I Hate My Coworkers
My boss is on his honeymoon, which he scheduled nearly a year ago. I am not mad at him. But suddenly last week, word came that the other sportswriter, who we will call F, had accepted an invitation to go to some Pacific Island (Hawaii or New Zealand, I can't remember which) the same weekend. That meant I was left to run the sports department all by myself. That wouldn't have been much of a problem, except that the college I cover reached an administrative milestone that we decided as a desk needed to be marked with a five-part series. Those articles were all to be written, of course, by me. So this has been my week since Tuesday:
5:25 a.m.: Alarm wakes me up, hit snooze button.
5:34: Actually get up, stub my toe on something strewn about on the floor and repeat "Fuck, Fuck, Fuck," as I walk into the shower.
5:35: Ask Anna, who is determined to wake up more cheerfully these days, to kindly read the story I'm submitting because I've been working on it for far too long.
5:50: Exit shower.
6:00: Put coffee in thermos and grumble about breakfast of three 120-calorie fruit bars that I started eating when commenced the diet and now seem incapable of avoiding. Maybe there's cocaine in them. (Actually this is an exaggeration. Anna made me a delicious breakfast this morning.)
6:30: Arrive at the office. Try to piece together the garbled language of some of our stringers while pushing the sleep out of my eyes. Bad prose and daybreak is not a good combination.
9:00: Print proof of front page and give to one of the chipper, morning-person editors. Watch as they scrawl all over the stringer's garbled article, pointing out all the commas I didn't put in or run-on sentences I didn't shorten or eliminate.
11:00: Send out final black and white pages. I am a fanatic about being done by 11. Others, like F, always seem to work until noon. What are we to do?
11:01: Wander across the office my desk. Many of the other reporters are on a kick to redesign the newsroom. That would entail cleaning out my desk so that someone burly could move it around. I still haven't found all of my papers -- my business papers -- since the last time I cleaned out my desk in order to get a new one. Today I told that group that I was in favor of redesigning the room, but only if they do all their measurements in picas, a newspaper-centric page measure. Everyone laughed as though I were joking.
Noon: Eat lunch
1 p.m.: Try to find something cool on the wire about baseball or soccer to put on one of my pages for the next day.
1:03: Get bored, start searching for pictures of Danica Patrick, Maria Sharapova and the WNBA on the photo site.
1:05: Okay, back to work.
1:10: Give up on finding cool story and instead take something about NASCAR.
1:30: Slap page together and hurry out the door.
2:00: Arrive home intending to get a jump on the next article in my---wait, is Around the Horn on?
2:30: Okay, time to get to---Oh wait, Michael Smith (fucker) is guest hosting PTI, have to watch that.
3:00: Okay, well, you know a couple of games of Yahoo! Euchre might be fun, just to get me in the mood to write.
3:45: Goodness, where has the day gone?
4:00: Hey is that the Tigers?
5:00: Leave house to pick up Anna from work.
5:15: Sit in Anna's office waiting for her to finish work (mark my territory)
5:45: Return home to apartment, which is suddenly stifling. Try to focus on work, but am hungry and hot and want to nap.
6:00: Dive into delicious Anna-prepared salad or similar. It's probably a cool meal, since it's hard to sit here and cook.
7:00: Well a 1/2 hour of crap TV won't hurt.
7:30: Fuck, fuck, fuck, I really need to start.
7:31: Shit, have we blogged tonight?
7:31:30: I don't know what to blog about.
7:32: Think about what to blog about.
8:32: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck
9:05: Start actually working on article
9:30: Wish Anna goodnight
11:30: Finish article and stumble into bed, toe stub optional. Mostly just try to avoid any hint of covers since it's too hot and I'm sharing the bed with an angry wolverine who doesn't quite recognize me through the fog of sleep.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
See how glamorous sports journalism is?
5:25 a.m.: Alarm wakes me up, hit snooze button.
5:34: Actually get up, stub my toe on something strewn about on the floor and repeat "Fuck, Fuck, Fuck," as I walk into the shower.
5:35: Ask Anna, who is determined to wake up more cheerfully these days, to kindly read the story I'm submitting because I've been working on it for far too long.
5:50: Exit shower.
6:00: Put coffee in thermos and grumble about breakfast of three 120-calorie fruit bars that I started eating when commenced the diet and now seem incapable of avoiding. Maybe there's cocaine in them. (Actually this is an exaggeration. Anna made me a delicious breakfast this morning.)
6:30: Arrive at the office. Try to piece together the garbled language of some of our stringers while pushing the sleep out of my eyes. Bad prose and daybreak is not a good combination.
9:00: Print proof of front page and give to one of the chipper, morning-person editors. Watch as they scrawl all over the stringer's garbled article, pointing out all the commas I didn't put in or run-on sentences I didn't shorten or eliminate.
11:00: Send out final black and white pages. I am a fanatic about being done by 11. Others, like F, always seem to work until noon. What are we to do?
11:01: Wander across the office my desk. Many of the other reporters are on a kick to redesign the newsroom. That would entail cleaning out my desk so that someone burly could move it around. I still haven't found all of my papers -- my business papers -- since the last time I cleaned out my desk in order to get a new one. Today I told that group that I was in favor of redesigning the room, but only if they do all their measurements in picas, a newspaper-centric page measure. Everyone laughed as though I were joking.
Noon: Eat lunch
1 p.m.: Try to find something cool on the wire about baseball or soccer to put on one of my pages for the next day.
1:03: Get bored, start searching for pictures of Danica Patrick, Maria Sharapova and the WNBA on the photo site.
1:05: Okay, back to work.
1:10: Give up on finding cool story and instead take something about NASCAR.
1:30: Slap page together and hurry out the door.
2:00: Arrive home intending to get a jump on the next article in my---wait, is Around the Horn on?
2:30: Okay, time to get to---Oh wait, Michael Smith (fucker) is guest hosting PTI, have to watch that.
3:00: Okay, well, you know a couple of games of Yahoo! Euchre might be fun, just to get me in the mood to write.
3:45: Goodness, where has the day gone?
4:00: Hey is that the Tigers?
5:00: Leave house to pick up Anna from work.
5:15: Sit in Anna's office waiting for her to finish work (mark my territory)
5:45: Return home to apartment, which is suddenly stifling. Try to focus on work, but am hungry and hot and want to nap.
6:00: Dive into delicious Anna-prepared salad or similar. It's probably a cool meal, since it's hard to sit here and cook.
7:00: Well a 1/2 hour of crap TV won't hurt.
7:30: Fuck, fuck, fuck, I really need to start.
7:31: Shit, have we blogged tonight?
7:31:30: I don't know what to blog about.
7:32: Think about what to blog about.
8:32: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck
9:05: Start actually working on article
9:30: Wish Anna goodnight
11:30: Finish article and stumble into bed, toe stub optional. Mostly just try to avoid any hint of covers since it's too hot and I'm sharing the bed with an angry wolverine who doesn't quite recognize me through the fog of sleep.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
See how glamorous sports journalism is?
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