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Buildings aren't big enough for Blade Runner yet, and there's still a veneer of government control.

(ETA: No one's said it yet, but 1984 is so obvious that it wasn't worth mentioning.)

Nothing huge ... just removing an "n" that made it incorrect. I emailed because it was a bit embarrassing.

But I literally changed an international publication. Not since I changed A1 on The Washington Post as a bystander in 2003 have I felt this.

this week's reading is The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

We have lived under a class of people who ruled American culture with a flaming cross for so long that we regularly cease to notice the import of being ruled at all. But they do not. And so the Redeemers of this age look out and see their kingdom besieged by trans Barbies, Muslim mutants, daughters dating daughters, sons trick-or-treating as Wakandan kings. The fear instilled by this rising culture is not for what it does today but what it augurs for tomorrow—a different world in which the boundaries of humanity are not so easily drawn and enforced. In this context, the Mom for Liberty shrieking “Think of the children!” must be taken seriously. What she is saying is that her right to the America she knows, her right to the biggest and greenest of lawns, to the most hulking and sturdiest SUVs, to an arsenal of infinite AR-15s, rests on a hierarchy, on an order, helpfully explained and sanctified by her country’s ideas, art, and methods of education.

More specifically:

1. How do you feel the platform performs compared to corporate ones?
2. How do you feel moderation is handled?
3. Do you believe the people of Beehaw (admins, moderators and users) could do a better job? If so, then why?

Interesting week - 8/23/2008

As you've likely sauntered this way from my wife's blog, there's no need to rehash the news about the cat, beyond: We have a new one. It's older than we thought. It's quite sweet and already fixed and declawed. I can now step onto the porch for a cigarette unmolested.

("An Unmolested Cigarette" -- where's Gore when you need him? [I mean Al Gore, not Gore Vidal. {If that's not funny to you, probably nothing I say will be. (It's been entirely too long since I nested brackets so far that it cycled back to parens.)}])

No, the news of the week revolves around work. Somehow, I find myself, through deed, not word, sliding inexorably toward some sort of quasi-management position in which I become a dotted line to the editor on the org chart. Well, as one of the deskers mentioned this week, we're really all dotted-lined to him, by virtue of the fact that our boss does nothing.

But it's a special breed of nothing. One that, in fact, makes me realize that Scott Adams did not actually exaggerate when he created Wally. My boss actually walks around, coffee mug in hand, from tiny office to tiny office, talking to people about things they have no interest in hearing. What could be worse? Well, when he's done traipsing about, he returns to his office. The one I share with him. The man cannot say anything once. A classic example of this would be "You probably want to do this, because, you see, you probably want to do this." Given a set [N], "this" is the same thing for all N. He also seems to have been sick on that day in kindergarten wherein the concept of the "inside voice" is imparted.

This includes the phone conversations he has with the girls and parents involved with the soccer team he coaches. In the office. On deadline. With me in there.

Anyway, he's been working there since 1979, and short of the Iranian hostage crisis and Skylab falling, the only other thing of note that I'm aware of from that year was being born. He's the fixture sort of co-worker, the one that won't get fired for any reason.

Not that he hasn't really been giving it the college try in the past week.

One of the deskers (we'll call him "Greg") is on vacation, and has been for the past two weeks. This is not, inherently, a problem. However, he is responsible for doing the bulk of the features work, some of which must be done on Mondays. Our intrepid boss failed to schedule anyone for the past two Mondays, and last week, one of my co-workers (we'll call her "Dawn") sucked it up and said, "I'll come in on Monday." She works Tuesday through Saturday, and we have a moratorium on overtime.

Because said boss was on vacation until after Greg started vacation, it was a decision that had to be made without a supervisor around. In the end, no harm, no foul. But as Dawn looked to Week Two of six days, with a young son, no less (not that I want one, but she never makes excuses about missing work for her son; quite the reverse, so I respect her), I offered to take her Saturday shift this week. She wanted time off, and I wanted overtime.

We ran it past the boss, who wasn't quite sure why any overtime was necessary. Explaining that the need to cover 11 shifts with two people has a nasty remainder didn't quite clear things up for him, and the idea that he, as the only exempt employee in the department, cover the fucking shift himself was simply a nonstarter.

The compromise was that I'd try to shave some hours off during the week, given that layoffs are in the immediate future, and I'd rather not walk in looking like I was wearing a shirt from Target. A house-brand shirt from Target.

That was the end of last week.

On Monday, I came in and another co-worker (let's say, "Phil") was quite irritated with our boss because on Sunday, he showed up fully five hours late because whatever soccer tournament his girls were in, they won the first game, and he simply had to stick around for the next one.

So Phil has to report to the editor that our boss didn't show up until 7 p.m. on Sunday (here, I gently remind the reader that we're a morning newspaper with an 11:45 p.m. deadline). After I hear this story, Dawn also reports that the boss didn't show up until 4:30 on Saturday. (Sundays, if you haven't noticed wherever you may reside, are large papers. And contrary to popular belief, gnomes and elves do not produce said paper.) Whoever's running the Sunday paper is supposed to be in by 2 p.m. (When I've been running Sundays, I haven't come in until 3 or so, but that's because I spend the square root of zero hours walking around with a coffee mug.)

So, the boss fuckup trifecta is in play. Not avoiding OT in his department and showing up, in aggregate, 8 hours late. Any further tricks up your sleeve there, boss?

Well, the city editor comes into my office on Monday and says, "So I assume [boss] talked to you about the election package." Tuesday was our primary election. "Umm, no," I said. "You're joking," he said. "Did you really expect a different answer?" I countered. The look on his face said no, he didn't expect it, but he was sure as hell hoping for it. From there came a litany of the sorts of language romantically ascribed to newsrooms, even though we can't smoke at our desks and the bottle in the bottom drawer is no longer allowed.

Ah, yes, the election package graphics agate boxes. The boss did come in on Tuesday, his day shudder off, and offered to come in between 9 and 11 if we needed him to fill in the agate. He figured it would take about 20 minutes. Phil told him that we'd manage just fine.

Between working on the wire pages and the live coverage, I ask Phil if he can get me a copy of the page templates, because there are a few bits of wheel reinvention that we engage in every night that I'd prefer to have automated. He's thrilled that someone else wants to take up the task, so he points me to the template, I make the changes, and then we wait for a few days for live pages to propagate.

Meanwhile, Election Night proceeds apace, and I'm done with my inside pages around 11. Phil asks if I can fill in the agate. He's still working on A1, so of course I say I can help. And then I discover that all the data the reporters were supposed to have collected for the agate weren't collected. And then I discover that what was collected came from different sources. And then, I discover that the city editor, who was supposed to compile the rest, you know, down to the fucking state Lands Commissioner, was instead posting stories to the Web. (We're a Web-first publication, don'tchaknow.)

Seventy-five minutes of aggregating, formatting and inputting ensues. The only things that keep my blood pressure in the healthy range are a smoke break and the knowledge that I'm being paid professional overtime wages to do basic data entry.

We blow clear through deadline, and by the time Phil's A1 is done and my agate is good to go, we're 45 minutes past deadline. What this means is: A1 and the agate did not get proofed. Once again, the front page of the paper and the only clump of data people would care to read did not get a second read. This is what we like to call "amateur hour."

Now, Phil and I have egg on our faces (him more so than me, thankfully) because the boss had offered to come in. But we only realized our shortfall at the tail end of his "available" time, and regardless, the roaming coffee mug would have slowed us down more than anything else. Thank god upper management knows this to be the case.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, it surfaces that, in the face of layoffs, my brilliant boss decides to tell a room full of people who don't work in the newsroom that he hopes lucrative buyouts are in the offing, because "I'm done with this job." One of these people reports directly to the circulation manager, who immediately passes off the information to the editor. Bad move. He's acting like he wants to be fired, and when buyouts are offered, they go to people who have been performing at least satisfactorily. Which is to say, he'd more likely be fired with no severance than get a buyout (and they're almost guaranteed to be skimpy, anyway).

So Wednesday rolls around. I talk with Dawn and Phil, asking if they'd talked with the editor about the clusterfuck, recently in progress, on Election Night. No, they haven't, but if I'd like to get a word in, feel free.

I go into the editor's office, having already on Monday told him about the OT situation and how I'd try to limit it, to which I got that sort of knowing sigh of, "Of course your boss won't work it. Don't worry, there won't be a witch hunt." (quote not verbatim)

Under advisement, I mention that I'm "concerned" about how Tuesday night went. This is true within PC guidelines, but my bigger concern is that we actually have our shit together for, oh, say, the actual presidential election.

The editor says he understands my concerns, and could I e-mail him those and any suggestions I might have?

I don't really know when I snapped. It might have been right before working on the templates, or it could have been the hour-plus I spent on agate. But what ensued as an email was not what a copyeditor would write, it was what the news editor should write:

As we discussed, there was some confusion on the night of the primaries as to responsibilities for compiling numbers and a couple of other rough patches that resulted in the paper being 45 minutes late to press without the front page or results data being proofed.

As to the data collecting itself, it would be helpful, looking ahead to the general election, to specify a single source for tabular figures that would be our source for state figures. Different people were using AP results, county website results and secretary of state website results. Even if the data had been gathered in time to avoid being late, it would have been nigh impossible to get them double-checked efficiently. Judging from the amount of time it took me to compile and enter roughly 75% of the results table, roughly an hour and 15 minutes, this stage could be expected to take 2 hours in full. I would recommend a specific cut-off time where results are printed out and entered, with the printouts retained for checking, instead of having two people visit the same Web site.

Hopefully, the AP will have graphics and/or tables ready to go for national elections. If that's not the case, or if we're planning on doing our own formatting on that, then that's more time that needs to be taken into consideration. And worst-case scenario, we have a third-straight election without a clear winner in at least one top race.

One good way to handle division of labors on the desk would be to have the entire front page (and inside election pages, ideally a couple without ads) designed in advance, with the results breakout boxes duplicated on a separate document that houses the full agate. If the formatting is properly in place, this would mean results would simply be pasted twice, and once the breakouts are done, they can replace the dummied boxes when A1 and other pages are released.

Pre-designed packages can hem in reporters to a certain length; however, on deadline on election night, there's rarely time to write the Great American Novel, and jumps and wire can be adjusted accordingly, anyway.

The other thing I would recommend, especially in light of 2000 and 2004, is a significant extension of deadline. While we may only need 45 minutes, wiggle room would help us avoid the dreaded question heds. Accordingly, I'd suggest moving the budget meeting back by an hour or two.

Just as a suggestion, here's how I might see a three-person desk working: First reader/data compiler. First reads happen before data need to be compiled, so this makes sense as a progressive position for the evening. A1/Election designer/inside proofer. Proofs inside pages, then gives second reads on stories for the page, paginates election coverage and places completed graphics and breakout boxes. Inside designer/final proofer. Gives first reads on and paginates wire pages. Since those can be done earlier in the shift, this person can then shift to proofing on A1/Election coverage and ultimately checks data figures from the printouts provided by the compiler.

I anticipate senior editors would also be available for final looks.

These are just my suggestions from running election coverage in the past, adapted for our situation. Since some people will be looking to us to tell them what happened in the election, I think at least three sets of eyes are key on this important issue.

Hope I haven't overstepped my bounds on this.

I've been management before, and I don't like it, but in the absence of competent management, I know how to run election coverage. In fact, after sending the e-mail, it occurred to me that I've never had a general that I didn't run. I was managing editor in 2000, news editor in 2004, and I know how to cover an election. Presidential election nights are one of the things that reaffirm my love for this industry.

So, that e-mail gone, the week's just a downhill slide, right?

I came in on Thursday a half-hour late, as per the terms of shaving hours off. No one talks to me, not even my loquacious boss. I mention to him that I'd setup new quick keys for myself for horizontal scaling, and here I find out why I'm a pariah. The new style sheets? They're in effect. And I made a rather large error in saving the document with the character stylesheet set to Drop Cap, which means everything is now coming in as ITC Garamond (kerned out to 50, no less), and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

It took me 20 minutes to figure it out, and once that was done, all was well. Phil even calmed down after cussing a blue streak that would make a sailor blush. Amazing what happens when you own up to your fuckup, apologize and tell everyone it's your fault, not Phil's. In fact, 20 minutes after I came up with the solution, he was back to normal. Funny how adults act.

So I figure, this is it for the week. It's downhill from here.

This afternoon, I come in, and of course, the big news on the wire is the speculation about Obama's running mate. We put the paper to bed around 10, and the wife's not off of work yet, so I walk home.

And I'm home for about 20 minutes before I check the wire from home, and, sure as shit, a Democratic source has finalized Biden as Obama's running mate. This is 40 minutes before our true deadline. I've cracked open a beer and am ready to settle in.

But this simply won't do. We can't have wild conjecture when the confirmation has happened with 40 minutes to spare. So after getting nowhere trying to call people at the office, I convince the wife to drive me into work, where nobody happens to be (on the news side, anyway).

I walk into prepress and ask if it's too late to replate (black only) on A1 and A8 (thank god the pages married and that's where the story and refer were, and thank god we already had a mug of Biden ready to go). The answer? You need to stop the press.

Thankfully, this wasn't entirely true, as I walked into the pressroom and they were finalizing plates to get ready to go. So I shout out (everyone's wearing earplugs), "REPLATE - I need a replate -- BLACK ONLY -- on A1 and 8." They took it in stride, and after five minutes back in the newsroom, I've pumped out a new black for A1 and 8, and we then wait 15 minutes for it to go to the negative for final proofing.

I look it over as the press guy's watching, and I look at him and say, "Let's run it." With a bit more joy than text can convey -- and wildly above my pay grade.

I've never stopped the press, and I've been doing this for nearly seven years.

So, new stylesheets, a dictum on election coverage and a replate. Not the week I was expecting, but if you want an adrenaline rush, stop the press sometime. It makes you feel like you've made a difference, and sometimes, that's the validation you need.

Now, let's hope they get it in register.

you ever think about that? imagine if you could section out a cube of space and remove every single “thing” within it. take out all the particles, leave a complete void. you would still be left with the remnants of the universe; a quantum foam of could-be and probability. the foundations of physics still remain. absolutely fascinating.

anyway, the universe is unfathomable and we are delusional and arrogant for thinking we can understand it. and thank god for that because we wouldn’t be making the progress we are.

I want to draw attention to the elephant in the room.

Leading up to the election, and perhaps even more prominently now, we've been seeing droves of people on the internet displaying a series of traits in common.

• Claiming to be leftists
• Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left
• Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates
• Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party
• Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is "to the left of them"
• Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system
• Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism

When you look at an aerial view of these behaviors in conjunction with one another, what they're accomplishing is pretty plain to see, in my opinion. It's a way of utilizing the moral scrupulousness of the left to cut our teeth out politically. We get so caught up in giving these arguments the benefit of the doubt and of making sure people who claim to be leftists have a platform that we're missing ideological parasites in our midst.

This is not a good-faith discourse. This is not friendly disagreement. This is, largely, not even internal disagreement. It is infiltration, and it's extremely effective.

Before attacking this argument as lacking proof, just do a little thought experiment with me. If there is a vector that allows authoritarians to dismantle all progress made by the left, to demotivate us and to detract from our ability to form coalitions and build solidarity, do you really think they wouldn't take advantage of it?

By refusing to ever question those who do nothing with their time in our spaces but try to drive a wedge between us, to take away our power and make us feel helpless and hopeless, we're giving them exactly that vector. I am telling you, they are using it.

We need to stop letting them. We need to see it for what it is, get the word out, and remember, as the political left, how to use the tools that we have to change society. It starts with us between one another. It starts with what we do in the spaces that we inhabit. They know this, and it's why they're targeting us here.

Stop being an easy target. Stop feeding the cuckoo.

I've mentioned a few things over slightly fewer months. I really do need to write a book about my life, because it's apparently somewhere around the 95th percentile on how people go. International choir trips as a kid, the semester as an exchange student, forcing your way into a college without legacy options, then seizing control of the opinion section at the school paper when journalism wasn't even the goal.

I expected the same opportunities my parents had. I think we all did in the '80s -- "fuck you, I got mine, and now you need to support me" wasn't yet clear.

Not being clear is nonetheless formative.

I just wanted the same opportunities. That wasn't to be. My folks didn't do cocaine, but it was rather popular in some circles.

My career has been a heavy lift in which I've been told I'm wrong to believe I shouldn't lose purchasing power every year. Sorry, but I'm (barely) Gen X. I could bike out for the day, and were I not home by dinner, the friend who I ended up with would have his mom call my folks; a sleepover generally ensued.

What we've turned into is this metastasized unrecognized mass. Helicopter parenting, people thinking they can order partners off a menu. That may be normal to you, but it's recent.

I usually date women who aren't into men -- because we're, in general, assholes. I don't exclude myself. But straight women generally want assholes [citation needed] and to act, well, like compliant women. Where's the fun in that? If you aren't my equal, why are we dating?

Sorry, I was watching a YouTube video where all sense was thrown out the window, and I can't stand by and call any of this OK. You have every right to be barefoot and pregnant. You also have every right -- for now -- not to choose to do so.

this week's reading:

Hi all! It's my birthday today, but I'm feeling a bit shitty as I haven't been in a good headspace lately. Got some messages from friends but not really in the mood to do something or see them today. But that's OK I guess, there always comes a time where I'm more in the mood to be social, just a strange situation to be in on your birthday.

I have been enjoying digging through Blue Prince though, so I guess I'll do that tonight with some pizza and maybe a chill podcast.

I've also been reading a bit more lately, currently going through Gate of Ivrel by C.J. Cherryh and A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. These were bought with my first wage (from a small part time job in a supermarket) in a long time. I'm trying to read more woman writers in science fiction, and I'm super impressed with both.

Enjoy your day and look at the small stuff that makes you happy!

currently reading: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Tonight this has crushed my soul

I fell into the field. Had my roommate not wanted to watch a particular channel at a particular time, y'all would have a rather different U.S. News community.

This was spring 1998, so at least we were past Braveheart running on some HBO channel 24/7 such that walking down the hallway to pee meant hearing it yet again.

Early on in my time as a columnist, I took aim at the administration, as I already saw what was happening. We were sold an amazing undergrad, but as things went on, it became increasingly clear we were just this pesky thing stopping UW from being able to fully focus on important things like research.

By underpaying grad students, of course.

As opinion editor a year after actually steeping myself in the newsroom (and production room), I stepped up my assaults on the administration; by this point, I was calling out individual administrators for their actions.

A year later, I was managing editor and at this point had no fucks left to give. I raked the university president over the coals over, and over, and over. Not weekly via my column, as that would have been tedious, but I was running the editorial board, so I could certainly do it anonymously with some frequency.

We had those times where College Republicans would steal and burn issues of The Daily just outside the Communications building. Thing is, they didn't do enough research to figure out which side of the building the newsroom was on, so they were burning shit outside of professors' offices with all of us blissfully unaware until someone needed to take an unusual path (usually via the health center) to grab lunch.

There was a vice-provost who had to endlessly come to my defense throughout my time there, from contributing writer, to designer and columnist, to opinion ed, to managing ed. It wasn't that he agreed with me; he thought the purpose of the university was to foster an environment where ideas could be exchanged.

When we remove this from campus, it is questionable what universities are doing. At that point, it's an unapologetic trade school, shitting out good little bitches for corporate America.

I never intended to go into journalism, everything my parents did to the contrary, from getting me a rubber movable-type setup -- which I loved -- around 4 to a copy of The Newsroom, software for the Apple ][+ that allowed one to take copy and art and design a page crudely.

Right, this is normal for being 8. But I'm named after a WWII journalist, so despite their protestations when I went off the reservation in college and starting prioritizing my time in the newsroom over being fucked to go to class, surprised Pikachu.

There is no purpose in a college newsroom where the opinion page is Dear Leader approved.

It's nothing new, private companies love to use governamental resources. It doesn't matter how they gain access to them. In this case, it's news about the biggest health insurance provider in Brazil deciding it's cheaper to outsource procedures to the public sector and then pretend they will pay their debt later. They won't, but they would profit anyway, because the government works with outdated numbers and charge less for the same procedures provided by the private sector.

• The company finding a way to recover when their stock drop when the government forces them to improve their plans: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/brazils-hapvida-corrects-accounting-balances-renegotiates-debt-2025-03-19/

• News talking about how health insurance providers had 430% increase in profits and the practices that allow that (in Portuguese): https://piaui.folha.uol.com.br/hapvida-desenrola-divida-com-o-sus-e-tem-perdao-de-866-milhoes/

The text "AI ART & intellectual property" in blue, next to the ancom flag with a green brain made of circuits over it. This is all on a digital art wooden background featuring individual textured planks with varying distances between them lined up as a wall.

Ran into an old Reddit post (December 2022) on an account I no longer use. It's funny how this sort of writing has a binary chance of aging well. There's never like "meh, I don't see any relevance today." Without further ado ...

Today's "Jesus fuck, I wouldn't have run that" in the Post was apparently my lightbulb moment on how the desk — and the recurring rounds of layoffs on what remains — had a far larger impact than anyone seems to be acknowledging widely enough to have hit my radar. If you've got links to stories or studies, I'd like to see them if the hed doesn't start with "Here's"!

As fev has been pointing out for years, the most important function served by the copydesk in its late-20th-century incarnation was the framing. Usually, we see this writ small, sort of easy to identify and purge at the unit level: the individual story, where we call it removing bias.

Something I'm just coming to understand is great copy editors I've worked with knew their fucking framing. And as the word itself implies, everything else is inexorably tied to that skill. Bias, tone, when to turn off proofreading (and yes, there are times to run intentional errors), page composition from a content perspective, when to use uncensored vulgarity.

When to spike. I'd go so far as to consider framing the central pillar of the always-nebulous "editorial judgment."

I think we've all gotten the regurgitated press release from the green reporter we knew was coming from the time we saw the incredibly vague photo assignment. That doesn't need to be spiked, but it sure as fuck ain't running tonight.

What does need to be spiked is naked propaganda like the Post is putting forth in its breathless crusade for a recession at the same time we're finally wising up to the fact that modern recessions are engineered and necessary to transfer wealth from any pesky middle class that are just about to or just bought their first appreciating asset by tanking its value and buying up the fire sale in classic rent-seeking fashion.

I know of no competent copyeditor that would have allowed that shit to print where it did. "Did Editorial accidentally drop this in the A1 queue?"

When you've nailed your framing, you're just using tools to do a job. Everything else can be learned through pattern recognition, which is why most jobs seem so easy after several years.

Here's the thing: If you're doing a job you know you're good at, you're focusing on different aspects of it than a novice. If you navigate InDesign using mostly hotkeys, you have exponentially more time to devote to design and editing than someone looking for the right dropdown menu every few seconds.

When you've gotten 10-inch spot news down to a five-minute science, you have more time to see if the 34th Ld moved before sending A11.

In all cases where you save time on the technical end, not only does the product improve, but you also gain time to ask if you should be proceeding as directed. And if a red flag goes up, no matter how small, the answer is "no."

A competent desk functioned as a bit of a hive mind, with earlier members teaching new members data points as they come up, eventually getting everyone to at least 90% competence and at most 10% questions. If you've ever been floored that a seasoned editor didn't have an answer to something, it wasn't that the desk didn't know, this was just on the long tail ("Well, last time that happened here was '84, and Larry wasn't here yet, so I don't know.").

So while the tone and goal levers were set from on high, the desk was the engineering crew deciding what the levers did within the less-than-technical spex provided.

While no desk is a democracy, and style dictates do arrive without recourse, I found desks to be surprisingly egalitarian when it came to new ideas, even on desks with burned-out reporters. If the data proved that Method Y was unequivocally better than Method X, Method Y became the new SOP. No one sat around defending inferior methods, even if there was grumbling about relearning. When new data debunked standing policy, policy was changed. The elephant was acknowledged and escorted out of the room. Almost everything not AP Style-related was unanimous consent.

In effect, this led to the desk having a much larger role than I certainly realized in the beginning. If a copyeditor was overruling the city ed and spiking a story, that was it unless they wanted the ME involved, because bringing up a spike meant the desk would not run it, and that is a large problem when it comes to publication.

For those of you for whom this sounds foreign (and you're picturing it in black and white), this was still the case less than 10 years ago, but dying rapidly because buyouts targeted those with the longest service (most expensive), and there were several rounds of those before centralization, furloughs and the layoffs even started.

Copyeditors became superfluous as soon as being first became more important than being right (both are, of course, important, but only the latter must be true). Desks were wound down and centralized, copyeditors forbade from reading copy (Gannett/GateHouse policy from at least my joining in 2015) and turned into movers of rectangles on larger glowing rectangles instead of designers.

And that's all shit we have to deal with for choosing this field in college.

But the impact to society at large is unmistakable: reputable outlets publishing stories that a 20-year desk veteran would have spiked was only made possible by killing the institutional guardrails that underpinned local and national media's gravitas. When everyone's in the first five years of their career, you're not running an established newspaper; you're running the college daily 2.0, clickbait, propaganda and all, because that's all they know.

It was pointed out to me that the following post was inappropriate for !lgbtq+. I said I'd not repost, but as with all useful things in life, the first time is never effective. I'm a biased opinion, but I believe this lies at the intersection of that being appropriate and larger impacts in interaction.

And, I mean, fuck it, if I wrote it, may as well keep it published.

---

My first kiss was under a table in kindergarten with a girl with short hair.

It would later turn out, as discovered via Facebook, that she’d gone full alt butch. Which, uh … well, that’s my type. The die was cast at 5. I liked her because she didn’t want to act like a girl – the rest were somewhat boring, and I found myself already drawn to the idea of equality sted gender roles.

Not that I knew this at the time. It was 1984 (no, not that one), and I just found myself drawn to her being someone who was fun to hang out with because we didn’t have to play any of the games surrounding other interactions. I have a bit of a guess about what her family structure was like, but such things were not discussed back then and would have anyway been inappropriate for 5-year-olds.

So when I met the girl at 17 in the dorm my first summer in college who’d introduce me to the rave scene that year and play a major catalyst role two years later, scrambling my seemingly direct journalism path I’d only stumbled into eight months earlier, it wasn’t unusual but rather a return to form. She ended up marrying a guy (and becoming a professor), so not fully on brand, but that’s the joy of being bi.

We never got together, much to my consternation. But I pulled up an email she sent about how the path meant for me was not what society expects when I dropped out of college for the first time, in fall 1997.

"you're braver than i shall ever be.

remember to follow the sunset - not the sunrise. it can only blind you and lead you where only the teachers and preachers want you to be.

always take that shadowed path. that is where you will find happiness. not many find it there, but you are one of those few - i know. whether it be early in the morning, downtown in a strange place with some bizzare chick...

good traveling.

this is is your life. i am so jealous that you are taking it upon yourself to be your own life. someday i will be that brave...

i wish you all the luck in the world."

Quite a bit to take in at 18, with years to unpack. And, indeed, the role I settled into in journalism would not be a byline but rather getting shit done without recognition on the desk.

I’d then finally get laid at 18 by a woman who had short hair and would go on to marry a woman years later. She's cheated on her wife twice with me over the years, in addition to having come out (no, she wasn’t there yet) to visit me in Virginia for a week before she met her wife. She was crucial as another catalyst, as without her getting me a hotel room, I’d not have met my second ex-wife.

I’ve never had a relationship with a straight woman. I just can’t understand this obsession with things like makeup and celebrities. Those are uninteresting topics.

So, we have all this backstory, and then the college newsroom happens and I’m living with my boss within days. There’s a community where this is a meme, but it rarely involves men. The raver shows back up and shatters this, and while we still never were directly involved, this leads to chartering an international flight after missing a ferry to meet a woman. That girlfriend was the only one I’ve had a threesome with.

The hits keep piling up. After a few years in the wilderness relationshipwise working on my career, I get a note of interest from a woman with hair shorter than mine on OKCupid. Within a week, well ... we went directly from Starbucks to her dorm room.

And the same week, I reached out to a woman with a collar in her profile pic who wanted nothing to do with me and was hours out of town. I married both, just not at the same time. The second had a five-year gap from that first contact, and neither of us was actually aware we’d communicated in the past because she'd created a new account.

I moved in with her after 12 days, which involved jettisoning her boyfriend Christmas Eve, and three days later, the penny dropped when she showed me an old photo ... the one I'd messaged in 2004.

The second ex had a girlfriend for much of our marriage, as denying her pussy access seemed unfair.

The day that marriage fell apart, I was again in my boss’ bed. Lesbian, of course. I’d no idea she wasn’t straight, but I damn well should have from prior art. She was a femme (and likely still is), but I was attracted to her competence and saw my marriage collapsing from outside factors, and she had that “get shit done” attitude that’s an aphrodisiac.

After cohabitating for a time, my kink side reared its ugly head. She was as vanilla as they come, which strained things to the breaking point.

I’m heavily aware of my needs at this point and thus not interested in unmodded straight vanilla women. This generally leads to bad outcomes via batshit, but the heart wants what it wants.

It’s just crazy that this whole thing started when I was under a table at 5. Who knows their trajectory from then?

I'd like to work for you

I'm a moderator on beehaw.org, and one of the admins told me about your campaign. We're a bit of a leftist collective. I've seen some of your coverage and of course your announcement video. I'm inspired.

So, here's the hard turn: I was working most recently as a green-energy and -tech reporter, which came to a screeching halt for self-evident reasons Jan. 20. I'm currently homeless and unemployed in Texas, after winning national awards for writing decades ago. The country has gone to shit, and I left commercial journalism in 2020 (just before the pandemic -- bad idea) because I no longer believed we were serving the public good as the Fourth Estate.

I can't do something I don't believe in for very long.

I started in college as a columnist, veered into design and ended up opinion editor 17 months later because I was so pissed off with how being edited for the first time went that I said "fuck it, I'll do it myself."

My first editorial took first place from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, and I wasn't even aware it had been entered into the contest. It was about the redevelopment of affordable student housing, and not particularly nice to the UW administration.

I dropped out of college after hitting managing editor, as I felt there was nothing left to learn. I got my first copyediting job in 2001 and was second in command at a daily with yet another award-winning column by 2003.

So I know what I'm doing and how to talk to journalists. I'm not going to claim that I'm your guy for public outreach, but I've been playing this game since the '90s and can have that five-minute bonding conversation at the start of a call before heading into the actual content. And, of course, I can also write.

I really like what you're doing and would love to be a part of it. I'm also desperate and living in a van, so do with that what you will.

Regards, Pete Hahnloser

Today's fun time is that my internet billing date got moved (at my request), but incorrectly, and now they attempted to take out my automatic payment the day after the interest hit my credit card. So I'm sort of dead in the water, using my phone as a hotspot, but my data plan is very limited.

My mom is helping me out but on fixed income and can't do anything for a week (pension check hits the first of the month). ~~So I'm reluctantly making an explicit plea for assistance, as one cannot find work without internet access, and I've no money to buy anything somewhere with Wi-Fi (I do have a few days of food left, at least). If you have CashApp and are willing to help, please message me.~~

A friend came through with six times what I needed. I'm going to have a real dinner tonight, real dinner tonight! (god, I feel old)

To be very brief, I hate the coldest part of the winter here in Maine (January/February) and need a couple of breaks for my sanity.

I have a ‘plan a’ (visit my brother a couple of times) and a ‘plan b’ (take my eldest son with me to Boston a couple of times).

I would like to have a ‘plan c’ to ensure that I’ll have an avenue of escape.

If you would be so kind to provide me with any ideas, then I would appreciate it very much.

Preferably, the idea would include getting to a place with less cold/snow, be reasonably affordable and not being alone.

Thanks in advance and I’ll repost this, if need be, in a couple of months.

(I will preface this with saying that I'm rather high right now. But I do think the general sentiment will hold up in the morning.)

The older I get, the more I value interactions by the amount of kindness involved in them.

I've always valued kindness. Growing up, I was lucky to have good role models, so it was easy.

Unfortunately, I think many of us learn from a young age that there are many situations in which kindness is not particularly valued by others. So we don't really get rid of it, but we downplay it. It's very strange when you actually think about it.

Anyway, it's nice to be in a space where that sort of thing is actively curated. We're all free to choose to interact with people who are not kind whenever we want. I imagine that many of us intentionally do so, and that can be very worthwhile in its own way. But it's nice to be able to just be(e) and not worry about all that meanness.

I've been going on about kindness, and the rule is be(e) nice. I do think there's a slight difference, but I'm quickly losing the vocabulary to describe it. I think niceness is perhaps easier to achieve when interacting with people one doesn't know?

This hit hard because that's exactly the sort of shit my second ex put me through. To the point that I categorically refused to open any joint accounts. She would have just stolen the money.

You don't marry a copyeditor for the lavish lifestyle, hence why when a millionaire offered to buy her a house if she left me, I basically said "go for it," and we separated. It was a wrenching five years of recovering from all the forms of abuse she imparted -- in addition to the financial shenanigans, she was verbally, emotionally and physically abusive.

Karma being how it is, she never got the house because he was an abusive fuck. But there was no way I was taking her back, so she lost everything. I mean, she kept my name and inexplicably still wears my wedding collar despite getting divorced in 2016.

The downward spiral I'm now in was started by a call in August or September, with her telling me she was getting remarried. I didn't want her anymore, but it was unnecessary stress, exacerbated when she texted a month later to tell me what a fucking idiot I was for believing her. She wasn't engaged; she just still wanted to fuck up my life while the van shit continued going wrong.

Then the election, where it became clear my job had a shelf life, and now I'm so stressed I usually look like I have Parkinson's. Those 20-second stretches where I'm not shaking uncontrollably are a nice reprieve.

(this one, I'm lightly editing)

Service with a smile

How to make friends and influence people while standing behind a counter

by Peter Hahnloser

The Daily of the University of Washington

Dec. 2, 1998

I can see anyone who's read my prior columns thinking to themselves, "Who doesn't this guy hate?" So far, I've covered affirmative action, religious folk, and people who couldn't write themselves out of an acorn. I realize that this has probably given people the wrong impression.

I don't intend to single any group out; rather, it's the general public that concerns me. I feel that humanity is heading downhill, not because of politics, religion or misspellings, but because of my time in the service industry. The more exposure to the public I get, the less I feel I can trust people to do just about anything.

In December 1995, I was hired for my first job. I was 16, and a job allowed me to get a car. A Boston Market opened right next to my house and one day, as I was walking home from school, I was approached by a guy offering me a job there. They offered $5.75 starting pay, and that sounded good to me.

After a week of training at another store and a week in training classes, the store opened. Throughout January, I looked forward to going to work -- and then I realized the folly of my ways.

I got one testy customer after another, until finally, I snapped. I started using the customers for personal gain -- namely, stories to treasure for the rest of my life. The beauty of it is, few of them realized I was giving them anything but top-notch service. This pattern continued through a brief stint at Arby's and then again at the Market.

So, if you have a job in the service industry, or have a temp job for the season, read on, and find out how you, too, can come up with entertainment at the expense of others, getting paid all the while.

Fun with menus

These days, many chains have modular menus -- you can move items around to change prices and available items. Beware, though: A fake price is false advertising, so be subtle. We had a modular drink board, so one of my shenanigans was making the free refills run 99 cents each. Sure, it makes no sense, but no one caught on for nearly three weeks, and we enjoyed the puzzled faces of customers who knew something wasn't quite right, but were too timid to say anything.

Labels everywhere

Sometimes you need to point out the painfully obvious to customers. I once was given the task of making cutlery labels, and produced "forks," "spoons" and "knaves" -- this went unnoticed for more than two months.

Affirm the customer's stupidity

When the customer asks a stupid question, it can be a reflex to laugh and say "Damn, are you stupid!" However, this has a generally detrimental effect on your job status. The key is to follow the customer into the land of the absurd.

One night, I was working drive-thru when a customer asked "That carved ham ... is that the same as a Ham Carver?" For those unfamiliar with the Boston Market menu of the time, one of these is a meal, located on the "meals" board, and the other is a sandwich, located on the "sandwiches" board.

Here's the kicker: One was, at the time, $5.49, while the other was $3.99. So how could they be the same? Well, I didn't want to tell the customer he was wrong, so I replied "Yes, sir, that's why it appears on the menu board two different times, and each time with a different price."

Someone else came on and corrected me, but by then I'd had my fun and went off to stock the knaves.

Point out the obvious

Early in my service career, a newlywed couple came in -- they still used terms of endearment profusely.

"What do you want, honey?"

"I don't know, sugar, what do you want?"

You can imagine how this continued. Eventually, the woman tapped on the cold case glass, pointing at the cranberry sauce, and asked, "What's this here?"

My immediate response: "That's glass, ma'am."

Her husband fucking lost it, head first into the glass laughing his ass off. I hope I didn't cause a divorce.

Yes, we don't have any

One night, a woman came in hell-bent on getting tortellini salad, which we had run out of 30 minutes earlier. When ordering her two sides, she pointed an accusatory finger at the cold case and asked as to the whereabouts of the tortellini.

I explained that we were out, and she asked if I was sure. Considering that we had this nasty habit of checking in back for more when we ran out of a side, I was pretty sure that we were out, but she assumed this was only a ruse.

"Can you check again?"

"Sure," I said, and proceeded to go in back, grab a soda and kick back for five minutes before I returned and announced that -- lo and behold -- we really were out of tortellini salad.

She went ballistic at this point -- started shaking and whatnot -- and said shrilly, "You're telling me there's no tortellini salad in the entire store?"

Essentially, yes, that's exactly what I was telling her, but this had gone on long enough, and I tired of her attitude quickly, so I responded with "There may be some out back in the dumpster, but I assure you, there's none anywhere else."

I almost got fired.

The customer is always blind

Funny thing about chickens, they all look the same once plucked, and they all have the same anatomy.

Yet a customer who ordered a quarter white declared that his meat had no skin. I quickly explained that there was skin o' plenty on the ridge of the breast, where it is commonly found.

This simply wouldn't do -- he wanted skin on the part of the breast where it met the thigh (and where, consequently, there was none). Even after explaining to him that no such chickens existed, he demanded another piece, which he then accused of also being skinless.

I finally gave up and rang him up, ignoring his shrieks of displeasure. He threatened to never come back. Darn.

Can you hold on?

Oftentimes, especially in drive-thru, a customer will ask if they can have a second to decide. A good response to this has always been "I'm sorry, we're fresh out of seconds -- would you like to try a minute instead?"

Au jus night

Alright, so this isn't really something everyone can apply to their jobs, but it should be a good starting point from which to brainstorm. It takes the ability to keep a straight face under duress, but it pays off.

The store I worked at was a very slow one, and there were only three people working at any given time. I was working drive-thru one night and decided to have a little fun.

Arby's serves french dip submarine sandwiches that come with a cup of au jus. To portion the au jus out, we had a vat that held about two gallons from which we poured these cups. In an average night, we'd sell two french dips, accompanied by two cups of au jus.

I realized that we were wasting a lot of au jus in serving only 16 ounces of the 256-ounce capacity, and decided to organize au jus night, an evening of fun and festivities wherein all drive-thru customers were offered a cup of au jus with their order.

Perhaps "offered" is a bit misleading. When repeating their order back to them, I'd throw a cup of au jus in the middle, and only one person caught me in the act -- out of around 60 orders.

When the customer would arrive at the window, their order -- complete with au jus (at 30 cents a cup) -- would be waiting. This included those who only got a beverage, and these people would invariably be surprised at the small sack accompanying their cup.

"What's that?"

"Your cup of au jus, sir."

"I didn't order a cup of au jus. Why would I want au jus with a drink?"

"Frankly, sir, I was wondering the same thing myself, but I figured you knew what you wanted."

"Well, I don't want au jus."

"No problem, sir."

Admittedly, I had to refund most of these drink-only au jus orders, but I kept the declined au jus container close at hand for the next person.

I emptied two vats that evening, and I thought for sure that the fun was over, but I later learned that the management had caught wind of my escapade.

They saw an errant amount of au jus being sold for the evening, and I think they could have seen at most two explanations: one, an employee was fucking around, and two, there was a sudden increase in demand for au jus.

Management being how it is, they took option two, and proceeded to purchase six months' worth of au jus for the next week. I got another job three days later. They probably still have the au jus.

As you can see, with a little imagination, a little confidence, and a lot of spiteful feelings, your customers can be your playthings. But, as always, be careful: It's all fun and games until someone loses their job.

Then -- it's just fun.