Thursday 08/15/2024
Used to be, I spent nearly every Thursday at the Shustek center in Milpitas, accessioning donated objects. Back in April they had a problem with the building that put all that on hold. Today I went over there for a meeting where we volunteers were told and shown what had happened, and got a roadmap for the future.
Shustek center is a one-story office building, mostly open-plan with rows of metal racking, plus a few enclosed offices and storage spaces.. Back around Easter there was a day with a lot of rain and wind. The wind apparently blew over a cinderblock wall that was on the roof, masking the HVAC equipment on the roof from the street. The wall fell on a corner of the roof, which partly collapsed. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but it also broke a sprinkler pipe, which dumped a huge amount of water on the floor at that corner. Water moved across the floor, soaking into carpet. At that corner of the building had been a large amount of old computer stuff in a disorganized mass, which was the personal collection of a guy named Al — not museum property; they were kind of letting Al do his work there. A lot of Al’s stuff was on the floor, and got soaked and eventually had to be thrown away.
The museum stuff, rows and rows of shelving with boxes of documents and piles of media, was all raised from the floor, so once they had the humidity under control, it didn’t suffer, but a loty of stuff had to be moved very quickly. Then carpeting had to be pulled up and rather than replace it, they had a contractor scrape all the glue residue, sand down the cement floor and seal it.
The accessioning work area still isn’t usable, being full of stuff relocated from other spaces. Plus Aurora, the lead curator, has some vacation time coming. Likely volunteers won’t be back to work before October.
Back home by 3, when I took a tech squad call to help install a printer for one of my newest neighbors on the 6th floor, Sophia. Bert had started the install and ran into problems. I was able to get the printer going and sort out a couple of other problems she had with her quite new iMac.
Codgerville 