I have little interest in numerology and related fabrications, but there seem to be a lot of social\u00a0and cultural concepts involving the\u00a0number seven. Heavens, saumurai, sins, dwarfs, seals, seas, signs, wonders, pillars of wisdom, hills of Rome and years in Tibet – all magnificent sevens.<\/p>\n
Seven (or, if you’re David Fincher, Se7en) years ago I had an itch.<\/p>\n
Seven years before that<\/em>, I was in the process of planning my Masters by Research; and, in mid-2001, my then-partner and I moved to Scotland and I became a postgraduate at the University of Edinburgh. (My thesis was on the emergence of body imagery in West Coast American assemblage and installation art of the 1950s and 1960s. Why I was on the North East Coast of the British Isles rather than, for example, the West Coast of America is a story for another time.)<\/p>\n I arrived back in Melbourne mid-January 2003. The next day it was 43 degrees which, having come straight out of a Scottish winter, was ridiculous. I was hot, jet-lagged and broke. But – as you might glean from my thesis topic\u00a0– until that point I had carefully followed Max Ernst’s philosophy for life: “The young man, eager for knowledge, avoided any studies which might degenerate into breadwinning.”<\/p>\n After a couple of weeks back living with Mum and Dad I decided Ernst’s philosophy could wait and I went to an employment agency. Within a few days I was a casual answering phones in the Eftpos sales department of the National Australia Bank. Within a few months I had a flat in Richmond, and I had moved into a sales role. I got on well with\u00a0some of the people there and was good at my job – so good they offered me a full-time position. The next day I turned it down and quit. Following Ernst didn’t pay the bills, but I was a trained art historian. I wasn’t going to work in a bank.<\/p>\n Despite my newly-acquired sales skills, I hadn’t learnt to plan ahead. A week later I was broke again and returned to the employment agency. They had another job for me, starting Monday at a building somewhere in Docklands. I arrived Monday and groaned. Different building, different job, but it was the National Australia Bank again.<\/p>\n This time it was data entry on superannuation accounts, and I was good at that too. Soon I was a trainer, then caved and took a full-time job. Paid holidays! Sick leave! Financial security! I had it all, and gradually, inexorably, my hard-working indifference turned to strong dislike, then to something stronger still. I could see one possible future before\u00a0me: a corporate wage slave, with a mortgage and a white-collar senior management position. The thought of it made me shudder. I was miserable.<\/p>\n Despite this, I had learnt a huge amount. Management and finance skills, building a team, managing up as well as down, writing performance reviews, dealing with difficult people, interview skills and more. Leaving corporate culture to one side, they know how to train staff; unfortunately, leaving training to one side, corporate\u00a0culture is toxic. Thankfully I had learnt one other skill: planning. In mid-2007 I decided to leave and started saving money.<\/p>\n I finally left NAB just before Christmas 2007, itching to do something meaningful and worthwhile, something I enjoyed. I spent the next seven years scratching that itch. After a few months exploring options (and recovering from the mental battering corporate life gave me) a friend called and offered me a trainee archivist position. Professionally (and personally) it was about the best thing that could have happened to me. I had found something I really wanted to do. It was meaningful and worthwhile, and I loved it.<\/p>\n Then,\u00a0over the course of seven years as an archivist, a\u00a0postgraduate research\u00a0itch gradually developed. One week shy of the seventh anniversary of my last day at the National Australia Bank I started my PhD. Interestingly, it combines archives with museums and museology. I read a lot of museology as part of my Masters, which I was planning for fourteen years ago today.<\/p>\n As I said, I don’t believe in numerology or artificial patterns. But it makes a good story. (700 words)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have little interest in numerology and related fabrications, but there seem to be a lot of social\u00a0and cultural concepts involving the\u00a0number seven. Heavens, saumurai, sins, dwarfs, seals, seas, signs, wonders, pillars of wisdom, hills of Rome and years in… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,26,100,57],"tags":[165,27,101,102,103],"class_list":["post-647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archival-profession","category-art-history","category-autobiography","category-personal","tag-archives","tag-art-history-2","tag-corporate-world","tag-jobs","tag-seven-year-itch"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2X6WE-ar","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":714,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647\/revisions\/714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}