I'm officially a daytime tour guide now.

This is good news and I was/am super excited, training was really fun, and I feel good about my first tour I have this afternoon.

It did, however, come with some weird news yesterday.

Being tour trained was always somewhat of a promotion, not monetarily unfortunately (beyond tips), but just the next step. It meant you were doing a good job, and it is necessary for you to ever become full time within the department.

Now it's becoming more officially a promotion bc they're separating it to more of a separate department from exhibits. Both under a larger umbrella department of education. Nobody else will be tour trained after maybe only one more group. The only opportunity for future exhibit educators would be if a tour guide's position became vacant.

Hopefully this could mean a pay raise since they're treating it more like a promotion. That's a good thing. The fact that we'll have a supervisor and some full timers dedicated to just tours, and then some to just exhibits, is also a good thing.

Unfortunately what this means, and what I didn't know when I started my training, was that at some point I may never staff the exhibits again. This won't be an immediate change I'm sure since they're still short staffed and these things take time. But like...fuck I hope I like tours bc that's just going to be my life now.

And it's like,,, I'm doing the same thing I was. Just with a specific group of people, and in different locations. So I think I'll like it, but it did make me a little sad to learn that I didn't really know my last exhibit-only shift might have been my last.

GO HAM!!!

Tour Guide Hamantha

Let’s go Hamu!

yay congrats!!!