Just My Opinion - By Mary Kilen
Holiday Week Crunch
It’s been an interesting week here at the Promoter to say the least. With the 4th of July falling on Tuesday, we needed to make some drastic changes to our usual schedules. I’ll be honest. During the middle of the week, I can sometimes be found at my desk not working terribly hard. I might even be playing games or watching something recorded on my Dish receiver. I might even be doing both at the same time.
That was not the case this past week. Because we needed to upload our pages to the plant first thing on Monday morning, we found ourselves trying to cram a whole week’s worth of work into roughly three days.
Friday was like Monday in our office as we worked on getting all of the rest of the copy set up and ads done. I started page layout, knowing that there were two things over the weekend that I was going to want to take pictures of and still get into the paper.
As I sit here on Saturday writing my column, I have the rest of the pages put together with holes in two pages waiting for those pictures. Writing my column on Saturday is also a bit of a weird change for me. That is frequently a Monday night task after I see how much space is left on the page.
I have to give an atta girl to both Christina and Jada. They matched my crazy speed step for step this week. We were all mightily confused about what day it was, but we got it done.
The bright point to me writing my column right now is that other than getting those pictures placed and the accompanying wording put with them, I’ll have most of Sunday free. That might not seem like much to most people, but truth is I do most of my writing on Sundays. Sunday, July 2, though was a great day to not have much to do. Dale and I celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary on Sunday. By getting everything done early, we will be able to have some time together enjoying the day.
For anyone that called our office on Monday hoping to get something into the paper for July 5 still, I am sorry that deadlines did not allow that to happen. It could not be helped, though, and we did try to warn our readers for the two weeks prior.
Because we had to be done early on Monday morning, I decided not to open the office. Hopefully having most of Monday and all of Tuesday will make up for the craziness I put the girls through leading up to the early deadlines!
It will also be nice for Dale and I to have a good part of Monday free. We need to do an errand for a friend on Monday and Dale’s class will be celebrating their 50th Class Reunion later in the day.
I’ll spend Tuesday taking all of the 4th of July pictures and have all week to get them sorted out and ready for the July 12 issue of the Promoter. It will be nice to enjoy the day’s events without thinking about having to go into the office and hurry up to get them done.
Editor’s Dilemma
I found this clipping from my father-in-law, Russel’s, column years ago while doing some research for something else. It made me laugh because it is so true. I’ll share it with you here.
If we print jokes, people say we are silly.
If we don’t, they say we are too serious.
If we still close to the office all day, we ought to be around hunting material.
If we go out and try to hustle, we ought to be on the job in the office.
If we don’t print contributions, we don’t appreciate genius.
If we do print them, the paper is full of junk.
If we edit the other fellow’s stuff, we’re too critical.
If we don’t, we’re asleep.
If we clip things from other magazines or newspapers, we are too lazy to write them ourselves.
Now, like as not, some guy will say we copied this from some other magazine.
We did.