And now ... we wait!

This week we've got the usual amount of ads and probably the usual amount of content. We've also got several pages of Easter greetings, which are a lot like the ads your parents bought in the back of your high school yearbook, but replace "Congratulations, Rob! We always knew your trial would be postponed enough to let you graduate" with "Happy Easter to all our friends! Love, Rob's disappointed family."

Don't ask me to explain why people want to run these greetings. The Christmas greetings we run are understandable: people are too cheap to send Christmas cards to those they pretend to like but secretly can't tolerate. Easter greetings, though? It must be one of those "devout Christian" things I don't understand.

We're also running a four-page spread about this year's scholarship winners. (My paper, or rather my paper's publisher, gives out scholarships every year. I think there is a large chunk of money reserved for the scholarships and then whoever fills out the paperwork gets a piece; that's the only explanation I have for the meagerness of the amounts.)

(I wanted to use "paucity" but it didn't seem correct.)

My editor wants the scholarship spread to go dead center in the paper, with the Easter greetings to follow that. The trouble is the advertising manager doesn't know how many pages the Easter greetings will take up, so I can't plan the overall size of this week's issue, much less place the regular ads or tell my editor how many pages she'll need to fill with actual content. I called the ads manager and asked her how many pages exactly the greetings will take up and her response was, "I'm thinking 8 to 10 pages." Hey, thanks. My editor laughed when I told her that.

I think the worst part is that the more I try to explain the hurdles I encounter in my job, the more boring they seem. In the first paragraph of this post, I was all "Yeah! This office is filled with diabolical blend of incompetence and craziness!" By the time I finished the paragraph above this one, I couldn't think of a reason to continue writing. I can only imagine what it's like to try to read it ... I'd have given up long ago. Maybe everyone has given up, and I'm typing only for myself. Sometimes that's what doing my actual job feels like: I lay out a newspaper and other than the copy I receive the next day, the design document might as well have been ftp'ed into Mel's Hole.

I think Mel's Hole is a lie, actually. Basically, any story that occured more than ten years ago that doesn't have multiple independent sources of verification is a lie. If there were no newspapers to document Michael Jordan's basketball career, in another twenty years the oral tradition would have turned him into the second coming of Jesus. Although I don't think Jesus would have made Space Jam, regardless of Bill Murray's involvement in that project.

But maybe he would have, and in July I'd be writing this same exact post, only replacing "Easter" with "Space Jam." I'm not sure if Space Jam Day would be a "Happy" or a "Holy" type of day. Depends on how well it did at the box office, probably.