Forty Days #3 You shouldn’t do that
Posted by Aaron - 11/03/11 at 08:03:00 pmI was working late one night and one of the page designers came by my desk to check his mail. This is common. My desk is in the far corner of the newsroom, near the office mailboxes. Every night, the latecomers, the sports writers, the copy editors, the page designers, come into the office and stop, briefly, at the mailboxes to check.
I’m new, still new. I’ve been at the paper a year and a month. And I’m not part of the clique. At least I don’t feel like it. When I was really new, during my first months, my first 10 months, probably, I went to the bars with the rest of the reporters, whole groups of us. The patrons of the bars new us collectively as the CitPat, the paper’s nickname, a name I was trying hard to avoid becoming the paper’s permanent moniker. Not that I like the Citizen Patriot, a product of a century-old merger, if my newspaper history serves me correctly, which it doesn’t, but the CitPat, I felt, was worse, new in that way that things were new in the 1990s and 10 years later everyone realized they were just bad ideas.
Like laser discs.
I go out with the CitPat much less now. It’s because I don’t like most the bars in this city.
This page designer, who stopped to check his mail that one night, he’s a newsroom legend. When someone says “Mark” everyone knows who they are talking about. I assume it’s the same way with “Aaron,” I just haven’t felt it yet.
When most people stop to check their mail, they don’t talk to me. I’ve learned not to look up from what I am doing. I did at the beginning. I looked up, thinking they were coming over to talk to me, and made eye contact. An awkward hello often followed. I learned, quickly, not to make eye contact. It has made for equally awkward silences the few times someone has come over to ask me a question. Usually just Brian, an editor who I work with rarely, and who I think will stand quietly near my desk forever as long as I look busy forever. I have played games, sort of like chicken or staring contests, where I see who breaks first. I knew Brian is there but kept working to see how long he would stay. We’re about even, if anyone is keeping score.
So Mark stopped by that night to check his mail. I was working late that night, and hard, because when I work late it is only because I am working hard. While he checked his mail, I took my glasses off, sighed and went back to work.
Mark wears glasses too.
“You know we’re not supposed to do that,” he said.
“Huh, what?” I was startled.
“Take our glasses off and stare at the screen.”
“Oh. It’s something I do,” I said.
“But has it ever helped? Has it ever made you feel better?”
“No. I guess not.”
“Yeah. We’re not supposed to do it.”
He walked away. I put my glasses back on.
At my first job, for a small newspaper in the middle of the desert of California, taking my glasses off was a cue to the rest of the newsroom. It meant I was stressed and to not bother me unless you were going to make my life easier, which was almost always never the case, or it was really important, which always seemed to be the case, no matter the issue. The technique, I will confess, failed to keep the badgers away.
I take my glasses off much less now, and if I do, I put them back on promptly, realizing that it is something we’re not supposed to do.
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