Beat writers on the road

Ha ha... Share a room while covering an event... Ha ha... ;D

 

This is another thing only newspapers consider. Name another profession where people on the road bunk up? There are NONE. I will not stay with another person in a hotel room. Anybody who does is an idiot. This is human decency here.
Mizzougrad ... great story. I enjoyed reading it BTW.

 

Wrong. When we send tech service reps to a customer's factory, they drive there and double up, even if it's a 24-hour round trip to Massachusetts. They are also required to use their own credit cards for expenses (including hotel), then request reimbursement from our company.

I know the newspaper industry ia in bad shape right now, but let's not go overboard making assumptions about other ones.

 

So Eddie can always stretch out to sleep on the redeye?

 

I shared rooms at two entire Olympics (Barcelona and Sydney) with another Herald staffer. That's three weeks. But of course its three weeks of 18-20 hour days (recreation included), so I wasn't in the room much.
It's awful, but it was worth it to be at the Olympics.

 

Admitting you supposedly work 70 hours a week, 30 of those unpaid, and now thinking that having to bunk with someone for a night or two isn't "human decency" means you have loose screws.

You need to get a grip on reality.

They're not asking you to sleep in the same bed with a columnist and photographer. But if a room costs $350 for a few days why have separate rooms and bills of $700 or $1,100 or more. Pair up unless there is some kind of health or other reason (see disgusting photographer, above). It's not a big deal.

Being told to drive 3-4 hours to get home at 1 a.m. instead of paying for a hotel room is a safety issue. Being told to share a room is fiscal responsibility.

If I were your boss and you pitched a fit about this, you wouldn't be covering anything on the road. Ever.

 

True that.

 

SID staffers too.

 

OK, I am amazed tech guys share rooms.
I will repeat this: It is WRONG to make people bunk up together. If companies want to send people on the road, they should budget money for the reporters and photographers to get their OWN ROOMS. Some people snore. You ever hear of that? It is inhumane to make strangers bunk together. It is ridiculous. And I want to know the other professions that make their people bunk together. Again I am shocked that tech people do it, but I believe you.
If companies want to send mutiple people, they each GET THEIR OWN ROOM.
Newspapers that force people to bunk together again have no class.

 

I would say that 99 percent of all of the time I spent on the road I had my own room. Most of the other times, I was asked if it was OK, and I always said it was.

There were a few times when it was not a positive situation, which was usually due to a drunk colleague. Once I slept in the hall because a co-worker (and close friend) had a massive brain fart and locked it from the inside so no one could get in. Nine years later he still apologizes for that one...

 

At the smaller paper where I started my career, I always shared a room with a photog when he was on the road, too. We never asked for separate rooms. We just didn't know any better.

Now that I'm, ahem, established ... I don't play that shit.

 

A human piece of dung? Or a piece of human dung? If not human, what brand of dung are we talking here?