Career milestone of sorts

Sounds displeasant.

 

I still have oxford shirts with blue-pen stains on them. Guess I'm old, too. One time I was watching our news editor galley in a page, and I jokingly told him not to cut himself. I walked back to the newsroom, and not 10 seconds later he walks in with blood everywhere. Ah, the good old days ...

 

Our News editor sat next to the vacuum tube. He smoked a pipe. When he'd put the cassette into the tube, he'd exhale a big puff of pipe smoke into the opening. When the tubes landed in the composing room, they'd arrive with the smoke.
In 1978 or 79, we moved to a new office, everything on the same floor with partitions separating the departments. I pilfered a couple of the vacuum tubes from the old building. First morning in the new office, I put the page dummies into the tubes and threw them over the wall to the composing room. Got "laugh of the day."

 

I used to go up to the pressroom and tell dudes where to put what when they cut and paste the Scoreboard/agate page together.

I didn't start using a computer until I was a junior in college.

SFE, maybe I'm not as old as you ... but I'm not that far off.

 

Newsmaker? You haven't been to Harris Hell until you've used one of the old 286s with the crosshairs puck and the 2x2-foot sheet of commands-on-a-board that were used instead of menus.

 

Thirty is something to be proud of, and I just wonder how many in the next generation will ever know the feeling. I'm about to start No. 28, and even that staggers me.

 

Just passed 38 years... only 7 or 8 to go til retirement.

Feb. 1969 ... hot type!

 

Not until this thread did I really think about how many years it's been since my first very prestigious job....organizing and alphabetizing ten humongous rolodexes belonging to my boss and mentor. One day I said to him, 'You know what would be cool, if there was some electronic machine for all these names, you just hit some buttons and the information comes up on a screen!' He just looked at me like I was an idiot, which I was, and told me to go sharpen some pencils. I think it was a metaphor, I'm still not sure.

Congrats, SF, on surviving 30 years...may you have as many more as you wish for, and may your pencils always be sharp.

 

those qwip machines ... i forgot about 'em ... we got horse racing results on the qwip, and they smelled hideous

i'm 25 years in and loved every minute of it

 

Well...I'm 19 and most of the stuff written on this thread has made absolutely no sense to me. Congrats, though, to S_F and all the others old-timers on the board. It's damn impressive that you've been doing it for this long.

 

You know, a rolodex....big flipping wheel with hundreds of paper cards attached? Put one in the wrong place, it's lost to you forever. But damn, we could alphabetize in those days....

 

I think rolodex was one of the few things I understood...you guys might as well be speaking Mandarin when talking about the different types.