Myth of a clean newsroom?

A college friend of mine is a fireman in town.

He said our building is on the 'watch' list as it dates back to the 1870s or thereabouts. Brick, with ink-soaked floors that go back 130+ years.

I've had to put a garbage can over my monitor to catch the water from the leaky roof. Had to type with gloves because the heat wouldn't work, and we'd have to wait for the press to get going downstairs for the heat off that to make its way upstairs. I've had to wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts in July because the 50-year-old air conditioning system works *too* good.

My legs have been bitten by tiny bugs under my desk, so another reason not to wear shorts to work.

I have sat at other people's computers and spent the first 20 minutes wiping away the crumbs, dirt and hair that is stuck in their keyboards.

There is a cleaning guy that works around 3 a.m. (when I would be working on all-newspaper sections) that would tell me about how people throw out things like shirts and food when they are still perfectly good, and he would show me the shirt he is wearing was one of those aforementioned steals.

There was also the other cleaning guy when I first started who, while vacuuming 15 minutes before deadline, hit the powerstrip and shut off my computer.

Interesting place, I work in.

 

Almost like clockwork, the cleaning crew would show up and immediately start vaccuming the newsroom on Friday nights, about 10 or 15 minutes before deadline, when the sports editor would be his most frantic.
Thanks guys.

We definitely had both a roach and rat problem at my previous rag, and in one dark and dank corner was a "sofa" that legally should have been named a Superfund site.

 

I know the feeling... Have on a short-sleeved shirt under a sweater or sweatshirt in the winter so I can take off the top layer and just be in short sleeves in the winter because the heat works too good and then in the summer have a sweatshirt stashed in the desk for the nights when the air conditioning works too good.

 

Who leaked this to the Chronicle?

 

At a former workplace I was told the CEO in a tantrum once walked through the newsroom, sweeping files, photos and anything else he found off of the cabinets that lined the aisles and onto the floor. I laughed at this bit of apocrypha until I saw witnessed it myself one day.