Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Kickbacks and tragedy.


Jeff kicked the back of my chair. Then Josh kicked the back of my chair. Ryan is still too shy, I think, to kick the back of my chair. Patti will probably never kick the back of my chair. She's too nice.

Scotch stayed home today...he was eating grass this morning and has a belly ache.

Other than that, it's a typical day in the newsroom. Except for just about all the news coming in has been sad.

Brenda just paged Patti's phone and made a fart noise into it. It sounded real, so we're giving her a hard time about "blaming the phone." I think Brenda is bored today.

We're all trying to stay in decent spirits because bad things seem to be happening all around. One of our co-workers suffered a grave hardship today, and the news in general has been grim. A 23-year-old burned to death near here when the truck he was driving had a blowout and he lost control. The truck went on its side and caught fire. I simply cannot imagine the heartache that surrounds tragedies like that. One minute your life is cruising along...you're thinking about something ordinary or doing something ordinary then in just a split second it all turns bad.

Prayers to his family...as well as to the families of the eight people killed in Connecticut. And the the family of the shooter. It can get pretty terrible.

That's why, here in the newsroom, we've learned to hone our crazy. That's why lots of newspaper journalists (as well as ER docs, EMTs, police officers, firemen and other people whose days are filled with someone else's grief in detail) seem a little hardened or have an inappropriate, twisted sense of humor. It's so we don't dwell on the facts or the stories that come at us every day. Including the ones you never read.

No comments:

Post a Comment