A Little G in a Big D

It’s no secret that eating over a laptop, keyboard or any other piece of computer equipment is a bad idea. You run the risk of spilling and screwing something up. Let’s face it — food and computer equipment don’t get along.

But hey, sometimes you get hungry and you have work to do. Sure, it’s safer to take a break to eat (away from the computer), but it’s far less efficient. Suffice to say, by nature of my job (always have something to do), I’m in this position a lot.

Ladies and gentleman, I’ve eaten a lot of different kinds of food over my PowerBook, but last night, in the throes of hunger, I think I found *the* item that makes life miserable for me and my laptop:

The lovely, somewhat healthy and very addictive snack that is the Quaker Oatmeal Square. Let the record show I’m a fan of this food, finding it a fine way to quickly fill my tummy (alliteration, anyone?). The thing is, it’s a surprisingly messy snack. As you bite into these little oat nuggets, they sort of splinter apart and, I guess if you chew like I do, some of them unknowingly fly out of your mouth … and onto your laptop … and right under the keyboard.

Havoc … sheer havoc. I found myself — this morning, that is, after a snack last night — having to mash the keys down, some not working at all. I’d pull up the offending keys and, sure enough … nugget splinters. Damnit!!

I don’t have the time or energy to pull up every key. I’m also out of the canned air stuff that works wonders on slovenly-kept gear like mine. In a last-ditched effort to get the crumbs out of there, I turned my laptop upside down and ran my fingers along the keys, over and over, watching crap pour out. Disgusting.

But wait, there’s more! I hadn’t closed my Firefox browser and had left it on my home page, Google. Funny enough, I somehow managed to type something into the search field and hit enter …

What I love is that the helpful Google bots actually suggested something just as absurd. And no, that link goes nowhere.

Randomly …

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Not long after I started I was invited to a new-employee seminar. Nothing too unusual — the standard benefits and 401(k) talk, plus the standard videos about sexual harassment, work-place injuries, welcome to the company, etc.

We were given a lot of papers to look over. On a couple of sheets were a list of bullet points detailing safety and “awareness” at work …

Again, pretty much the standard stuff … lock up your valuables, don’t leave expensive stuff sitting on the dash of your car, etc. And then there was this little ditty …

Obviously, I found this hilarious. So much so that fellow photo new-hire Courtney Perry nearly burst out laughing when we read that. Other things that inspired nearly audible chuckles were the call signs of two TV news stations owned by our parent company, Belo, in Seattle …

No joke … ‘KING’ and ‘KONG’.

I’m gonna like this place.

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I’ve been asked a few times what the transition has been like going from a relatively small paper (20,000+ circulation) to a rather large one (like a half-million, I’m told). It’s been interesting, and I could tell from day one it was going to be a pretty different animal. Case in point …

So I have to set this up a little bit (for the non photo crowd). When pictures run in newspapers, they usually run with something called a “cutline” … more commonly referred to as the caption, but that’s not the appropriate name. It’s where we put names, background info, date, etc.

There are a lot of rules and so forth that we follow when writing cutlines. Most are set by the Associated Press via their stylebook. Additionally, a lot of papers have localized stylebooks to fit local needs. Beyond that, there are some sort of “unwritten” rules folks abide.

The one that pertains to this post is as follows: usually, we don’t ID (name) more that 4-6 people in a photo. It keeps the length of the copy (writing) down and keeps the cutline from being cluttered. Basically, we just ID the most prominent people in a photograph. If we go into a situation where we know there will be a lot of people, we try to frame it in a way that avoids needing a lot of ID’s. Making sense so far?

The above, very bad photo is case in point. I was told beforehand that Mr. Garza would have an unspecified number (several to a lot) of grandchildren and great-grandchildren on hand for this shoot. The gist of the story is he creates little savings accounts for each of them to use for college. It was a business trends piece.

As you can see, we had a lot of people to deal with. I framed it like that so that we would ID some people and not all; it really didn’t matter who was prominent in the photo (aside from Garza), so I just went for the little kids. I’m a sucker …

Back at the office, I cleared my thinking with an editor. He agreed — to ID every single person in the photo would be a challenge; best to just name the prominent five. I turn it in, double-check all the name spellings and go on my way. It’s important to note that, yes, I got every single person’s name at the scene. To keep everyone straight, I took a mug shot of each person and wrote their name down in my notes in corresponding order.

So I go on my way, not giving the photo or situation a second thought. Fast forward three days — I was down in Austin for a conference, eating dinner with coworkers who also went when the phone rings. An editor is on the other line telling me they need all the names. All of them.

Now I had my notes with me, but I still had problems. For one, I needed to look at the corresponding mug shots … which were back in Dallas. Fortunately, they were also on our server, which I can access off-site … but it’s slow. Moreover, they needed the names by 10 p.m. It was like 8:30 when I got the call.

I left dinner, ran back to Michelle’s apartment and got to work. The whole time I was thinking, “There’s no way they’re going to run all these names.” … “Who’s call was this?” … “How is the cutline going to look??”

A lot of page flipping, hang-ringing and a long-call-with-a-very-patient-lab-tech-who-took-all-the-info-from-me later, I was done. But still, I was convinced it would never run with all the names; it just didn’t make any sense to me. How would they make it work??

I burst out laughing when I saw this. Never, in a million, gillion years, did I think they would work it out this way. And I don’t know what I find funnier, that someone came up with this (and it’s a good idea), or that some poor designer had to do all this work …

So there’s something that’s different. Random, seemingly overkill decisions and the manpower and talent to make them happen. Amazing.

TTFN …

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