Most tedious assignment EVER

[PhilaYank36]

As I sit here and stare at my screen, trying to comprehend the fact I have to write 720 player bios for two MLB organizations, I put to you, the SportsJournalists.com community, this question: what has been the most mind-numbing, brain cell-destroying, so-ginormous-you-want-cry tedious assignment or story you ever had to do?

 

[Cadet]

Anything involving your publisher or editor's kid.

 

[Mystery_Meat]

Anything involving your publisher or editor's kid.

But what about the thrill of knowing that you're giving fair-minded journalism the boots treatment at the requirement of your clueless/myopic boss?

Typing the season schedule is tedium to the eleventeenth power. I run (read: am) three sports sections, and tying master skeds for 10 schools is a serious buzzkill. But it provides a service (in theory, since I never get feedback on anything I do unless I misspelled a kid's name or someone wants a story).

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

Typing agate -- bowling scores, track scores, etc.

 

[playthrough]

The weekly club softball update. At my old warm-weather shop there were a zillion club softball teams who made the rounds every summer to the ASA, NSA, XYZ and all the other alphabet-soup tournaments, and I'd have to track down the coaches for the weekly updates. Every game was 1-0 with 15 K's per team, and every winner was a regional champion or some other worthless designation.

 

[Ace]

I always look at these things as what interesting fact can I wring out of it? Is there a story in the agate? Is there a new way of presenting the information?

If you go into it with the idea that it's tedious, the readers sure as hell will too.

 

[TwoGloves]

We have an annual Olympics type event pitting the hometown athletes against those from another city. Couple thousand people involved in about 20 sports. We run winners in each event, box scores, etc. Fills up two inside pages on Sunday and two guys are responsible for doing all the agate. The main guy writes the story and does some of the agate. The No. 2 guy does the majority of the agate, starting about 1 p.m. and finishing about 10ish. Both jobs suck to the umpteenth degree. The best part one year was the editor singling out the sports editor for a job well done. Uh, how many ****ing names did he type for nine hours?

 

[Michael_ Gee]

Was not involved, but producing results for the 100th Boston Marathon, 30,000 names, places, and times, left scars on all the Herald personnel who had to do it.

 

[SCEditor]

The newspaper I work at now covers all high school sports across the states. Typing up football capsules on about 200 teams ranks as the most tedious thing I've ever done. I've done it twice, and once the football section is done, I drink for two days straight -- morning, noon and night.

Second to that was when I was a copy editor/page designer in a NASCAR town. When the race showed up twice a year, I felt like I was carrying a sack full of bricks everywhere I went. Monday could never come soon enough.

 

[Cadet]

I've found that I can do agate quickly by getting it into Excel, copying the table to Word, converting table-to-text in either comma-deliniated or tab-deliniated format, and then cleaning it up using find-and-replace. I can format cross country results in about 15 minutes.

 

[tyler durden 71351]

At one rag, I was the guy who had to enter in the parishwide election results on this double-trucked graphic. It took hours to put the numbers in every precinct. And then there was all this strange stuff with the graphic, like you had to be careful about hitting return or tab keys. Tedious to the nth degree. Worst part is, I had to do this for the paper that came out two days after the election, and all these asses at the paper would say "Why don't we run it in the next day's paper? It's useless for it to come out two days after the election." Because there's no way I can enter in all this junk and make deadline, unless the paper springs for a time machine.

 

[The Backyardigan]

About 10 years ago, a co-worker and myself had to compile weekly football stats for 15 teams, by hand, after deadline. (this was before those stat programs, even Excel). Nothing like trying to add Jimmy Tacklebreaker's 15 attempts, 86 yards, and two touchdowns to his season total of 747 yards on 83 attempts and eight touchdowns at 3 a.m.

Coaches in the area were too math-challenged for us to use their stats, and we had to have it in first thing Saturday morning to meet our early Sunday press time. So, we'd be there almost til sunrise doing them. (Note: my co-worker set some kind of record by uttering the word "****" 63 times in 55 seconds after his computer crashed and didn't save the five teams he did).

 

[statrat]

Retyping swim results by hand because the coaches don't know how to email them in makes me want to pull my eyes out of my skull.

 

[Kaylee]

The SE at my first paper always took a somewhat patronizing tone to me. It was always "Now, now, young one, type out this bowling agate and maybe someday down the road we'll find a junior high football game to cover if you've paid your dues."

The upside to pecking in bowling agate in a small town in the south is you run across some great names.

 

[leo1]

doing any agate pretty much sucks. i admire anyone who can do it on a regular basis and not be miserable.

 

[tyler durden 71351]

The SE at my first paper always took a somewhat patronizing tone to me. It was always "Now, now, young one, type out this bowling agate and maybe someday down the road we'll find a junior high football game to cover if you've paid your dues."

The upside to pecking in bowling agate in a small town in the south is you run across some great names.

I worked at one rag where they submitted the bowling agate, hand-written on yellow legal paper that just reeked of cigarette smoke. When the SE would open the envelope the results came in, the smell of smoke went everywhere.

 

[SoSueMe]

First weekly I ever worked at, the weekly "Legion Report" was shared. We had three employees and each week, one of us would type it up.

It was a had-written letter/report from an 80-year old veteran, obviously a member of the Legion. He'd let the community know who was leading the Euchre League, Crib League, who won the meat draw - yes, a draw for a basket full of meat products. Had upcoming events, like horsehshoes and shuffleboard, etc.

Again, I remind you, it was HAND-WRITTEN BY AN 80-YEAR-OLD!

He'd deliver it on his bicycle every DEADLINE DAY!

 

[PhilaYank36]

I'm surprised none of you have strung yourselves up like Bubbles yet after reading some of these horror stories.

 

[Angola!]

I never had a problem typing agate. In some ways it was nice because you could just zone out, listen to tunes and type away. I wouldn't want to do it eight hours a day, five days a week by any means. But I didn't think it was the worst thing in the world.

 

[suburbia]

*Typing in schedules, rosters, and last year's results for a preview pullout section.
*Typing in agate from large swimming, wrestling, and track meets, as well as cross-country and golf
*Designing a two-page high school all-star spread for which none of the content or pictures gets turned in before 10 p.m. on the night it's going in the paper