Beat writers on the road

What do you expect? Newsday is all the way in Long Island -- they have to save their money to cover only local teams so why wouldn't they just use AP or a stringer for national games of no interest to their local readers.......

 

I don't really have a good argument against sharing a room (except for how do you decide who gets the Marriott points ... har!).

That said, I would be slightly horrified if my current paper asked that of me.

At a previous stop, we shared rooms with our photogs. One time, it was a male writer and a female photog ... weeeeeird. Needless to say, the guy's wife wasn't happy. Until she met the female photog ... then, sadly, she was OK with it.

 

No hookers. I've shared rooms with snoring cranks, too.

I just don't care to do it and will avoid it if possible. If you want to put up with a human chainsaw or someone rumbling around at 3 a.m. because "I can't sleep" then go ahead.

 

Funny, but Cablevision owns the Knicks and Newsday so you know little Jimmy Dolan wants the team covered IN THE BRIGHTEST LIGHT POSSIBLE. So the last-second pitch for stringers is indeed a little odd.

 

It's the little things, too. If you're gonna send me on the road 100 nights a year ... you're going to have to pay for me to have some damn personal space. For someone on my type of beat, that midday nap is absolutely essential.

 

I feel like the "pay for meals" debate is akin to being stranded on an island with another person for a month.

When you first landed, you wouldn't have thought the slightest bit about eating the guy. But a month later? Mmm, liver.

 

Stop the presses! Members of the opposite sex sharing a hotel room!! Perish the thought!!

Seriously, one thing I enjoyed about traveling with the women's basketball team as an SID was getting my own room. Not that they didn't trust me. But it was a state school.

 

Once when covering a national event where the local team was playing, we had 10 people there (six writers, four photogs), We had six rooms booked and everyone except the columnist was doubling up. The hotel was about $300 a night so there was very little bitching.

We arrive and they only have four rooms for us. There was a problem on one floor that they had to essentially shut down.

The columnist apparently had something in his contract saying he never has to share a room and he had brought his wife with him on the trip so we knew there was no wiggle room.

Three of the people there were women, so they took one of the other rooms.

That left six of us.

One of the photogs was someone who was once described by an editor as "The most disgusting functional human being on the planet." The guy is an amazing photographer, but that statement is incredibly accurate. If you talked to this guy for five minutes you would feel dirty. The other photographer graciously agreed to stay with him and we pawned off one of our prep writers on him as well.

Three in their room, three in ours.

We got a rollaway, so it's no big deal.

About 30 minutes after we get to the room, the other male photog calls us and asks me if it's OK if he sleeps in our bathtub. He said the gross photog started drinking as soon as he got to the room and he said he knew if he stayed there they was going to be a fight.

We had a couch that didn't pull out, so we put him there. Four in a room.

The four of us go to dinner and we're all kind of slaphappy about the day's events. We come back to the hotel around 1 a.m. and we see the prep writer in the lobby. Apparently, the gross photog brought home what was assumed to be a hooker and threw him out of the room.

And, then there were five in our room for four days. For the most part it was fine because four of us were pretty close friends and the preps writer kind of just was quiet the whole time.

 

Moral of the story: Either be a prima donna columnist or the most digusting human being alive, and you never have to share a room. Somehow accomplish both, and you'll probably never have to share an airplane row, either.

 

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or what, but if a boss forced two members of the opposite sex to "bunk up," he'd be just begging for a sexual harrassment lawsuit.

And if it were my wife being forced to share a room with another man, I'll be damned if I'll let that happen. Unless we could win the aforementioned sexual harrassment lawsuit, which we almost certainly would. In which case, bring it on.

 

I covered an event very early in my career where myself and another writer were being sent in at the last minute to help with coverage. The other four writers we had at the event were sharing rooms and the other writer going with me was female. We spent the entire flight wondering if we were going to have to share a room. As luck would have it, the secretary had booked separate rooms. As soon as I got there, I got grief from the other writers about getting my own room. I immediately offered to give it up to someone else, which I think won me points, even though it never happened.

You just can't ask two members of the opposite sex to share a room.

 

Hey Zag, does that make Mizzou a Heterophobe?