Yes indeed, I'm a grump. But hey, you knew that, right?
Here's the latest proof:
We're on deadline today. It's 15 minutes before we have to send the last pages of tomorrow's edition to prepress. Fifteen minutes - then we all might as well drop dead.
Listen, what I do for a living is a very lonely, solitary thing.
I'm a copy editor. So I read. I read all day long, eight hours a day.
But I don't just read. I concentrate. I read very carefully. I look for misspellings, poor punctuation, breaks in AP and LA Times style. I try very hard to make sure that the news stories make sense. When they don't, I fix them. Or try to.
So distractions are not helpful. Peace and quiet are good. Peace is very good. Yes, and so is quiet.
But a bunch of youthful wankers in the cube across from me laughing and talking loudly about "false eyelashes," whatever the hell that means within the context of today's newsroom problems, that bunch, that din, that racket, is not helpful. Not when there's just 15 minutes to go before we have to send the whole shootin' match, and I'm not done with the final three pages.
So I asked them politely to please shut the hell up and go back to work because some of us were on, like, you know, deadline.
It worked, I'm glad to say.
It also proved the title of this post. I'm a grump. But we made deadline. Just barely. With pages that are more or less error-free. I hope.
Tomorrow will be better. Maybe. I hope.
-JFT
