Previously on...

This week in a Small Town Newsroom

(Sadly, I do not know how this ended) Yesterday, it came over the scanner that one of the banks had locked someone in the vault by accident, and they needed the police to come and get them out. 

Fergus sent one of our photographers to get some pictures of these two little girls raising money for St. Jude. Well, he wasn’t really specific about what sort of photos he wanted. The next day, we all get called into Boss’s office, who asked what in God’s name is going on, and there is no way we could publish that, and was Fergus some sort of perv. The photographer had taken pictures of the two little girls (Maybe 6 yrs old?) sitting on a bed, holding dollar bills fanned out. With no context, it did not look like a upstanding situation. We chose to run the photo of them “presenting the money to the police” which I called paying off the cops. 

Late Saturday night, the computer systems stalled, and one of the IT guys had to remote in and try and fix it. The system was overloaded, and some things needed to be moved or taken off. He got excited, and started deleting things right and left. Boss somehow compared IT deleting stuff to flinging Napalm in Vietnam. It was a stretch, but he really committed. 

Jane was in a seperate space in our bullpen, and could hear what was going on, but could not see us, and was removed enough to have her own space. She has now changed jobs, and moved to the desk across from me and next to Farquad. I’m taking bets on how long before she goes off on him. He started talking about his dating life again the other day while I was training her on one of our products, and I half thought she was going to smack him. 

Boss is taking this weekend off, so Jane gets to do my job, and I have to do Boss’s. This will involve the creation of our front page. It could go terribly. If all else fails, there will just be a note at the top to the effect of “This is what it would be like without local newspapers” and the rest of the page blank.

I previously wrote this on the July 20 Friday open thread on Ask A Manager.