Who's your elephant in your newsroom?

This wasn't a newsroom, but it's still a good story.

Woman in mid-to-late 30s, married with no kids. Hypocondriac, always going to the doctor. Couldn't write her way out of a paper bag but was hired for a writing position. Wasted a lot of other people's time who had to help her with assignments.

But the best part was the crying. She'd sit at her desk and just sob. Over work. Over her husband, who she was cheating on. Over the baby bird outside her window that got knocked out of its nest. Over her car. Sometimes twice a day she'd be crying. And not discreet, stress-release crying. Heaving sobs so that someone would have to pay attention to her.

We all wondered why she was still employed. Hell, our boss wondered why she was still employed. But as has been said, it's tough to fire someone.

Until she chased after a coworker one day with a knife someone had brought to cut a cake. Ran through the office screaming after her, making slicing motions. Straight out of a movie. The cops were called and apparently that was enough to get her fired.

 

At my paper, we had a business editor who was finally let go a couple of months ago.

At our fairly small paper, he usually had just one page a day (actually half a page because the stocks chart was put on there), yet shortly after I started there, the news desk gained responsibility for laying out the page because either he needed to devote more time to reporting (the official reason) or he couldn't design a simple page for shit (the probable real reason).

And what was this "reporting" he would have all day to concentrate on? Mainly anything that came to him in a press release or any business lunches or dinner he would get a free ticket to. Any stories on new businesses were from surrounding cities, because the general reporters at our sister papers were the only ones finding new businesses to do stories on. Actually, he would find out about new buildings that were going up and then take a point-and-click and bring us back about 10 choices from a vacant or half-developed lot being worked on (We used to joke with the photo tech that we had more "pictures of dirt" from said editor). Once in a while he would submit a column in which he would write about the most nonsensical things -- my favorite was the one about the light poles in a local shopping center that had swastikas carved into it, noting the poles were made well before Nazi Germany emerged.

He seemed like a pleasant enough guy, the only thing was if he needed to talk to you about something, he acted like you and he were the only people on earth and he would interrupt any conversation or task you were doing and just keep talking being totally oblivious to anything around him. And he would come get you and start talking as soon as you arrived at your desk at the start of the shift, before you even had time to clock in. Just so you all know, when he was let go (and yes that shows how hard it can be to fire someone) he was pretty ready for retirement financially, so when I came in and found out he was gone, I breathed a sigh of relief.

 

Kevin.

 

Me.

 

Since I work from home, I'd have to say it's that damned girl. She acts like she's only six months old, drooling all over herself and hollering about whichever thing it is that she just dropped on the floor.

She rarely pulls her own weight. In fact, she has to do the electric worm just to make it to the kitchen.

I'm thinking of cutting her loose.

 

Electric worm? Just fantastic.

 

Utter incompetence. Our layout guy is swift enough to make it not a priority and his other inabilities made trying to teach him too daunting a task.

 

You write for a living? Man, that's some awkward sentence construction.

 

I know one who complains about having to write, travel, answer the phone, do a story on a sport this individual doesn't like and is hated by EVERYONE! Got scooped on a huge national story, too, that would have cost me my job if I was in that position. But unfortunately, this individual still remains at our paper.

 

TS: A sincere question.

Why do you feel you would have lost the job/beat had you been scooped and the current person emerged unscathed?

 

It depends on who you ask. Some say it's the agate guys, some say it's one of the reporters who spends as much time socializing as interviewing during phone calls everyone can hear (but he routinely comes close to topping the inch list each week, so it's hard to say...).

Personally, I think most everyone busts their butts pretty hard. But my favorite from my current paper is one of our two columnists. Good guy, great stories to tell out at the bars, been there forever, etc. But every Sunday you can count on a baseball column. And during the week, his columns (even when he's had, say, a week to work on the thing) roll in around 10:30 at night. Sometimes it's 10:30 if the desk is lucky.

There are a handful of reasons I am happy I'm not a desker. One of them is not having to fret about his columns.

 

The weather guy.