Tuesday night wasnt your usual night in the Enterprise-Record newsroom. Most of the reporters work regular daytime hours, with the occasional stint when there is late-breaking news or a late meeting.
Usually when I forget something at my desk (like filling out my time card) and come in late at night, the copy editors are busy putting together the paper. Occasionally one of them will look up and say hello. But generally they are feverishly working at their computer stations.
Its hard not to feel sorry for the copy editors. All of them have pale complexions and you know it cant be fun to work until midnight every night.
At least when I was a graveyard waitress working my way through college I had really interesting characters to share the time with. These guys have to concentrate.
That’s in contrast to an action news reporter’s job, which involves sitting in meetings that last hours.
I must admit though, that sometimes I get to do fun things like tramp around on wildlife refuges.
Tuesday the Bossman asked the majority of us to stick around so we could help get last minute quotes and update our Web site as the election results trickle in. Bossman bought us pizza, which was devoured by the time I could return for a second plate.
Im not certain but I speculate it was the sports guys.
Election night is a job that is mostly hurry-up-and-wait. Results start coming in at about 8:30 p.m. after the polls close. But those early results really dont mean diddly. So we sit at our desks and sort of arrange our coveted contact phone numbers to gear up to make a mad dash of calls once there are enough results to make an educated guess as to who won what.
In the meantime, we joked around. Our reigning computer guy even played music from the soundtrack of Rocky,? which Im sure is not the norm around here.
I guess he wanted us all to feel like action newspaper reporters.
Ah, the glamor that is journalism. I hope the copy editors werent too distracted.
This year is a little different, however, because we have been working to make our Web site more useful and decided to update the Internet info. as soon as Candace Grubbs (elections chief) got fresh results on the countys Web site. This meant the newsroomies sitting around until new results were posted.
I guess I could have cleaned my desk while I was waiting for fresh results. But mostly I made phone calls to Tommy.
I checked out some of the other Norcal blogs, and felt sort of silly that something like an election was going on and I hadn’t updated all of my fans with my every thought about how the campaign was going. So I decided to spend some time writing this important update.
As the night progressed, we got a little antsy and a little obnoxious. Our resident techie even perked us up by singing “Vos O No Vos,” the Telemundo version of “Deal or No Deal.”
If you haven’t checked it out, the Spanish channel version is much more spicey. The tension is incredible when the Mexican version of Helga the German dominatrix comes out to tempt the players with the suitcase filled with cash.
See, newspapers bring you culture.
Thats why we get the big bucks.
