<Storyteller's Note: The following account, though strictly personal and anecdotal, is true. The names have been changed, masked or omitted to avoid retribution from the guilty.>
<i.>
Unlikely as it sounds, the Daily Bugle sacking carried a silver lining. Before your late nemesis, Chief Tightly Wound, booted you off the island, you'd interviewed next door at its out-of-county rival, The Daily Retreader. You knew the editor there, because she'd actually worked at the Daily Bugle, for a couple of months before the Chief's arrival. She soon regretted her mistake, and fled back to the Retreader.
Such games of musical chairs are standard fare at small town dailies. Don't like how So-and-So treated the expansion of the new industrial park? Wait a few months, maybe even a few weeks, and they'll throw up their hands, and move on. There's a sticking point, though. The interview went well, but Taylor fretted that the salary might pose a stumbling stock. It's little better than the Daily Bugle's pittance, "and I'm not sure if that'd be enough to keep you here," she worries.
Guess what? In an area flooded with Service McJobs, it'll McDo, for now. So you call Taylor, and ask if her offer still stands. Luckily, she hasn't hired anyone else, though you face down some skepticism (Why would you come back to the place you turned down, exactly?). But you don't have to lobby that hard. She needs someone, well, right now, and you're a warm body she knows. Those dynamics work in your favor.
Best of all, you can start in a couple weeks, citing the unused vacation time you've got coming. Actually, that's not true, either, but you can't reveal how Chief Tightly Wound never gave you a day off during that final, fraught year at the Bugle. Hence, the $2,400 in severance pay, on which you and the wife have lived, since that debacle.
So you ask Taylor not to call the Bugle, since you're "on vacation" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). Now's not the time for honesty. On some level, it's all a giant game of, "Don't ask, don't tell," isn't it? In that sense, your new job is off to a flying start. It reminds you of the line from "Adios, Johnny Bravo," as Greg Brady's handlers prepare him for his rock star makeover: "You fit the suit."
<Teenage Graphic: 5/79:
Inspired via The Bells (Lou Reed):
"It was really not so cute
To play without a parachute..."
The Reckoner>
<ii.>
Everything goes well, at first. The overall atmosphere definitely seems way looser than the Bugle, and way less paranoid. People hang out together, away from work, and enjoy each other's company? What a concept! It's a welcome change from the Bugle, where departments barely interacted, outside of brutish necessity.
Better yet, the Retreader encourages your outside interests, which allows you to cover local punk and rock shows, as long as they end up in the paper. (Well, most of them, anyway.) The arrangement also builds contacts for your own musical aspirations. Before long, you're booking, playing and promoting shows at The Connection, an alternative club that's sprung up only five minutes away from your apartment.
You'd already been helping out there during those final months at the Bugle, but had to keep it under wraps, due to its owner's anti-Iraq War, anti-Bush leanings, the polar opposite of Chief Tightly Wound, whose lack of empathy for his galley slaves matched the indifference felt on Capitol Hill toward those who weren't white, or rich.
No such issues dog you now. Instead of reporting at 7:00 a.m. for the Chief's abuse every day, you can come in whenever you wish, depending on what needs doing. As an assistant editor, you're fleshing out whatever blanks Hunter didn't fill in during her day shift. The master print copy heads out the door by nine; whatever doesn't make it by then, you have to send over electronically, via the FTP connection -- those were the days, eh? -- by 1:00 a.m.
This schedule does wonders for your biorhythms and mental state, not to mention the new levels of autonomy you're suddenly experiencing. You're having too good a time to hear the thunderclaps nagging in the distance, and the sparrows chirping in the wilderness.
<"Teenage Graphic, 5/79:
Flipside/Take II":
The Reckoner>
<iii.>
The wheels start wobbling off the wagon, bit by bit. After the first week or two, you stop taking a formal dinner break. Some nights (Wednesday, Thursday) are slower than others (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday), On the slower days, you only have two or three pages to finish; on the busier ones, it's eight, nine, or even ten, for 16- to 24-page weekend editions. On the slow nights, you're home by midnight, or 1:00 a.m.; on the faster ones, not till 2:00 a.m. or so.
The biggest challenge doesn't come from editing and laying out the stories, but labor-intensive fillers -- like the stocks and comics -- that require filling in lots of little individual pieces. The comics page typically features a dozen or so strips, plus a crossword puzzle, that takes 10 to 15 minutes, right off the bat. At that pace, six of these fillers gobble 60 to 90 minutes, before you've edited one story, or laid out one page.
Your responsibilities don't stop there. Like many dailies its size, the Retreader publishes half a dozen or so weeklies in smaller towns, to maximize its reach. They're eight to 12 pages, and mostly recycle key stories from the daily paper, but still require you to add the relevant content for each one, tasks increase your workload exponentially.
After the first couple months, coming home by 2:00, 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. becomes the norm. The only time you make it around midnight or 1:00 a.m. is on those slower Wednesdays or Thursdays, when the paper is mostly finished. You still have to cover local government meetings, though not as many as the Bugle demanded. Even so, most of your city council, school and township beats are in outlying areas, which means additional driving time, and writing a story for tomorrow's paper. If the meeting runs long, you're straining to make that final 1:00 a.m. deadline.
You soon reach a point where you're either eating at your desk, microwaving what the wife makes at home, or eating and running, via the usual suspects (McDonalds, Subway, or the local '50s-era drive-in: pick your poison). Even the weekends no longer feel so relaxing, because you spend most of them recovering from work, like most of your fellow unfortunates.
The annoyances are piling up, but you don't see as the Retreader as the last stop. You periodically interview for other jobs, typically way out of town, but nobody ever offers enough cash or autonomy to make the risk worthwhile. At least Taylor leaves you alone, and lets you do the job, a welcome change from the Bugle. Staying put seems like the best option, for now, at least. Remember what fate whispered in your ear: You fit the suit.
<iv.>
A year or so into your tenure, the wheels fall off with a clang, and a thud. Your publisher calls everybody in for a sitdown to discuss the Retreader's dicey financial situation. Like nearly every paper at this point in 2005, circulation is seriously tapering off, by 30-35% or so, the publisher estimates.
You pay less attention to the P&L (Profit & Loss) charts that the publisher wheels out, than his conclusion. If the paper can't win at least some of that 30-35% back, layoffs are not only likely, but unavoidable. Makes sense, right? Two-thirds of any organization's costs are tied up in labor -- and you just got here. They don't say, "Last hired, first fired," for nothing, right?
Gas has just rocketed up to $4 per gallon, too, and you're really feeling the pinch, as someone who makes a 40-mile round trip every day. Your wife estimates you're losing about $20-25 a day, before you show up to work. (This is a good decade before Uber and Lyft hone that model to perfection.) That's a pretty demoralizing proposition, but if you don't want a McJob, you'll have to McMove, because the McBetter McPaying ones aren't here.
Neither you nor your wife can cope with that idea right now, so you do what comes naturally to people stuck in these mousetraps. You clench your jaw a little tighter, and hope, no matter how irrationally, that things will work out, somehow. After all, the Retreader's just launched a new weekly youth section, and named you to run it. Though your plate's plenty filled already, this new task matches your music and pop culture interests, so at least it's fun. And hey, they just gave you another thing to do, right? How could they get rid of you?
Carnival Of Bills"/
The Reckoner>
<Coda>
As it turns out, they can, and they do. Six months after that sitdown, Taylor and the publisher call you in for a meeting. They ask you to show up at 4:00 p.m., well before your typical preferred starting time (around 6:00 or so). Oh, crap, you tell yourself. That can't be good.
Sure enough, your gut is right. You're getting the chop, all right, effective -- well, right now, basically.
The way that Taylor explains it, "We'd have to cut you, or the other reporter, Dean, and he's been here way longer..."
"Yeah, a good decade or so," I finish. "I get the picture." You shrug your shoulders. "Well, what else can you do?"
"We won't fight your unemployment," the publisher promises. Even in this soggy scenario, that's another welcome change from the Bugle, whose management always fought everybody's unemployment applications -- a stupid move, actually, when you consider that, from a regulatory standpoint, they were paying for it all along. Then again, "logic" and "manager" don't always end up in the same sentence, as you know all too well.
To further drive home the point, the publisher slides your severance check across his desk. You pick it up and squint: it's comparable to what the Bugle begrudgingly coughed up, more or less. That'll do for another month or so, you tell yourself.
None of you say anything for a minute that stretches like an hour. The atmosphere is cordial, but awkward, as it has to be. You're not getting shoved out for anything you did, or because the boss didn't like you. There just isn't enough in the kitty to keep you around.
Finally, the publisher stirs. "You're taking this well," he offers.
You allow yourself a wry smile. "Yeah, well, what other choice have I got? It's not like I got to vote on the matter."
Stale as it sounds, your witticism serves to break the silence. The three of you get up at last, trading the usual banalities about keeping in touch, wishing each other well, blah-blah-blah, and so on. The Beatles probably told each other the same crap when they broke up, you ruefully observe, as you head out the door, and into your van, for the last time.
You give full vent to every black-humored impulse on that final drive home. No more endless shifts, nor long commutes. Hell, what's not to like about that? All the time to read whatever you want, or watch TV, once you finally figure out what's on it.
You can give The Connection more of your time and energy, now that you're shed of that second/third shift schedule. Shit, you can play all the gigs you want! Got one coming up Friday, in fact.
Because you heard the sparrows chirping all along, even if you didn't admit it. Now that they're finally here, what happens next? You really don't have a clue, but that's okay. It's not like anybody expects you to figure out the answer right away. For now, you can just focus on immediate things, like the next benefit check, the next bill, the next gig, not necessarily in that order. Living on unemployment is like that sometimes. --The Reckoner
Links To Go (Hurry, Hurry,
Before They Lay You Off For Good):
Jobs To Nowhere: The Series So Far:
