This job takes me basically everywhere, to see ALL the weird and wonderful stuff. That’s why I took it in the first place; couldn’t be stuffed with a boring old office job. I saw an opportunity to be a researcher for ‘Snipley’s Believe it, Or Don’t, Whatever’ and I knew it was my dream role. Since then I’ve been from China to Chile, Turkey to Turkmenistan, to Algeria. It’s not ALL been fun and games. Sometimes I go to see something ‘odd’ but not interesting, like when I was in the Himalayas and there was a girl who could balance 342 pencils on her nose. Like, great. It still took about 40 minutes for her to get them onto her nose, and the pictures just made it look weird.
But every now and then, something will really surprise you. Like, I heard about Melbourne’s first ladder and scaffolding museum. Strange right? It’s a building that is dedicated to the history of Melbourne’s scaffolding industry, and that sounded like something I had to see. Two things convinced me: there was the review from the Museum Buff (a very respected source in the community), who said it was a hidden gem of mobile scaffolding history. And then there was that lawn maintenance museum in England that turned out to be great, even though I took the assignment under duress.
So I travelled to Melbourne, thinking that at least it’d be a fun trip to a nice city. Maybe I’d have a chicken parmigiana. I heard they were good. But the ladder museum? A rare gem indeed, one for the books. Apparently things have expended since they got that review, and business has been going well. They have a gift shop now, albeit a small one. And the best thing about it was that the owner has such passion for ladders, you know? It b;ed through his entire tour, and I think the handful of people along for the tour with me really felt it as well. I didn’t walk out of there with an avid passion for ladder platforms and aluminium work platforms, but I could understand the passion, which was really the most important part. That should be the goal of every museum owner. And this one is just about unbelievable to make it into the book.
-Tyger