Day in the life

This past week was a little on the hectic side for your humble correspondent, gentle readers. So please forgive me for offering you a rerun column from a number of years ago. Iran across it recently and discovered that little had changed.
The more years I spend in the newspaper business, the more I am amazed at the gross misconceptions that exist in the mind of the general public, in regard to newspapers I mean. Unfortunately, most people get their ideas about this crazy business from movies and television shows. Let me tell you, folks, it just ain’t that way anymore - if, indeed, it ever was.
Therefore, gentle readers, I thought I’d treat you to a few of the bits and pieces, the flotsam and jetsam so to speak, of a couple of days in the life of a member of the working press. It may seem a bit disjointed and poorly organized, but that pretty much describes what a newspaperman’s life is really like.
Monday, 7:30 a.m. - Arrive at work. Find the floor littered with paper spewed from the fax machine. Most of the messages are from Tim Hutchinson and Marion Berry, both of whom have absolutely fallen in love with fax machines. They send us a fax about everybody and everything that comes their way. They haven’t let us in on what they have for breakfast every day, but I figure it’s only a matter of time.
Monday, 7:35 a.m. - Discover that, thanks to our elected representatives’ eagerness to enlighten us as to every sub-committee they have been appointed to, the fax machine ran out of paper some time during the night and several messages that really were important never got through.
Monday, 11:00 a.m. - Work on this week’s edition is well under way when the computer system decides that it is having a bad hair day and quits working. All attempts to coax it back into working order are futile as it just sits in a corner and sulks. The type setters are getting frustrated and the computer technician is threatening to “adjust the system” with a chain saw.
Monday, 1:45 p.m. - Technician finally succeeds in getting computers back on line just in time for a thunderstorm to sweep through the area and knock out the electrical power. In the windowless and, now, totally dark office, the editor (that’s me, folks) trips over two chairs and a copying machine trying to find the @#%!,-^ door.
Monday, 6:30 p.m. - Finally, pieces are falling together and it looks like we might actually get the paper ready by press time tomorrow. This realization, naturally, brings a feeling of dread to the entire staff because this is usually when something really bad happens.
Tuesday, 11:30 a.m. - Just after the page paste-ups are finished and dispatched to the press shop in Stuttgart, somebody comes in with a story about the first birthday party of their great-nephew who lives in Oswego, New York. They are greatly upset when they are told that there is no way it can get into the paper this week, and being told that the deadline was at noon Monday does nothing to calm them down. After this person leaves, somebody reads the handwritten, almost illegible story and realizes the kid’s birthday was two months ago.
Tuesday, 4 p.m. - Printed papers are brought back from the press. Editor discovers that page 6 is missing, but page two is in the paper twice. A hurried conference ends with a desperate phone call to a thoroughly embarrassed press operator. He agrees to reprint the paper immediately after the editor reminds him that the editor knows where press operator lives.
Tuesday, 5 p.m. - Local (pick one) school board, city council, planning commission or Bureau of Indian Affairs calls to inform editor of a special called meeting that night at 7 p.m. Editor’s plan, made a month ago, to take wife out to dinner for wedding anniversary goes up in smoke. Editor calls home to tell wife, who, thank God, was raised in a newspaper family and understands.
Tuesday, 7 p.m. - Editor arrives at special meeting. Discovers that there won’t be enough members of the group there to have a quorum, so the meeting can’t be held. Editor fights back urge to throttle somebody (anybody, at this point) and goes home in a very bad mood. Considers working out his frustration by beating his sons, until he remembers that his sons are bigger and stronger than he is and would probably do him serious injury. Settles for kicking the cat, then remembers that he doesn’t have a cat.
Wednesday, 8:30 a.m. - Papers ready to be delivered to Post Office and newspaper racks. It starts raining - hard. Question - do we put papers in the racks knowing they will get wet and turn into papier mache, or wait until the rain stops and be deluged with complaints about the paper being late? Answer - it doesn’t matter because you’re going to lose either way.
Wednesday, 12 noon - Papers delivered, work on the week’s edition is finished. While eating lunch, editor briefly considers going into some less stressful line of work, like brain surgery, before returning to office and starting work on next week’s edition.