Hours

The news business is not for those whose sole aspiration is a quiet cubicle or a 9-5 job.

In fact, there may be a total of three people here at the paper that come in at the same time from day to day. Until a few weeks ago, the news editor would come in at 4 a.m. And work until noon, followed (on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday) by me working 6-2, the community and opinion editors and the editor-in-chief working 6:30-2:30, the features and business editors and the day cops reporter working 7-3, the courts reporter and managing editor working 8-4, and any reporters without municipal meetings that day would come in from 10 to 6. Reporters with a meeting work 2-10, and the night city editor comes in from 4 to midnight.

Do not web ask about the sports department, I have no clue what they do.

Now, with the printing change some of those times have altered, but it largely remains that none of us ever work 9-5.

Sometimes I wish I could have a 9-5 job. I would wake at 6, exercise, shower and eat a real breakfast (my defacto morning meal is a large glass of orange juice. Simply Orange, mind you, because Donald Sutherland said I should) while looking over the morning paper, or at least Times.app, my news-feed RSS reader.

But that whole business of getting home at 5 seems rather icky. I mean, where’s the day gone, old boy? Time for dinner! Sun is setting!

No thank you. Maybe I am stuck in a foreverland of Academia (true, my hopes-and-dreams of becoming a college professor and never being too far from a tweed jacket have not yet been dashed), but I will gladly reveille at 5 if it affords me the prospect of getting out of work a mere two hours after lunch, which I sometimes do not take, and sometimes take at 11. Because, honestly, I have been up since five, and a glass of Simplyunfooledaroundwith goes only so far).

For, as I sit here basking in the short time between deadline and when tomorrow’s dummies appear, my stomach seems to remind me Mr. Sutherland is not all he is cracked up to be.