My Boss Screamed at Me Tonight

I worked for a man so miserable that I used to go to work every day for three months with my optic nerve twitching.'
After he got fired from our place and landed at another paper, the SE there (who also worked for him at our shop) chased him around his office with a pair of scissors.
The former SE at the first shop, when told about this, responded "Jail time? Hell they should have given him a medal."

 

But, that's the way that they do it in Manhattan.

Folks in the rest of the world are wimps.

 

Someone wrote about the same thing here some years ago. The best response I saw was along the lines of replying to the yeller calmly and cooly, "Sorry, but I don't react well to yelling. But I will be more than happy to discuss the situation later in a rational manner."

 

At the risk of being unreasonably proactive here, Night, why did you hold space for a story two minutes until deadline in the first edition? Did you writer call in and tell you, "Hey, head's up, we're in extra innings. Better get Plan B ready." Given that it was the first edition, plug the damn space and get it the next edition. You make deadline, there's no screaming, everybody wins, right? Who made the call to wait?

And I'm not saying the screaming is justified. Just more understandable if you chose not to plug the story and waited for the writer to file.

 

If you can't handle getting yelled at, your fault or not, you're too thin-skinned to be in this business.

The best advice I got at the beginning of my career was never to let an argument or a disagreement with an editor or another co-worker carry over to the next day.

How many times have people here gotten yelled at because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and the person who should have gotten yelled at wasn't around?

It's just one of the many perks of being in the newspaper business.

 

It's an act??!?

 

It was fun when Lee Elia was running things at The Daily Planet!

 

1. He said he made deadlien, which last I checked is kind of the object of the game.
2. What kind of ME is hanging around at deadline at a multi-edition paper when it isn't election night? And is there a reason she felt compeled to hang around the sports desk in particular? Have there been deadline issues in the past?

 

Not for nothing, but did you have to wait until the story came in to write the headline and captions?

Not that it makes for an ideal hed, but if I know the teams involved and the outcome, and I know that I'm going to be up against deadline, I can probably get something that serves first edition onto the page beforehand.