Back in the Madhouse
The (relatively) long holiday is over, and everyone's in high spirits. Half the staff is MIA, taking the customary extra day off to recover from the binge-fest. The Flint said, "So did you bring me back a girlfriend like I asked?"
"What am I, a pimp?" I retorted.
"Ha ha you so naughty eh!" he said, and pinched my arm. (Yes, pinched. The Flint's way of being affectionate with his minions is to make impossible demands and follow that up by trying to tear out pieces of their flesh.) "Here, edit this for me."
Let me take this opportunity to talk about our 'reporters'.
The Beard employs about twenty randomly selected individuals of varying levels of ineptitude, the only common denominator being their incoherence. (I'm not speaking about the feature writers, though I shall in a moment.)
The court beat is covered by a grim, taciturn woman who has trouble with gender, number, tense, and spelling. This week's murder victim was a 50-something housewife. "His husband," our reporter would have us believe, "slited her throat with a chiken knife when he was asleep"... and has found himself in the slammer as a consequence. This is our best reporter, as it takes me only ten minutes and a migraine to figure out what she's trying to say.
The crime beat is covered by two reporters: a slight, timid, sensitive girl with an uncannily good sense for news, and entirely no self-confidence, and a brutish, middle-aged man who watches porn on the office computer and bullies aforementioned timid girl into giving him her stories. He takes her stories, breaks each sentence into two paragraphs (to give it the illusion of length), slaps his name on it and turns it in. Sometimes 'his' stories go on the front page. Porn on the office computer in a room full of your colleagues, you've got to be pretty gross AND desperate AND thick-skinned to do that. And he clears his throat and spits in the sink AND DOESN'T WASH IT OFF. Ugh.
The community news reporter is a spunky, upbeat boi, very likeable (the Phlegm hates her guts, which makes her even more so). If only she didn't habitually use idioms in their literal sense--without a trace of irony. [EXAMPLE: describing villagers without water as having been 'left high and dry'.] And apply the past tense to non-verbs. (Remember the case of the official who 'apologise for the inconvenienced cause'? Yeah.) And obsessively play dating sims... okay that's really none of my business.
The sports beat is covered by three reporters (which is three more than the number of sports events worth covering locally). One is a generally nice young chap with rather bad teeth. The second is a bespectacled, elderly man who never makes eye contact. The third is a bespectacled, shifty-eyed fella with bad teeth, bad breath, a silly grin, and a predilection for scratching his balls in public. None of them writes in English, which absolves me of the responsibility of editing their stories and hating their guts.
Nature stories are covered by a chubby-faced chap who also covers, oddly enough, a spate of stories on this dance instructor and his activities. (I subconsciously assumed that the dance instructor was Chubby's boyfriend, but apparently not--Darcy tells me Chubby is, in fact, quite the lady-killer.) Chubby has an unhealthy fondness for Microsoft Word's Thesaurus function. Not satisfied with describing a monkey as a monkey, he will ensure that he describes the simian as an ape, a chimpanzee, a rogue, a rascal, and a scamp--in a nature article. Rampant deforestation, he goes on to tell us, 'has made it difficult for the monkeys to earn a livelihood'. Needless to say, it is quite entertaining...
...Though not as entertaining as our 'foreign correspondent', whom Flint probably found through an online pen-pals listing for grown-ups with social adjustment problems. This is a man uses the word 'retarded' to describe special-needs children (as in "Picture shows retarded kids painting paper-mache teapots"). His articles are peppered with words he closes his eyes and randomly picks out of a dictionary. He once translated a local politico's speech into English, and quoted him as saying he "wished to inseminate the younger generation with knowledge".
An S&M orgy involving librarians perhaps?
Speaking of social adjustment problems brings me to the final contestant, a shoo-in for the Weirdo of the Week award. Let's call him Jack (as in The Ripper). No-one actually knows what beat Jack covers, since Jack never gets assignments. Instead, Jack writes about what Jack feels like writing about. Most of it passes for political reportage, and involves 87-word sentences, chock-full of highly inflammatory adjectives and adverbs strung together in a disturbing, incoherent mass. Jack interviews people; the trouble is, all his interviewees sound just like him. They use the words he likes to use, they have the opinions he espouses. Which begs the question: Are these interviews being conducted in Jack's imagination? Is there a tape recorder? Do these people read our paper? (We know the answer to the last one.)
Jack's problems don't end with his writing. Jack throws things. He has thrown paperweights, he has thrown chairs. Most often he throws temper tantrums and hissy fits. On good days, he throws in the towel and sits in his chair with a scowl, and listens to power ballads from the '80's. And Enya. His one redeeming quality is that he does not sing along (but we have someone else who does, so yeah, you can never win, not here).
I wish I could say that Jack's hatred for me took root when I came to the defence of some hapless innocent caught in the maelstrom of his wrath. But no. Jack's hatred for me, like his hatred for everyone at work, took root at a... I don't have a clue. But Jack walked up to me one day, and began mouthing off about how I was not doing his stories justice, how my layouts were not highlighting the magnificence of his creative output. "Look, mate," I said, "if you have a problem, speak to the editor. I don't take orders from you." The moment the words popped out I felt incredibly cool, like I had superpowers, a cape, and my underpants worn over my tights.
So yeah, these are the people I work with. There are a few normal ones, but where's the fun in writing about them?
"What am I, a pimp?" I retorted.
"Ha ha you so naughty eh!" he said, and pinched my arm. (Yes, pinched. The Flint's way of being affectionate with his minions is to make impossible demands and follow that up by trying to tear out pieces of their flesh.) "Here, edit this for me."
Let me take this opportunity to talk about our 'reporters'.
The Beard employs about twenty randomly selected individuals of varying levels of ineptitude, the only common denominator being their incoherence. (I'm not speaking about the feature writers, though I shall in a moment.)
The court beat is covered by a grim, taciturn woman who has trouble with gender, number, tense, and spelling. This week's murder victim was a 50-something housewife. "His husband," our reporter would have us believe, "slited her throat with a chiken knife when he was asleep"... and has found himself in the slammer as a consequence. This is our best reporter, as it takes me only ten minutes and a migraine to figure out what she's trying to say.
The crime beat is covered by two reporters: a slight, timid, sensitive girl with an uncannily good sense for news, and entirely no self-confidence, and a brutish, middle-aged man who watches porn on the office computer and bullies aforementioned timid girl into giving him her stories. He takes her stories, breaks each sentence into two paragraphs (to give it the illusion of length), slaps his name on it and turns it in. Sometimes 'his' stories go on the front page. Porn on the office computer in a room full of your colleagues, you've got to be pretty gross AND desperate AND thick-skinned to do that. And he clears his throat and spits in the sink AND DOESN'T WASH IT OFF. Ugh.
The community news reporter is a spunky, upbeat boi, very likeable (the Phlegm hates her guts, which makes her even more so). If only she didn't habitually use idioms in their literal sense--without a trace of irony. [EXAMPLE: describing villagers without water as having been 'left high and dry'.] And apply the past tense to non-verbs. (Remember the case of the official who 'apologise for the inconvenienced cause'? Yeah.) And obsessively play dating sims... okay that's really none of my business.
The sports beat is covered by three reporters (which is three more than the number of sports events worth covering locally). One is a generally nice young chap with rather bad teeth. The second is a bespectacled, elderly man who never makes eye contact. The third is a bespectacled, shifty-eyed fella with bad teeth, bad breath, a silly grin, and a predilection for scratching his balls in public. None of them writes in English, which absolves me of the responsibility of editing their stories and hating their guts.
Nature stories are covered by a chubby-faced chap who also covers, oddly enough, a spate of stories on this dance instructor and his activities. (I subconsciously assumed that the dance instructor was Chubby's boyfriend, but apparently not--Darcy tells me Chubby is, in fact, quite the lady-killer.) Chubby has an unhealthy fondness for Microsoft Word's Thesaurus function. Not satisfied with describing a monkey as a monkey, he will ensure that he describes the simian as an ape, a chimpanzee, a rogue, a rascal, and a scamp--in a nature article. Rampant deforestation, he goes on to tell us, 'has made it difficult for the monkeys to earn a livelihood'. Needless to say, it is quite entertaining...
...Though not as entertaining as our 'foreign correspondent', whom Flint probably found through an online pen-pals listing for grown-ups with social adjustment problems. This is a man uses the word 'retarded' to describe special-needs children (as in "Picture shows retarded kids painting paper-mache teapots"). His articles are peppered with words he closes his eyes and randomly picks out of a dictionary. He once translated a local politico's speech into English, and quoted him as saying he "wished to inseminate the younger generation with knowledge".
An S&M orgy involving librarians perhaps?
Speaking of social adjustment problems brings me to the final contestant, a shoo-in for the Weirdo of the Week award. Let's call him Jack (as in The Ripper). No-one actually knows what beat Jack covers, since Jack never gets assignments. Instead, Jack writes about what Jack feels like writing about. Most of it passes for political reportage, and involves 87-word sentences, chock-full of highly inflammatory adjectives and adverbs strung together in a disturbing, incoherent mass. Jack interviews people; the trouble is, all his interviewees sound just like him. They use the words he likes to use, they have the opinions he espouses. Which begs the question: Are these interviews being conducted in Jack's imagination? Is there a tape recorder? Do these people read our paper? (We know the answer to the last one.)
Jack's problems don't end with his writing. Jack throws things. He has thrown paperweights, he has thrown chairs. Most often he throws temper tantrums and hissy fits. On good days, he throws in the towel and sits in his chair with a scowl, and listens to power ballads from the '80's. And Enya. His one redeeming quality is that he does not sing along (but we have someone else who does, so yeah, you can never win, not here).
I wish I could say that Jack's hatred for me took root when I came to the defence of some hapless innocent caught in the maelstrom of his wrath. But no. Jack's hatred for me, like his hatred for everyone at work, took root at a... I don't have a clue. But Jack walked up to me one day, and began mouthing off about how I was not doing his stories justice, how my layouts were not highlighting the magnificence of his creative output. "Look, mate," I said, "if you have a problem, speak to the editor. I don't take orders from you." The moment the words popped out I felt incredibly cool, like I had superpowers, a cape, and my underpants worn over my tights.
So yeah, these are the people I work with. There are a few normal ones, but where's the fun in writing about them?
