but you can never leave.
That seems to apply to newspapering.
It's 11:15 p.m. and I'm stuck at my wife's newspaper - dragooned into service when servers crashed and they found themselves in the midst of a production crisis. She and her coworkers are making progress, doing clever computer work-arounds to access wire copy, reconstruct lost pages that had ads on them and send the painfully constructed pages to the production department.
I became the de facto wire editor, searching the AP state, national and international wires for enough stories to fill four pages.
It's reminiscent of the all-nighters I pulled with colleagues on my college student paper nearly 40 years ago. It was the dawn of the offset printing era and I had the dubious distinction of being the production manager during the semester when we switched from hot type to cold. We set type with a diabolical machine called the Varityper which produced a column of justified type, line by line, after first typing the unjustified line, then automatically spitting it out in justified form. It was a horrible piece of crap and could not be counted on to function properly for more than a few hours at a time. The Varityper service guy was continually on the road to our office and we did plenty of late-night improvising of photos and ads to make up for copy that couldn't be typeset.
So tonight's little dance with wobbly techology - this is a smallish daily with an antique computer system that's prone to seizures and crashes - feels very familiar and tinged with nostalgia.
But tonight's labors will end with a long drive home, rather than a ramble across campus for a couple of pitchers of beer.
I guess that's the difference between being a 21-year-old college kid and a 58-year-old recovering journalist.
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