Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Otherwise, it's a fine day..


Had a smooth morning drive to work, the road was congested in Subang, so, after spending about 25-minutes, I landed myself at the office basement carpark.

Like usual, I would boot up the workstation and check for messages, emails and do all the administrative stuff.

Having said that, I have set the pages till Thursday. All along, this has been my style. Revisions are made on the go and well, there are plenty of rough edges to be smoothened out when we migrated to a newer editorial system.

Now, came the nagging, I mean literally nagging issue. The sub-editor was too lazy to append some glitches, so, being the junior guy on the floor, I had to bear the brunt of it.

He won't event say a word when the old hand is around. The situation is totally reversed when I had to fill in.

I can take the kuli-batak office boy work, but not nagging. Again, I have overlooked some factors in the sent story. Grammar and spell-check done, but one of the stories - not significant piece, was flawed.

Instead of amending the flaws, the sub-editor went ballistic. Not a nice thing to do when you have so many things running around at the same time. I had to divide my role today as coordinator of the Metro Southeast pages as well as conduct some chores for my main desk. That said, I still have plenty to learn. By the one and only Southeast sub-editor's standards. Purty petty because of some minor changes.

Can be easily done, but the strange thing is - the guy would spent the entire morning on his emails, yahoos, watching you-tube videos and talking cock.

I find the chatter thing very distractive and frankly, I am not too fond of hearing one person telling the other about a reporter's flaw. Its not his business. I let the bureau chief of editor deal with this.

On whether the person can write or not, its up to him or her. They need to improvise. If I have to call, I will point out the flaws. My style.

All good things said and done, I learned that the one and only person manning the last line of defence for Metro Southeast is also flawed. What an irony. And word had it that the company is not extending contracts for their retained staff (post retirement) and I have this funky sinking feeling that I would be sucked into doing the pages full-time. Something that I dread, but it would be a blessing in disguise. Will have to wait and see...

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