"I’m only here to help!”
I was always trying to pass that line off on Special K – sometimes I even succeeded too.
I had John Coburn on my list of things to get done today. All summer long he’s been putting his remaining stock of books from Coburn’s Bookworld out for customers to browse through at the Bored Room Bistro.
The books were available for a donation to the Midway Library and the money jar was on the counter inside the restaurant.
Despite a short period when the books were disappearing without anything going into the donation jar they had collected $400 so far. This included $100 from RJ at the Bistro who admitted she’d been high grading the table for recipe books every week.
Coburn was planning to take the table down when winter came – since wet and soggy books don’t attract many customers. But RJ suggested a picture in the paper might help advertise the table a bit and perhaps bring a nice little uptick in the donations for the last few weeks.
The obvious picture would be with John and Midway Public Library Director Nicole Ferrier standing in front of the book table. But organizing the three of us at the same time proved to be too much of a problem for Tuesday. The last thing I’d heard was from Nicole was her query if Wednesday morning work?
So this morning my agenda included calling John and seeing if we could make it happen.
He answered on the fifth ring or so – if he’s anything like I am with my cell phone it takes the first two rings to realize it’s my phone and the next couple or three to figure out which pocket it’s in.
When I asked if he would be available he said he certainly was. Then he asked me where I was. It seems he needed a ride back to Midway because he’d driven the Highway Rescue truck out to Granton Motors for some work.
I made his day when I told him that I was leaving to pick him up right away. I know he was thrilled because of his happy and hearty laugh as we hung up the connection.
Like I say – I’m only here to help. It all worked out really nicely too because by the time we got back to Midway Nicole was at work and ready to hustle down to the Bistro.
Putting the paper together was rather difficult this week. Still unsure if we’ll make press time or not and I fear that I’m responsible for that to a large measure. Workplace stress is soooooooo much fun.
But you see there was almost nothing happening last weekend in the west end here. So I sat around and dithered and fretted until I was right up against the deadline.
Deadlines are the curse of my life.
I’ve been at this crazy job for over six years now and the deadlines still win all too often.
Being a reporter on deadline on the day you are trying to push through to press time is kind of like having sex with a gorilla. You’re not finished until the gorilla is finished. I did try to put a better spin on it a few of years ago when I was talking to the boss about deadlines – or rather the boss was talking to me about deadlines.
“I love deadlines,” I told them. “I particularly like the whishing sound they make as they go whizzing by.”