Post by tjaman on Sept 13, 2006 22:00:10 GMT -5
I'm not 100 percent convinced I'm capable of this.
I knew today was going to suck donkey balls. I had a six page section and practically nothing to put in it. This college student was supposed to get me photos of her theater thing she had going on this weekend all last night (none showed up) and then turns out she had the wrong email address (although I repeated it to her twice on the phone and we make 25,000 copies of it every day and fling them into the streets of Minot and the surrounding). So she's gonna send it to me all morning and by 11 a.m. I've got an email from her. It's cutline info but no photos. Sorry. Turns out she can't get them to me until 6 p.m.
No ... turns out you can't get them to me at all. No more waiting around, dear.
I grab the story the photos were meant to accompany and run it down the page with a review of "The Blakc Dahlia" as a main story. We had one photo with that, so I ganked one from Universal's site (can't see how they'd mind -- apart from crediting them we just gave them a full front page's promotion [except the review was kinda negative, but never mind]).
That whole process took half an hour. Hey, everything's off to a great start. Page 2 with my review of "Justice" fit perfectly, and then I had three more pages to build.
No arts stories anywhere. None with photos. Crap. I start casting around for things to fill in the pages, and find something on the historical importance of rum. Believing that story implicitly by now, I start building the inside pages and get one of them all done when the system crashes. I lose an hour's work.
Crap. Well, a lot of that hour was spent tracking down photos and things and arranging the page, so it only takes about 15 minutes to repeat the process. Meanwhile, people are calling me because I stupidly ran the wrong crossword puzzle in yesterday's paper (and made up for it by running the right crossword puzzle in today's). I think they just wanted to complain. When I told them where it was they didn't seem any happier about it.
Have I mentioned that not once in this entire day have I had a smoke?
At about 3:30, things seem well in hand for the final stretches and my boss comes up to me. "Say, are you running anything about Sunday's concert anywhere?"
* needle scratch *
Back up.
Before I went on vacation, about Sept. 1, my boss hands me a big packet of promotional info about a concert that's happening on the 17. I hand it off to our typesetter and we run a brief about it Sept. 7 (a paper built while I was still on vacation.) I figured it was significant enough (visiting Air Force jazz ensemble taking over the civic auditorium that news side was gonna grab it and do a real story.
As it turns out, Bryan, my boss, thought he was handing it off to me to do the Big Significant Promotion.
Well s**t. No. No, I hadn't planned on it. Every other time these people are in town it's whisked from my desk and planted squarely in the news section. I figured I'd done what I was supposed to do, and he let me know that I had in fact not.
OK, I'm frantic now. Where's the original materials? Where's the disc with the photos? More importantly, WHERE'S MARSHA?
I gather the materials and with trembling hands hand them off to Marsha, our typesetter. Would she, could she save my life? Could she take the information she made as brief as possible last week and make it as long as possible this week?
She agrees to try, and I go back to fussing with the last blank page before That Page (Bryan agrees it'll be fine to run it on the back, so long as it's in color and has a photo, so I don't have to completely rebuild my front page with a STORY THAT DOESN'T EXIST YET!!!
How kind.
I just about went next door. Eight different times in all of this I nearly gave up. I was such a mess. Part of why people think I can do this is because I can do this. Give me a six-page section with nothing to put in it and I'll build it.
Meanwhile, the clock is spinning on by and by 5:30, I had the story, I had it placed, I had a photo to go with it and I had a section built. I printed it off so someone could proof it and set to work building the holes I'd left -- namely, in the calendar page and the teevee page (projects that I left myself to do while someone else was proofing all the copy).
Calendar page fills up just fine, and teevee page fills up just fine and by 6:40 I'm able to leave.
And face the second half of my day.
I want nothing more than to go home and watch Bones. But no. I've agreed to make copies of my director's audition sheets and ...
OMG. I was also going to put something in today's paper about there being auditions.
Crap. Crappity crap crap crap. No, I completely forgot about it. And no I wasn't able to get a teevee column written for this weekend.
I feel like a complete failure because the perfectly acceptable is still lacking stuff I promised others I'd do.
And then I begin to realize hey. Wait a minute. If all this stuff was so important, where was the follow up? Where was the information about the auditions in the first place? Am I directing this show? Why, when my email address is sent out to thousands of people every day, is it my sole responsibility to get information to people -- especially when they've given me a faulty e-mail address in the first place?
If things suck, it's only partly my fault, and right now I'm barely competent to drive sometimes (and will be, I realize, for another couple of weeks at least).
I get my payment dropped off at my cable company (late), get my Veronica Mars rentals back to the video rental, and get the audition sheets dropped off like three hours later than I was initially going to. I don't have any laundry done, I don't have any energy to do it, I'm missing Bones and Criminal Minds (because I'm driving around frantically worrying about everyone else's life but mine -- I didn't even eat lunch today. I had like a bowl of cereal, a packet of peanut butter cookies a cup of coffee and this like hotdog thing from waking up at 6:30 a.m. after four hours of sleep and having the day I've had.
I don't care. Dammit. I'm having a KFC and a Blizzard.
If I haven't earned it at the end of the day I've just described, then such a meal is entirely un-earnable.
Wow, am I completely overwhelmed.
And if you'll excuse me, I'm only halfway through my rebroadcast of the "Criminal Minds" season finale.
So far ... I'm mostly sympathizing with the serial killer.
I knew today was going to suck donkey balls. I had a six page section and practically nothing to put in it. This college student was supposed to get me photos of her theater thing she had going on this weekend all last night (none showed up) and then turns out she had the wrong email address (although I repeated it to her twice on the phone and we make 25,000 copies of it every day and fling them into the streets of Minot and the surrounding). So she's gonna send it to me all morning and by 11 a.m. I've got an email from her. It's cutline info but no photos. Sorry. Turns out she can't get them to me until 6 p.m.
No ... turns out you can't get them to me at all. No more waiting around, dear.
I grab the story the photos were meant to accompany and run it down the page with a review of "The Blakc Dahlia" as a main story. We had one photo with that, so I ganked one from Universal's site (can't see how they'd mind -- apart from crediting them we just gave them a full front page's promotion [except the review was kinda negative, but never mind]).
That whole process took half an hour. Hey, everything's off to a great start. Page 2 with my review of "Justice" fit perfectly, and then I had three more pages to build.
No arts stories anywhere. None with photos. Crap. I start casting around for things to fill in the pages, and find something on the historical importance of rum. Believing that story implicitly by now, I start building the inside pages and get one of them all done when the system crashes. I lose an hour's work.
Crap. Well, a lot of that hour was spent tracking down photos and things and arranging the page, so it only takes about 15 minutes to repeat the process. Meanwhile, people are calling me because I stupidly ran the wrong crossword puzzle in yesterday's paper (and made up for it by running the right crossword puzzle in today's). I think they just wanted to complain. When I told them where it was they didn't seem any happier about it.
Have I mentioned that not once in this entire day have I had a smoke?
At about 3:30, things seem well in hand for the final stretches and my boss comes up to me. "Say, are you running anything about Sunday's concert anywhere?"
* needle scratch *
Back up.
Before I went on vacation, about Sept. 1, my boss hands me a big packet of promotional info about a concert that's happening on the 17. I hand it off to our typesetter and we run a brief about it Sept. 7 (a paper built while I was still on vacation.) I figured it was significant enough (visiting Air Force jazz ensemble taking over the civic auditorium that news side was gonna grab it and do a real story.
As it turns out, Bryan, my boss, thought he was handing it off to me to do the Big Significant Promotion.
Well s**t. No. No, I hadn't planned on it. Every other time these people are in town it's whisked from my desk and planted squarely in the news section. I figured I'd done what I was supposed to do, and he let me know that I had in fact not.
OK, I'm frantic now. Where's the original materials? Where's the disc with the photos? More importantly, WHERE'S MARSHA?
I gather the materials and with trembling hands hand them off to Marsha, our typesetter. Would she, could she save my life? Could she take the information she made as brief as possible last week and make it as long as possible this week?
She agrees to try, and I go back to fussing with the last blank page before That Page (Bryan agrees it'll be fine to run it on the back, so long as it's in color and has a photo, so I don't have to completely rebuild my front page with a STORY THAT DOESN'T EXIST YET!!!
How kind.
I just about went next door. Eight different times in all of this I nearly gave up. I was such a mess. Part of why people think I can do this is because I can do this. Give me a six-page section with nothing to put in it and I'll build it.
Meanwhile, the clock is spinning on by and by 5:30, I had the story, I had it placed, I had a photo to go with it and I had a section built. I printed it off so someone could proof it and set to work building the holes I'd left -- namely, in the calendar page and the teevee page (projects that I left myself to do while someone else was proofing all the copy).
Calendar page fills up just fine, and teevee page fills up just fine and by 6:40 I'm able to leave.
And face the second half of my day.
I want nothing more than to go home and watch Bones. But no. I've agreed to make copies of my director's audition sheets and ...
OMG. I was also going to put something in today's paper about there being auditions.
Crap. Crappity crap crap crap. No, I completely forgot about it. And no I wasn't able to get a teevee column written for this weekend.
I feel like a complete failure because the perfectly acceptable is still lacking stuff I promised others I'd do.
And then I begin to realize hey. Wait a minute. If all this stuff was so important, where was the follow up? Where was the information about the auditions in the first place? Am I directing this show? Why, when my email address is sent out to thousands of people every day, is it my sole responsibility to get information to people -- especially when they've given me a faulty e-mail address in the first place?
If things suck, it's only partly my fault, and right now I'm barely competent to drive sometimes (and will be, I realize, for another couple of weeks at least).
I get my payment dropped off at my cable company (late), get my Veronica Mars rentals back to the video rental, and get the audition sheets dropped off like three hours later than I was initially going to. I don't have any laundry done, I don't have any energy to do it, I'm missing Bones and Criminal Minds (because I'm driving around frantically worrying about everyone else's life but mine -- I didn't even eat lunch today. I had like a bowl of cereal, a packet of peanut butter cookies a cup of coffee and this like hotdog thing from waking up at 6:30 a.m. after four hours of sleep and having the day I've had.
I don't care. Dammit. I'm having a KFC and a Blizzard.
If I haven't earned it at the end of the day I've just described, then such a meal is entirely un-earnable.
Wow, am I completely overwhelmed.
And if you'll excuse me, I'm only halfway through my rebroadcast of the "Criminal Minds" season finale.
So far ... I'm mostly sympathizing with the serial killer.
