First Night on the Desk

[NoOneLikesUs]

I remember sweating a lot and the fear of ****ing up. I just made it on time.

 

[SF_Express]

I was a PM paper, and the boss was there, so I was just learning on the job and it wasn't too bad.

We had a really grumpy compositer, but boy, were he and the other people in production helpful at bailing you out.

I think my first situation, I was pretty lucky.

 

[RossLT]

10:50 (deadline is 11) Night editor "RossLT, did you know you have no pages back yet"
Me-unintelligible grunt
It was hard the first time but now I have the hang of the whole desk thing and can finish all my designing by 9 or so

 

[SCEditor]

Got damn, I thought you were talking about me. Hell, maybe you are ...
(Everything about that describes me and my former SE, including the rolling in at 10 p.m. part, the good friends, and the good gig now. Except it was my first SE who was in charge the first time I was on desk, and I didn't make a gaffe like that. Whew

It wasn't you, but a first night can be hard. I was fortunate to be working at a paper that printed at 10 a.m., but sports did their stuff the night before. On the fly on a real deadline would have been a different situation for me.

The guy who made the mistake did an outstanding job other than the one miscue, and I ended up helping him move on to his next paper after I went there.

 

[Appgrad05]

My first night was also the first paper of a major redesign of my college paper. It was summer, so I was a one-man band as far as design. I started at noon to lay out my five pages and by 7 p.m. had finished 3.5. The grad assistant, who was a design whiz, comes in to see how I am doing and noticed that my body text font looked a little weird. InDesign had decided to hiccup and create two "Body text" in my styles tab. One had an upper case T, one with a lower. The lower was the one I wanted, but not knowing that I layed out the whole section with an upper case T.
I immediately went down to about two pages worth of copy from my previous 3.5. Had to scramble to find more photos, make the ones I did have larger and pull out a couple of press releases that were in the "Why the F would I run this? pile.

Of course, my first night designing at my current stop I was out the door 20 minutes early with two stories coming in on deadline.