Long weekend

There's nothing like starting the weekend on Thursday. It's just rewards for working on Wednesday, which was a public holiday. I kept thinking yesterday was Sunday, because I was working on a day when most people were off. As it so happened, I wasn't the only one. Some colleagues were also thinking that way because they were expecting a Sunday night lineup, and when it didn't materialise, we had to keep kicking ourselves in the head that it was mid-week.

How work befuddles us!

Going green

There are now potted plants all over the office. Big, leafy plants two to three feet tall, placed in corners, at the end of cubicle rows, in between filing units.

I found out from the administrators that these plants were rented. I didn't know you could rent plants. The rental includes watering once weekly and a topping up of the hydroponic feed.

They are part of some workplace health initiative the organisation is undertaking, and my particular office is getting the first go at the plants, to sort of test drive the outcome. The biggest boss emailed that we were picked because we had the highest MC rate.

I honestly don't know how the plants are going to cut down on the sick rate. I think people are falling sick because they are overworked, and we are overworked because we are short staffed. New hires might solve things better than new plants. But I guess plants are much cheaper to rent than people.

Also, I remember from biology classes that while plants absorb carbon dioxide and give out oxygen from photosynthesis in the day, the reverse happens at night.

You wanna bet that the sick rate among the night crew will only get worse? Now, among other things, we have to fight for oxygen.

Another long weekend

I was quite happy to be rostered to work on Sunday. I like Sunday shifts -- the top bosses are not around, nobody breathes down your neck, you do your work at your own pace and if you're lucky, you finish early and leave early.

Until I realised that Monday -- I'm working that day too -- is a public holiday. Labour Day. I'd quite forgotten about it. Another long weekend spent at work!

Out of sync

The problem with working a six-day Sunday-to-Friday week (other than six days! Working on a Sunday!) is you're facing a mid-week slump on Tuesday -- just when other people are recovering from Black Monday. By the time it gets to Wednesday, you're starting to coast downhill for the second half of the week while everyone else is struggling up the mid-week hump.

Dogbert would make me feel better

The designer/layout artist assigned to work with me on a magazine project hasn't got InDesign loaded on her Mac. So we requisitioned it.

Then her Mac's memory wasn't enough for the program. So we asked for an upgrade.

But an upgrade to the OS would mean that it would be incompatible with another programme.

Bangs head.

Help me, I'm caught in a Dilbert warp.

Fleeting moment of fame

... here, at about 2 minutes into the video. Closest I'll ever get to a Pulitzer. :)

Not all subs are evil

Boo hoo, Neil Gaiman hates subs. From his blog: When I was a journalist, one of the things that stopped me wanting to spend the rest of my life journalisting was sub-editors who made me feel embarrassed by carefully introducing mistakes or slight distortions into things I'd written, or into headlines.

Thank god he liked my Tshirt first.

These are the sort of brainards I work with

There were cookies left out on the communal food table at work some nights ago, and one of the night editors happened to be at the table while I was choosing which flavour cookie I wanted.

He looked at the little flat discs and muttered: "Can you imagine a three-dimensional being in a two dimensional world?" And went on to talk about a novel called The Flatlanders.

It was like jetstream, ie flying way up high above my head, very, very fast. So when I went back to my desk, I had to Google what he was talking about. It's a Victorian novella, published in 1884. I couldn't suppress the feeling that the ancient night editor probably read it when it first came out. Although Wikipedia tells me that it was also made into a movie in 2007, so maybe he might have read it again more recently.

And yes, it does examine the concept of different dimensions.

All this from cookies.

And I was having trouble choosing between chocolate chip and cranberry oatmeal.

In limbo

I haven't been updating due to a combination of reasons. My dad is in hospital for hip surgery after a fall and proving once again to be the patient from hell.

And my primary email account is unaccessible after my ISP migrated its mail servers, despite my following detailed instructions to change the POP & SMTP settings. Most frustrating, both ways.

So, nothing really nice to write about. Except last night, one of my supes came over, he had been reading the page proofs and brandished one that had a lead story which I subbed earlier.

"Eh, is this your handiwork?" he asked.

"What did I do now?" I groaned. It's my standard reply to him because everytime he comes over, it's to wag a finger at me because I missed a typo or a literal.

"You did good this time!" He liked the headline I had given and the pluck quote that I had selected.

It made my night. Now if only more supes will come round with good things instead of bad.

Back to work

I went back to work yesterday after a week's leave. There is one habit that I have followed from my parents, that of having coffee on a workday morning and tea on days off (in their case, tea on Sundays; in mine, on days off or as in last week's case, the entire week I was on leave).

Which meant that I couldn't even finish a cup of coffee yesterday. After a week of tea, it was way too strong. Even if the tea wasn't really that delicate but malty Marks & Spencer's Extra Strong. The coffee gave me quite a caffeine buzz after just half a cup -- which is weird since tea supposedly has more caffeine than coffee.

But I'm sure as the week wears on, I'd be gasping for coffee the minute I wake up.

20 years ago

There was a party at Bar None last night to mark The New Paper's 20th anniversary. I'd known about it for weeks and although I never got an official invitation from the bosses, I knew I was going to crash it right from the start, along with my gang of TNP contemporaries. We figured that we 1G TNPers don't need official invites.

And that was the spirit of things all night long. The old gang hasn't changed. They're still irreverent, funny, and downright wicked to the point of being complete a**holes if you were on the receiving end. And they are still capable of putting away vast amounts of alcohol. Except for the one who doesn't drink because it sends him off into a manic-depressive dive. I would like to finally thank him now, 20 years later, for introducing me to Jim Croce during his dives.

There're plenty of photos but I can only update them into this entry next week because they'll all be sent to my e-mail at work and I'm on leave for a week. I don't think the current TNP photographer taking them had any idea who we were, much less that we were the pioneer batch of reporters but she was damn good in snapping away when there were photo opportunities -- mostly involving shrieks and hugs when someone familiar turned up. Apart from my gang, there were people I haven't seen in 15 years.

It was a great evening playing catch up. Old jokes were revisited and there was much recalling of old times. It's nice to know that some things -- and people -- don't change. It didn't seem like 20 years have passed. The only thing that forcibly reminded us that it's a new generation at TNP now is that a new reporter who just joined them recently is a student of my old TNP buddy who went on to teach mass communication at a local university. At least the youngster didn't call his former teacher "sir". That would have been too much to bear. For him. Not us. We would have doubled over with laughter. What, him, responsible and moulding young lives etc. And shake our heads. And toss back more booze. Which we did anyway. The first batch of TNPers has produced two PhDs and an MP. But looking at my own gang in particular, it's quite heartening to see that we're the most unambitious lot.

Hitting the wall

No real reason for this picture, other than the fact that I was still playing with the new cellphone's camera. It takes sharper photos than the old one. This is a shot taken at the office rooftop where I eat my packed dinner.

At first, I wondered why anyone would place a park bench facing a wall, instead of facing the flowers at the other side of the rooftop garden. Or facing the view of the surrounding rooftops.

But then I realised that staring at a wall is not so daft after you've been staring at a computer for hours.

Back to work

It took a week off work to lessen (but not completely eradicate) the stiffness in my shoulders. And it took one day back at work to tighten them up again. Sigh.

L said that while I was gone, the dogs would get up from their naps and walk around the house, peer into the rooms, as if looking for me. They weren't upset or anything, it was more like they thought they were playing a game of hide and seek with me, he said.

Queeni yipped sharply at me when I came back, as if scolding me for playing the game for too long. Rupert bounced at me -- but then he does that even if I'd just stepped out for a minute to take out the trash. But at least Queeni gave me her customary face-washing welcome. Maybe that was the joy of leaving the house -- the welcome you get when you return home. I hadn't had a doggy facial for a week. I don't care what my mother says about dog licks and hygiene, I think my face is all the better for a doggy kiss.

Weak in English?

I'm sure the person behind this DIY ad stuck at the bus stop is a very good science tutor. He just needs an English tutor.

One of the perils of subbing must be the constant desire to take a red pencil to everything you see. *Must activate shutdown*

Fifteen minutes of fame

I don't usually blog about work but last night, there was this story sitting in the subbing basket that I simply couldn't bring myself to pick up and sub...

Back to the grind

I had worked New Year's Eve and New Year's Day but it didn't feel like a hardship since the workflow went smoothly (everyone was eager to get things finished, and go off and party). Then I had two days off on medical, went back to work for a day, followed by a long three-day weekend.

Which meant it wasn't really a full week for me last week. So my work year really started yesterday. And going back to work became a drag. The revelling is all over now. Another full year of work ahead. Groan.

(Normally, I would cheer myself up and say there's always Chinese New Year to look forward to next month. But this year, I'm wondering how to handle that festival, with all its food associations, now with Dad and his feeding tube and all.)

Minutes after I left the house, L called me on my cellphone. Rupert had started to whine as soon as I shut the door and and left -- something he's never done before. He was easily placated by a squeaky toy, L added. But for me, it only made the train ride to work longer and harder as it took me towards the office and away from the furkids.


When I got home, Rupert lay down on my bag which I had left on the floor. Like it'll stop me from going to work tomorrow. If only.

Further adventures in subbing

Back when George W Shrub stole the US presidency, the departing Democrat administration reportedly pried off the letter 'w' from the White House computer keyboards. In the spirit of things at the time, I wrote a column without using the letter 'w'. It turned out to be easier and much more fun than writing verse. The byline presented a bit of problem since my surname starts with 'w' but I thought maybe I could circumvent that with two v's set close together. In any case, in the spirit of not having to sub my own work, I left that to the sub to worry about. In the end, the column was spiked but I enjoyed the literary exercise anyway.

Now here's more literary gymnastics. How do you sub/layout a page without hyphens? And it's not ragged-right so you have to break words at some point. You could maybe force some line breaks but imagine doing this for every line of every column. And it's not a frivolous literary exercise this time but damn serious. There's a sponsor who doesn't want hyphens on his page (!) and the poor sub (not me, thank goD) is tearing her hair out.

The perils of subbing, part 2

I thought it was too good to be true when the copy subbing workflow slowed to a trickle at 11pm last night, with an hour to go before offstone. Damn right it was too good to be true.

One innocuous foreign page, assigned at 4.30pm and with the line-up ready at 5pm, was forgotten until 11.30pm, with half an hour left on the clock on a die-die-must-meet-offstone night because there was a supplement insert to go with the regular paper.

No one had the heart to blame the page sub for forgetting about it. She had two early pages, one of which was killed in a pagination rejig -- after she had finished the page. Then as the night progressed, she had to switch her focus to the VIP front and prime pages.

But it did mean half-an-hour of frenzy for the rest of us. And I guess there's no such thing as a full-page house ad.

The perils of subbing

... trying not to get teary eyed while going through the pictures and wire copy coming out of Myanmar.

The White House of course has already made its statement; the UN Security Council is convening (probably already has by now); even China, the junta's only friend, has had a discreet word. Only Asean, with Singapore in the chair, hasn't said anything. What goes on in the neighbour's backyard is the neighbour's problem. Typical.

[Update late on Thursday night: Reuters has photos of the AFP photog moments after he was shot. I don't think anyone could use those photos.]

Breaking the jinx

You know how there's always one person in a group that always -- and repeatedly -- gets the full brunt of Murphy's Law? It used to be me. This January, when I started doing layout, I was always the one calling Help Desk. Pages hung on me, and unexplainable e-hiccups happened to me. Only me. Once, my page froze and was so messed up that Helpless Desk couldn't fix it. They had to go to Pre-Press to get them to delete the page and then create a new one so we could start all over again.

At another time, another job at a small outfit where the tech guy was outsourced, I had to call him so often that soon, he started his day by calling me to see if I needed him to come in. L, who at that time worked for a computer firm, was even going to get me one of those anti-static wrist bands their assembly-line workers wore, just so I wouldn't zap and fry my nth computer.

Anyway, all the tearing of hair over doing layout on an antiquated software (it was so user-unfriendly it had no 'undo' option, which forced me to re-do a lot of things over and made me slower than I already am) stopped for a merciful two months when we switched to a new layout software and the senior subs had more serious technical fish to fry than helping out someone new to layout. I went back gratefully to copy subbing -- something I'm used to and something I'm so much better at.

But a sub must draw pages and so after the dust of the new software settled, I'm back to drawing pages again. This time, I can at least blame all the knotty bits on new software.

Only, I'm not the jinx anymore. The other new-to-layout sub has been the one struggling with the page rejigs (one hour before offstone), the change in line-ups (and nobody told her until she had to send a message begging the copyeds to clear the story and then one of them told her nobody touched it because it was being held over) and a printout with fonts all gone wrong although they looked fine onscreen while my pages breeze through with plenty of time to spare.

Last night, the only thing holding up my page was waiting: For Production to enhance a picture. They forgot. For Foreign Desk to update one of the stories. They forgot. For the proofreader to okay the page. He forgot. Frustrating and time-wasting but at least not as panic-inducing as a line-up change, a page rejig and a printout that didn't match what was on the screen.

I feel for my colleague. And I just know that as soon as I set this down in writing, I'm tempting fate and the jinx will be mine to carry again.