It’s funny the things you think about when you’re exhausted.
As I write this column, it’s 4:30 a.m. Saturday morning and I’m sitting alone in my office in eerie silence.
A perfect storm of circumstances wiped out our entire production team and their back-ups, which generally makes it hard to produce a newspaper. And yet we did. A big thank you to our friends at the Commercial Review in Portland who printed our Saturday edition.
Dave Schultz rounded up the troops to meet an earlier-than-normal print deadline.
Mark Miller, Natasha Mechling and I muddled our way through getting the newspaper ready for delivery well into the wee hours of Saturday morning. So here I sit, beginning to populate our website, waiting for 6 a.m. to deliver our collective hard work to the post office.
Everyone shared the burden. It takes a village, so they say.
As we worked through the early morning hours Saturday, I found myself pondering how often I hear people complain that Bob (a randomly chosen name) has an easy job, inferring theirs is much harder. I rarely hold back. If you think Bob’s job is easy, you probably don’t know what Bob does.
Part of my job at the News-Banner is knowing what people are supposed to do and putting them in a position to be successful. I’m the back-up for quite a few people and yet I still can’t definitively tell you what Bob’s job actually entails. That’s because Bob’s job is tough. It’s full of nuances and lessons learned from making countless mistakes along the way. Bob is leaning on a bevy of experience that makes his job look effortless.
Get off Bob’s back. He doesn’t complain about you.
Our crew of Bobs were sorely missed Friday night and Saturday morning. My appreciation for each of them is much deeper today.
While I’m expressing appreciation, a subscriber shared a link to a story ‘US newspapers are continuing to die at rate of 2 each week.’ Alarming stuff.
I believe (I responded) the biggest reason for that decline is the result of self-inflicted wounds by management.
The response to my response was “Keep up the good work… People don’t realize what a treasure we have right in our backyard!”
Thanks, Ed.
Unbeknownst to him, that compliment was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment.
Bob appreciated it too.
dougb@news-banner.com
