Kmart days and scanned people's tickets to get into the museum. Five minutes after opening, one of my coworkers made a kid cry. That's right. We were off to a great start :) We then had a fire drill, which was very sad. Let me explain why. The museum was open from 10 to 5 on a Saturday. Now, I don't know about you, but as a child, growing up, waking up early on a Saturday was expected.... but it was not something I enjoyed doing. As soon as I got to college, Saturday's were sleep in days for me. Anyways, the rest of the world lets their children sleep in, apparently, because for the most part the first hour was mostly older people... and when I say older... I mean... old. The fire drill was planned to be around 10:30, since that was only half an hour after we opened and therefore should have the least amount of people. Well, they were right in that. However, all the people for the most part were... old. Do you know how long it takes to evacuate a five story building full of a bunch of old people who have trouble walking... or are very stubborn? Yeah. Picture that in your mind. Haha. Anyways, so we finally got everyone out, and then had to shuffle them back in. Oh joy.

After the fire drill all was pretty calm. We had some "bad" tickets we had to deal with- we just called a manager. That's right. Taking the easy road. After that I enjoyed walking around the museum for a while, helping an old man discover the name of a bird we had on display and locating a clean tablecloth. Yes. It was that exciting. After all the craziness of the morning (*sarcasm sarcasm sarcasm*) I went to lunch with a bunch of my coworkers. It was.... interesting... I guess living in Rexburg really allowed me to be super sheltered these last three years. I cringe every time one of my coworkers cusses- which is quite often, let me tell you. Or, like the other day the IT guy, Alex, invited me to get a beer, and I was all "Oh yeah, I'm 21! I can do that..." And then I realized, whoa.... he's serious about getting a beer. I'm used to all my Mormon buddies joking about it.... but never actually doing it.... Let's just say Salt Lake is quite a different culture than living around Mormon's 24/7. Weird, I know. But true.

After lunch I had the opportunity to find a "lost" child- yeah, I'm a hero- and awkwardly carry on a conversation with a security guard who might have been trying to flirt.... or was just really good at being awkward. I'm still not sure. However, I did discover that there is a secret passage way under the museum. I know. Cool!

Overall, it was a pretty fun day. I enjoyed getting to interact with so many people and hearing their compliments on how beautiful and amazing the museum is. I'm excited for opening day, even though there is so much left to do! November 18th, here we come!