Me vs. the machines

Some time this year (last year? the year before? hell, I don't know; life is what happens when you're blogging about your cats), they replaced the soap dispensers at work with the fancy kind that magically sense a dirty hand and noisily crank out sanitary foam for your handwashing pleasure. These machines — there are two per bathroom for optimum convenience!!! — have a mystical set of standards for occasions on which they will actually dispense soap to the dirty-handed. Hold your tongue to the roof of your mouth, stand on one foot, use your toes to speed dial your mother, and sing "Old Time Rock 'n' Roll" to the tune of "O Tannenbaum," and you might coax the thing into giving you a dollop of foam. Every other Thursday or so.

I've endured my share of farcical battles of wit with those machines and have spent more time than I care to recount bitching at them or about them or in their general vicinity to anyone perched on a porcelain throne nearby who may or may not care to hear my ranting. My favorite move is the one where you hold your hand out beneath the dispenser for five minutes, waiting patiently, and the instant you pull away, hey, here comes a little foam turd for you and now it's on the counter. Awesome. It's especially insulting when I fail at my quest to get soap and wash my hands simply in plain water, and then go to dry them, only to be rebuffed by the automatic paper towel dispenser as well. The paper towel dispensers — there are two per bathroom for optimum convenience!!! — usually aren't nearly as finicky as the soap dispenser (although I have spent many, many minutes of my life waving at them like they're long-lost friends, trying to get them to recognize me and help a sister out), but they are quite often simply broken and/or out of paper.

In other words, I fucking hate these machines. They are a perfect example of machinery created to make our lives easier that, in fact, only complicates things. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the manual dispensers we had before. Sure, you had to touch them and some people get weirded out by that, but come on. What's more unsanitary -- touching a soap dispenser's handle -- which is giving you soap with which you will then wash off your hands -- or going without soap altogether half the time because the frigging things aren't even working?

Oh, and here's the kicker. I found out from a co-worker yesterday that part of the reason why the damned soap things don't work sometimes is because they run out of battery power and just sit there, unusable. They especially tend to run out of batteries on the weekend. So people working Saturday and Sunday often go without soap. Co-worker said the maintenance staff was going to start checking the batteries on Friday afternoons to make sure we could make it through the weekend.

How ridiculous is that? It makes me want to scream when I think of all the little double A batteries (hell, those stupid things may use C batteries for all I know) we're burning through and then sending to landfills for no fucking reason other than perceived convenience. I don't know. It just ... ugh. It's a bit much for me, and I'm pretty much the shittiest environmentalist you will ever meet. (Case in point: Weeks and weeks ago, I bought two of those Schnucks bags meant to be reused to replace the plastic bags, and I have been back to Schnucks exactly once with them. All other times ... of which there have been many, many ... I have managed to forget them, and returned home with a carload of plastic bags. Yeesh.)

So my plan is to buy a big bottle of dollar-store soap and bring it in this weekend for the weekend crew to use and refill it as needed. Maybe it will be just me using it, maybe not. Whatever. I don't care. But I am not fighting with those fucking machines again.

Yeah, I laughed

Overheard:

Dude 1: Hey, did you hear Obama might be sponsoring a car for NASCAR?

Dude 2: I guess that means he's going to play the race car.

While you were sweating

Holy hell, it got humid fast. I don't care if "quickly" is preferred standard English grammar there or not. When you're talking about humidity, you spit the words out and get it over with and then go back inside and take a bath in iced tea.

Mmmm, iced tea.

Anyway, I would like to sit and write and write about lots of different things, but my eyes are still dilated from the eye doctor this morning and I can't focus on the damn screen. The good news is that my vision hasn't gotten worse in a year and a half. That's unheard of for me. So I may finally be stable enough to consider Lasik. Which means that if I am in a plane crash and get stranded on an island, I won't be the weakest link because I lost a fucking contact lens during the crash. (I know I'm only on the second season of Lost, so maybe that plot device is yet to come, but seriously — where are all my vision-impaired brothers and sisters who would be up the proverbial shit creek were they to land on an island with a pair of broken glasses or no spare contacts? Yes, these are the things I think about when I watch that show.*)

More good news: Yesterday I came in to work only to find out that I'd won a Scripps quarterly design award. Yee haw! I got a certificate and everything. I'm pretty proud. I've had a lot of help this year and been given a lot of freedom to create some pretty cool designs, so I'm really thankful for that. Here are the pages that clinched the win:



Apparently the judges really liked the tornado A1. We were sure to include the backstory with the description of the page. (That was the night we had to hoof it to the basement twice and lost at least an hour of production time and they still expected us to meet our regular deadlines. Oh, and it was Super effing Tuesday, too.)

*UPDATE: Oh, duh. As someone who does not exist on the internet reminded me, Sawyer has shitty vision. Although, they kind of abandoned that storyline real quicklike.

Borrowed raincoat, borrowed galoshes, and borrowed time

The teevee tells me that the weather's gone all orange and pink and red. It's disgusting, mixing those colors like that.

About an hour ago I was driving north on Avalon, taking a right onto Madison, when I saw the biggest fucking lightning streak I have ever seen. It was so big because it was seemingly right in fucking front of me, and its union with whatever it struck created the loudest and sickest boom-snap-crackle-fizz in the air around me, and set off car alarms all around the Piggly Wiggly.

It made my teeth hurt.

So, like many other level-headed young adults in this city, I'll be spending the evening at the Beale Street Music Festival downtown on the riverfront, blogging for the Commercial Appeal's MIM blog. I've got Courtney's galoshes, Donna's raincoat, and, if I can sneak out of the office in an hour or two, all night to devote to some mud-stompin', hurricane-drinkin', and music-listening.

Should be a good time. If I don't get electrocuted.

I'm new here ... and by 'here' I mean 'to Earth'

[Scene: Walking through the courtyard into work, passing someone leaving the building.]

Cheery co-worker: Hi, how are you?
Me, smiling: Good, how are you?
Cheery co-worker: Beautiful day!
Me, smiling: You too!

Little things

• I woke up yesterday with a brand new grey hair. Funny thing is, I can probably pinpoint the exact moment it sprouted Thursday night.

• Our office calendars use the Futurama credit-sequence font for the names of the months. This pleases me to an exceptional degree.

• Speaking of calendars, I still don't have one in the apartment for 2008. I've also decided that I need a datebook so I can write down appointments and meetings and stuff, which seem to be occurring with alarming frequency these days. Actually, I've decided I need a smartphone. I realize there's a substantial price difference there, but I can get a pretty killer corporate discount on several different models of refurbished Blackberries. I'm just not sure that I should get a refurb. Anyone have any strong opinions on that?

• It's not raining right now. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON? Just kidding. Maybe we'll see some sunshine this weekend. I suppose I could check the Weather Channel, but that would require more effort than a throwaway guess, and this is a blog, therefore that's a big no-no.

• I hate the phrase "big no-no."

• Yesterday I waited in line at Circle K with part of the WMC-TV crew, including a regular reporter whose name I should probably know but don't (because I rarely watch the local news; sorry, but I'm usually working during it). I had hoped he was buying scandalous things so I could come gossip about TV reporters hopped up on No Doz and Red Bull and pork rinds, but I didn't see what he bought so that idea was a bust.

• My managing editor told me they held up my Martin Luther King special coverage front page on CNN yesterday morning. I didn't see that either.

• I dreamed in Pixar-like cartoon last night. It even involved a kitchen at a restaurant, but there were no rodents or French people. It was quite beautiful the way my brain rendered things (for example, a wax-paper bag of beans ... wtf?) and it was almost as if I was kind of floating through the atmosphere, observing the goings-on of the kitchen without actually being a part of the story. Weird. I'll try to collect the memory scraps and post about it over at NA.

• The Tigers play tonight in hopes of making it to the championship. It's weird living in a town where there is such vehement and loyal support for a college sports team that actually wins a lot. Murfreesboro, it ain't. Slowly but surely I'm beginning to understand Tigermania, and I don't altogether disapprove.

Reason No. 258 why it's great to work with a real artist

Because concepts you pitch that start out looking like this



end up looking like this



after he's worked his magic.

To say I have talent envy doesn't even begin to cover it.

Link love: Check out the newly redesigned Shelf Life blog, the book blog from the CA.

Bonus link love: Shane's blogging again!

Yes, do that. Do exactly that.

Love it when you stay late at the office to get some work done on a special project and the one program you really need to work in totally craps out on you.

Thanks, Fred*.

*Yes, the name of the program really is Fred.

Creepy

Storm stuff I totally forgot to mention:

• Last night as the wind kicked up and howled around the buildings downtown, we watched with nervousness as the giant plate-glass windows that front our newsroom bent and bowed with every gust. I just kept imagining them flying out of their frames and into the newsroom, crashing into cubicles and giving out concussions.

• On the way home, blocks and blocks of Midtown were pitch black without power. No street lamps, no stop lights, no friendly neighborhood Mapco to offer weary travelers refuge. It was exceptionally creepy.

• This morning — I'm not even sure what time, but it was before 9 — I was awakened by a loud exploding sound. I'm still not sure what it was. Could have been a transformer expoding. Could have been a Civil War cannon. I've not heard from any other Midtowners who can corroborate what I thought I heard. Which means I could have dreamt it. Which is nuts, because it shook me.

Stormy weather

I drove down to Hickory Hill to do some quality rubbernecking this morning (what? it's citizen journalism), but my efforts were thwarted by the Memphis PD, which had all the streets around the mall blocked off. Everyone else in the city seemed to have had the same idea as I had, though, as the streets were choked with traffic — the kind of traffic that doesn't really have any place to be in particular, but just wants to shuffle around and see what it can see.

Even though you couldn't see the major damage from the road (unless you managed to go westbound on Winchester, which I did not), you could still make out little clues everywhere that things were amiss. Bits of insulation blew across parking lots like leaves. Signposts were lying down or twisted. The trees that were still standing seemed like they'd taken a beating, and some of them housed bits of broken buildings.

So, I didn't park and hoof it around to Sears, where the bulk of the damage occurred. Instead, I maneuvered my way over to the World Overcomers Church just a couple of blocks from the mall to see if their pride and joy was still standing. And indeed it is. God smote the Sears and all the evil household appliances but left Lady Religiosity standing. Hallelujah and amen.

Last night was probably the most stressful night of work I've ever had. Previously, that title went to the night when I had to lay out all the zoned B section covers, jumps, and region pages (zoning was new and we were still experimenting with the best way to distribute the workload among designers; that was clearly not the best way, as it aged me five years that night). We had big Super Tuesday plans, and then the storm rolled through and got serious, and around the time they evacuated the entire building to the basement (for at least half an hour), we realized we were probably going to need to rip up A1 and focus on the storm.

And as soon as we tried to get going again, we were evacuated again. And the shit of it is that we were still expected to hit our regular deadlines. Which we did not. Because we're not machines, dammit.

One of our features designers called us from home and asked if there had been any damage to our building. As far as I knew, no, I told her. She said she was asking because someone had called her and said a Nashville news station was reporting that the CA had been leveled. ???

I'm beginning to wonder if Jackson is positioned in some weird vortex of tornado suckage that would explain why it gets hit nearly every year. My mom grew up in Jackson and said she doesn't remember it ever having the tornado troubles it's had in the past decade. Jackson's in a constant state of rebuilding after tornadoes.

Savannah and even Morris Chapel got their share of damage too. My sister's car's windshield was busted out by hail, and her husband's church (Sharon Baptist) was apparently leveled. Everyone in my family is safe, though, so I'm thankful for that.

If it's unwitting, can it be suicide?

Technically, no.

At least that was the argument a feisty* co-worker and I put forth last night when we got the first-edition edition papers and were looking through them for errors.

"Unwitting suicide bombers" — that's the phrase that keeps popping up in all the reports. It may seem completely stupid for me to quibble with semantics in the face of such a horrific act as strapping explosives to mentally disabled women and blowing them up in crowded markets to murder as many people as possible, but I don't ever think that accuracy is a bad thing. And I happen to feel like it underscores just how horrific the extremist mindset is when we have to think of completely new phrases and concepts to describe the type of violence they are employing.

I know "unwitting suicide bomber" was chosen by reporters or editors because it so closely describes the scenario in as few words as possible. You take a familiar template — the suicide bomber with explosives strapped to his/her chest — and inject "unwitting" in there in the hopes that people understand that it means that the people getting blown up weren't hip to the plan.

Except that when you don't know you're doing to die, you're not doing it intentionally, it's not technically suicide. You take the intent out of it and we've got something altogether different.

I'd like to see the Language Log guys' opinions on this.



*Hee hee, she'll punch me for saying that.

To the bastich who ate my Lenny's chicken salad sub out of the breakroom fridge:

I hope the mayo was rotten and the chicken infested with salmonella.

You feckless cretin.

Day 300 — Spider Cupcake

[for Saturday, Oct. 27]



I work with some crafty people.

Project 365

Day 293 — This Is How Actual Designers Feel About the Design of the Movie Paper

[for Saturday, Oct. 20]



Movie fatigue set in big time when I strolled into the office Saturday — already a cruel joke snickered by the universe — and was immediately informed that my desk would be unavailable for work. Instead, I'd have truck it back to the sports department to do my damn job. There was movie equipment — lights, boards, monitors, etc. — all around my cube. Movie people were standing around, looking at me like I was in their way. I couldn't even get to my filing cabinet. So I grabbed my dummies and my art and my pen and was whisked away so they could resume whatever they were doing that I was disrupting. I felt like a refugee. I knew that it would be tough to make it back to my desk for the rest of the night, even if I forgot something.

Not the best way to start a workday.

Sequestered in the sports cave, those of us whose desks had been taken over tried to get accustomed to the sports computers, which are small (sucks for designers) and without all the bells and whistles of our own (namely, we had to revert to corporate webmail, which lagged all night).

What a pain.

A few times I snuck out into the newsroom to watch the filming. Kate Beckinsale's character walks through the newsroom and gets greeted by several of my co-workers. Everyone hoots and hollers when the staff gets nominated for Pulitzers.

I think by that night everyone was pretty ready for the movie people to pack up and leave. It's cool being a part of something like that, but it's still incredibly annoying to be inconvenienced and then feel like you're the one in the way. It has been so hectic and weird in that place since they came. They've completely destroyed the newsroom and are supposed to put it back together before they leave.

They're supposed to be gone when I get in tomorrow.

Watch eBay for any items they left behind.

Project 365

Day 292 — The Masked Tripper

[for Friday, Oct. 19]



(Why do I suddenly feel like John Ritter really missed a career opportunity here?)

The movie people weren't all up in the newsroom yesterday like they were Thursday. Which was a relief for my workplace ADD. Instead, they were all up in the editor's office filming Angela Bassett-as-editor scenes. They moved our editor's manly leather couch out and replaced it with a more "feminine" couch so as to be believable. (I dunno, they both look like regular ugly fucking couches to me.) And yet this is the newspaper that is going to bring down the White House.

I've been playing a pretentious fun little game, trying to count the typefaces on that front page. (This pic shows the bottom half of the page, where there are no less than four typefaces alone.) Including the nameplate type, we've got at least six. I suspect there may be as many as eight or ten. (Play along! Eurostile, Futura, Times New Roman, Helvetica, etc.!)

Sorry for the snark, but yeesh.

It's truly odd how the attention to detail on the set is so rigorous — the fake cubes are just full of neat little knick-knacks (fake photographs, tape dispensers, mini cassette tapes [which KHall pointed out aren't really used anymore in favor of digital recorders] deadline schedules, news clippings, post-its, leather-bound journals, meaty works of fiction, Washington Redskins crap, crumpled granola-bar wrappers) added by set designers — and yet the actual product the movie revolves around — the newspaper — is so ... whatevs.

In other words, Hollywood, I WORK CHEAP. Resumé available upon request.

Project 365

Moving pictures

When I stepped off the elevator at work today, I entered into a magical land of grips and extras and cameras and God knows what else. The newsroom is quite packed with people I've never seen before and will never see again, including Noah Wyle (who is very handsome), Angela Bassett, and Kate Beckinsale.

You know, you try to be aloof and above the commotion, but when you're a total dork movie fan, the whole thing just gets to be too much and you find yourself scrutinizing every stray piece of paper left on the set after the crew has gone home for the night.

The fake conference room they've constructed is now furnished with some seriously nice furniture that is so laughably better than what we have in our real conference room it cracks me up. I spent some time in there tonight, watching the fake TV news looping on the product-placed flat-screen television, and reading the portion of a script someone left behind. It's a lot of "Rach, we're pushing your story hard for the front!" / "Really?! But I —" / "No buts, we're going to bring down the White House, but remain objective!" -type banter that doesn't actually ever happen in a real newsroom.

And while we're on the subject of stuff Hollywood routinely mucks up, can I just mention my pet peeve (which is shared by many, I'm sure) of dismal movie newspaper design? It's always some spinning depiction of a lead story stripped wide and deep, with awful art and mismatched, unprofessional typography.

Movie newspapers usually look like second-rate college papers. And this movie's newspaper looks no different. The Capital City Sun-Times is theoretically modeled on the Washington Post (they mimicked their nameplate something fierce), but the design is less Washington Post and more Tiger Tracks. No offense to whoever designed it. But seriously, would it kill the producers to spend a little time either consulting some actual news designers or just copying some obvious design conventions (like, don't cake-layer the page, and pick a lead typeface that won't make Jesus' eyes bleed)?

I don't know shit about film, obviously, and looks aren't everything, but it seems to me that verisimilitude is at stake when you expect your audience to believe that a hard-hitting, influential newspaper that can "take down the White House" can look like roasted ass on a stick and expect to survive.

It's enough to make me wonder if there's not some kind of Hollywood in-joke about how awful on-screen newspapers must look.

Anyway, look forward to Kate Beckinsale in a silly-looking ponytail, Noah Wyle with short hair and a smashingly tailored suit, and Angela Bassett with the fiercest flipped-out hair you've ever seen.

If you read this blog for nothing else, I at least hope you'll come back for more Nothing But the Truth hair updates. Coming soon: Matt Dillon and Alan Alda!

Update: The CA story is here.

Day 290 — The Set

[for Wednesday, Oct. 17]


(click photo for notes)

They're filming a movie at my place of employ. The whole process is mostly interesting, with just a smidge of annoying crap thrown in.

Annoying: There are lots of tattooed, unwashed dudes walking around with ladders and boxes, installing lights and blinds and green film over the windows. The newsroom is now so bright that we all feel like we're working under spotlights. The green film on the windows is a little post-apocalyptic for my taste. They've removed all the televisions from the newsroom, so we can't even watching the effing news. There are tacky homemade signs posted everywhere, directing people to the restroom and craft services. And the smell of tattooed, unwashed men is something I would prefer to not deal with, if possible.

Interesting: They've constructed a glass-walled conference room to shoot meeting scenes, and we might get to keep the room intact when filming's over. (We've discussed what/who to put in there, and the leading suggestion isn't very kind, so I'm not going to write about it.) Matt Dillon and Kate Beckinsale are supposed to come around sometime soon. In fact, Kate Beckinsale is going to be shooting her scenes right behind our deputy metro editor's desk. Which means I'm going to wear day-glo orange and make several trips to her desk during every freaking take.

I think my favorite part of this is sneaking around and looking at the sets as they're being put together. They've created a "reporter's cube" (which is actually the aforementioned editor's cube; they gave her the boot so she's temporarily at the adjacent cube) with books and papers and coffee cups and fake photographs and a fake computer and everything. And the fake conference room is coming together with a map of metro D.C. on the wall, a bookshelf, posh chairs, and stacks of newspapers. And they've created a cube that's full of Christmas decorations to, uh, help set the proper mood. I suppose.

A production designer showed us a photograph of David Schwimmer and said it was Beckinsale's husband in the movie. Our metro editor quipped, "It's good to see there's life after Friends for some of these people."

Ha haaaaa.

Project 365

F——king up

Some days ... I swear.

I know that being human is an ongoing experiment in imperfection. I get that. I don't expect to be perfect. In any way. Never have been, never will be. But I go through these periods where I am just a total fuckup at nearly everything I do, and I have no idea why it happens.

Now, before you try to console me and tell me that I'm just having a bad day/week/month/year/whatever, and that everyone goes through this and shit happens and all that, know this: I have always been somewhat of a fuckup.

It's true. I always let little things slip through, or I ignore things or get distracted and don't notice when things have gone to shit. I'm not as meticulous about things as I'd have the world believe. I am often oblivious. I fudge details. I am not the sort of anal-retentive taskmaster I like to pretend to be. In fact, I'm pretty laid back about most everything.

And sometimes that results in me getting shit wrong at work. And it drives me up a fucking wall that I let that happen. Because it shouldn't. Thousands of eyes are watching.

People (myself included) read newspapers and get fucking giddy when they notice things that are wrong. It's probably because newspapers purport to be publications of prestige and record; we are the final word, the bit that, were we in a movie, would be spinning toward the camera in a dramatic attempt to have meaning and finality. So when I fuck up a news page, I am essentially pissing on posterity. That's not an easy burden to carry.

I don't know where my fuckups come from. I sometimes wonder if it's a problem that stems from some sort of undiagnosed ADD. Can I blame the internet, or those several years that I spent juggling three jobs and full-time classwork, where I was never really focused on anything? Or is it just me and my personality?

Just now, when writing this, I had to leave and take a breather on the balcony. I'm not sure I can do anything in one sitting anymore. I've got a dozen windows open at all times: A dozen eyes peeking into other realities, each one vying for my full attention.

And for what? I have no idea.

I am terrified of being the weakest link, of being looked at as the one who can't be counted on to get shit done. I have always prided myself on being the type you could go to if you needed to make things happen. But I'm not sure that's me anymore. The older I get, the more wiry grey sprigs crop up on my scalp, and the flakier I am.

I want to fix it. Now.

[I got really excited when I stumbled upon Fuckup.co.uk, a compendium of fuckups, but what a letdown to find that there's only one confession on the entire site. There's a gap in the market; someone needs to make that shit happen.]

I like to pretend that I'm a photographer

The fabulous Ms. Mary K, founder of Culture Grits, a Memphis culture webzine, was kind enough to let me submit some photos for publication. And here they are, in all their amateur glory.

Check out the rest of the issue. I especially enjoyed the interview with Kelley Anderson, founder of the Southern Girls Rock 'n' Roll Camp. I had at least one women's studies class at MTSU with Kelley, and she was always the most articulate and well-spoken person in the class. I really admire the work she's doing, and I hope I can get involved in the new Memphis camp in some way.

I found out yesterday that some agency asked my workplace if they could buy my White Stripes photo(s) through them. I would have gotten a decent commission on the whole deal. But, alas, the White Stripes machine had me sign that release saying I would die poor and lonely, so I couldn't sell the photo(s). Meanwhile every drunkard in the front row with a camera phone got the same basic pictures and could theoretically make some decent money off of them, all because they didn't sign anything. Thanks, White Stripes!

Day 213 — Late Night

[for Wednesday, Aug. 1]



Big news, late night, crappy photo. There are obviously worse things in the world than not getting a good daily photo.

Project 365