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.