A Jaded Perspective
Wednesday, October 13, 2021
New York, Part I
Saturday, September 25, 2021
My first paid journalism job
My first ever paid journalism job came my junior year of
college, as a metro editor for the Daily Universe.
As these were part-time student positions supervising dozens
of first-semester journalism and public relations students, we had 10 total
student editor positions. I was one of two metro editors, meaning I supervised
the reporters who were covering off-campus news, such as Provo city council
meetings, alongside an editor named Courtney.
Although Courtney and I sat very close to each other, we
often resorted to communicating over whatever Google’s version of chat was at the time so that we weren’t overheard by the reporters. This is because
we only had a limited amount of space on the metro page every day, and we had
to balance quality control with letting everyone get their byline in the print
version at some point. Let’s just say some of our reporters were better than
others.
(Some of them weren’t reporters at all, but public relations
majors who were forced to take the class in an attempt to help them understand
how journalism works so they didn’t become terribly useless PR flaks who don’t
understand that if the paper is printed at 5 p.m. you can’t give me the
information at 5:15 and be surprised it didn’t make it in. This should not take
a college degree to figure out, but in some cases, apparently, even a college
degree doesn’t help).
Many of our reporters were enthusiastic go-getters, however.
I remember once we heard a report of a fire over the scanner but didn’t catch
the location, and one intrepid reporter offered to go ride out to the smoke
plume on her bike. This was both her and my first lesson in an important
principle of local journalism, which is that plumes of smoke are almost always
miles farther away than they appear. She never did make it all the way out
there.
Overall, I loved the job. Newsrooms are usually fun,
exciting places full of intelligent people who are the same kind of nerdy as I
am. I had awesome coworkers, including
not only the student editors but the four faculty members who supervised the
newsroom and were everything I could ask for in a mentor. We had spirited
debates about the State of the Union address, rehashed BYU basketball wins,
joked about anything and everything, and celebrated every possible holiday,
from National Pancake Day to National Cardigan Day.
We also experienced some of the downsides of any newsroom,
including hate mail from readers and anger from the subjects of our stories.
For my friends who aren’t a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, it’s a little hard to explain the certain flavor that early hate mail
often took, but that explanation should probably start with the old joke that
Catholics say their pope is infallible but don’t believe it, and members of our church say their
prophet is fallible but don’t believe it.
I can’t speak to the Catholic side, but what I can speak to
is that members of the church, including students at BYU, tend to have widely
different ideas of what it really means when church doctrine states that, on
the one hand, prophets and apostles continue to lead Jesus Christ’s church
today as they did in Biblical times, passing messages from God to His children
specific to their day. But on the other hand, the only perfect person to walk
the Earth was Jesus Christ and therefore church leaders are flawed human beings
who sometimes make mistakes.
A certain small but vocal segment of the BYU population
seemed to forget the latter, and instead decided that since BYU was a
church-owned school, everything that happened there was based on divine
inspiration.
When we reported that people were getting undeserved parking
tickets because the parking department’s new automatic license plate readers
had trouble distinguishing between the letter B and the number 8, people in our
newsroom generally felt that choosing a faulty brand of license plate reader
was a simple mistake by some random person in Parking Services that needed
fixing and not an essential part of God’s plan. But to some of the True
Believers, this was the Lord’s university, and therefore any criticism of it
was a sacrilegious attack on the Lord’s church and His chosen leaders.
Most of the Daily Universe editors were part of an advanced
reporting class taught by Professor John Hughes, a former White House correspondent,
Pulitzer Prize winner and my favorite professor at BYU. Under his expert
guidance we turned out all sorts of excellent investigative reporting, from a
look at the budget of the student association (spoiler alert: the student
leaders spent what some would call an unreasonably large amount of money on
themselves) to a data analysis showing that housing prices at BYU-approved off-campus
housing were rising faster than prices outside “the bubble.”
My favorite story that I worked on was one I wrote in
partnership with a student named Danny, about academic cheating at BYU. We had
a lot of good interviews discussing how sometimes professors at BYU were a
little too trusting that BYU students were honest people, but Danny found the
crown jewel of the piece, which started this way:
The paper is days overdue. It was on her to-do list, but
got relegated to the back of her mind as other assignments came and went. She
still hasn’t written it, and there’s no hope of turning it in on time now.
Worth 15 percent of her grade, this paper could mean a letter grade difference
in the course and a several decimal point change in her GPA.
But Heather isn’t worried. The 20-year-old from Kennewick, Wash. knows the professor can be absent-minded. She knows he will
e-mail her later in the semester, informing her he’s missing her grade on that
particular assignment. When that e-mail comes, DeFord will be ready with her
completed paper and a prepared response. “That’s strange,” she’ll say. “Here it
is again.”
The original article included Heather's last name, but after some thought I took it out here, to be nice, since this is a personal blog not a newspaper, it happened when she was 12 years younger it's not essential for this story. You may think it is unbelievable that a student would agree
to go on the record using her full name to describe such a strategy, but one
thing I learned in journalism is that you should never assume someone won’t be willing
to go on the record if you tell them that you aren’t willing to quote them
without their full name.
This is one criticism I have of the national media. Journalists
working for major publications have gotten far too lax about letting people stay
anonymous over literally anything.
Now, I’m not saying anonymous sources don’t have their
place. In my 10-year journalism career I can count on one hand the number of
times I quoted a source without using their full first and last name, and all
but one of those times was to protect a child. In one case in Hermiston, for
example, I reported on the story of a seven-year-old accidentally shooting his
two-year-old brother with a gun he found unsecured in under the front seat of his mother's care when she
ran into the house to grab something after buckling up the kids. The toddler
survived after brain surgery. The family agreed to
an interview about the deep regret they felt about not keeping firearms locked
in a safe at all times in a household with young children, in the hopes that other
families would learn from their mistake, but requested their names be withheld for
the sake of the seven-year-old’s future, and my editor and I agreed.
On a national level, again, there are times when using
anonymous whistleblowers is reasonable to gain information vital to our nation
that can’t be obtained any other way. Nixon would have never resigned without
Deep Throat. But these days reporters for national media will use an anonymous
source to say, “Someone says the president will announce this thing one hour
from now” or other similarly trivial things that aren’t worth the way such
wanton use of anonymity hurts trust in the media. The political machine in DC is
allowed to get away with far too much off the record, leveraging journalists against
their political opponents with no accountability. This country would be better
off if papers like the Washington Post and New York Times joined together to take the same hard
line on anonymous sources as journalists for local newspapers across the
country who frequently tell people, “if you’re not willing to own what you’re
telling me I’m not willing to write it” and often get told in return, “Alright,
you can use my name, then.”
Sorry but "My golf buddies might say something disapproving" is not a valid reason to stay off the record.
Back to the Daily Universe … In addition to sometimes
angering students, our investigative reporting also angered certain members of
the BYU administration, who felt it was our role as a BYU-sponsored publication
to focus on things that reflected positively on BYU.
Tensions between our staff and the administration escalated
throughout that final semester of 2010, with professors and faculty picking
sides. I learned a lot that semester about navigating office politics and
navigating the line between being assertive and being insubordinate (although occasionally I channeled my frustration into being passive-aggressive instead, like when a certain
professor would copy all the other professors on his emails back and forth with
me show everyone how well he was handling the situation, and I would hit “reply”
instead of “reply all” every time so he would have to keep looping everyone
back in).
There is a lot that could be said here, but parts of it
don’t feel like my story to tell, so all I’ll stick to saying that the Daily
Universe staff back then were good people trying their hardest to honorably
navigate the complicated balance between journalism ethics and reporting on
their own school and religion, despite accusations from outside the journalism
department to the contrary. We went through the wringer a bit that semester,
and by the end of it I had decided that while I still loved journalism and I
still loved the church, once I graduated I was moving away from Utah so I could
report free from the sleepless nights that sometimes came from trying to be an
objective journalist in a state where your own religion is mixed up in
everything.
As my junior year
came to a close, I had a new adventure to look forward to. Every year BYU sent
somewhere in the ballpark of 30 communications students to New York City for
summer internships, and after initially being waitlisted, I received the news several
of my fellow editors had also received: I was going to New York.
Wednesday, September 15, 2021
My First Internship
I did two internships during my time at BYU, and the first
was an unpaid summer internship for my hometown newspaper, The Dalles
Chronicle.
I grew up reading the Chronicle, and it shaped my idea of
local journalism before I headed off to college. I had also been featured in the
Chronicle a few times in high school – once, I was quoted as a student
representative on a committee advising the school board; another
time, I appeared in a front page photo as Cinderella’s stepmother in the spring
musical. So getting my byline in that particular paper was satisfying.
Everyone at the Chronicle was significantly older than me,
but the two full-time general assignment reporters, both near retirement age, were gracious in
taking me under their wing. The sum total of my journalism experience thus far
was a single semester at a student publication, but once I proved my worth my
editor trusted me to go off and report on all sorts of stories.
I filled in for the sports reporter while he went on
vacation, and while there were no high school games to cover, I filled the
sports page for the week with features on off-beat “sports” like dirt biking
and fly fishing. I covered various local summer events, and wrote a column defending
my decision to go into journalism even though people kept telling me print was
dead. One of my favorite stories I did that summer was a long Sunday feature on
a tattoo artist, talking about her journey to sobriety from drugs.
During my internship I confronted one of the weaknesses that
many journalists of my generation face: I really hated talking on the phone. The idea
of picking up the phone and cold-calling a stranger was about as daunting as walking
into an interview in my underwear.
At the Daily Universe, I had almost always been able to avoid
this by using the university directory to email professors to set up an
interview and then interviewing them in person. But in the real world in 2009, most
businesses didn’t have a website listing all their staff email addresses, Facebook
was for college students, and texting was for people who could afford to pay 10
cents a text.
I don’t know if it was more a Millennial thing or a McDowell
thing. My mom and my aunt once bonded over laughing hysterically at stories of the
lengths their husbands went to avoid picking up a phone. Why call the number in
the window of the car you are really interested in buying, when you can just
drive by it every day in the hopes that the owner will be standing there?
Either way, I had to really psyche myself up every time I
made a phone call. I would literally write down a script for introducing myself
and study it, rehearsing the words in my head, taking a few deep breaths and
then saying to myself, “Actually, maybe I’ll do this other thing and call later.”
Every time I got an answering machine, I breathed a sigh of relief.
They weren’t even hard calls, unlike later in my career,
when I would have to call people to ask questions like, “Did you commit this
crime you’re accused of?” or “Why did you get fired?” You would think people
would yell at you or hang up on you when you told them you were going to write
in the paper that they were being charged with a crime, but surprisingly, those
conversations were sometimes downright pleasant. A man accused of defrauding people
by collecting “investments” in creation of a biofuels plant and then allegedly
spending all that money on himself, for example, cheerfully told me he would be
happy to invite me to the groundbreaking when it was ready to take place.
On the other hand, sometimes the most innocuous-seeming
stories you didn’t think twice about will get you yelled at. I once covered a 5k
event on Thanksgiving, for example, and when I arrived I asked who was in
charge and interviewed the woman who was pointed out, referring to her as “Organizer
so-and-so” in the story that also featured quotes from several runners and
information about the charity the event was benefitting. Later a different
woman called, irate, and asked how I could be so incompetent to give someone
else credit for the event that she organized. No “thank you for missing out on
family time to work Thanksgiving Day to give some positive coverage of our
event,” just complaints.
Anyway, I took the first step in getting over my phone
phobia with my internship at the Chronicle, and survived. I couldn’t afford to
spend the entire summer there, because college is expensive, but I did spend eight
weeks of my four-month summer break there and then spent the next couple of
months working 60-hour weeks to make up for it.
I had assumed I would be heading into my first paid
journalism job in the fall, after faculty at the Daily Universe told me I did a
great job as a reporter there and I should apply for a paid editor position
when I came back. However, they ended up deciding to hire students who were
closer to graduation and hadn’t had the opportunity for that experience yet.
This resulted in the only period of unemployment in my adult
life. It was in 2009, when the recession was still going strong, and there was
more supply than demand when it came to student labor. Everywhere I went that fall
semester, I’d hand over my job application only to see it placed on an
inch-thick stack of applications already submitted. I’d like to say that I used
that extra 20 hours a week wisely, but to be honest, my grades weren’t any
better, I just spent more time socializing and actually had time to watch TV
for once.
I applied for the Daily Universe again as the fall semester
came to a close, and at first I was once again told that there were seniors who
needed the experience more than I did. But over Christmas break, I caught a
lucky break: One of the girls hired had changed her mind about working there,
and I was asked to take her place.
I was ready.
Friday, September 3, 2021
The Story of How I Became a Journalist
The first news article I ever published was in a newspaper that
my brother Lance and I created. The Family News only published a single edition,
created solely for the purpose of mocking my father, who had sprained his ankle
by stepping on a walnut. For some reason this was very funny to us, and we let
our bias on the matter show by including the line, “People say Rodney will be
participating in physical therapy, which is funny because he’s a therapist too.”
Other than the front page news, titled “The Walnut
Catastrophe,” the edition included an article about how our youngest brother Cole
was sick that week and a tongue-in-cheek advice column in which I recommended a
fictious sister frustrated by her younger brothers call Poison Control to find
a suitable poison for getting rid of them
(I don’t know exactly how old I was when this took place,
maybe 12? Old enough I should have had a better understanding of the purpose of
Poison Control, since by then I’m pretty sure my parents had called Poison Control
three times, once for each of my brothers.)
At that point, I didn’t know yet that I was going to make a
career out of journalism. When I was a kid with a voracious appetite for books
I said I was going to be an author, and then when I got old enough to
understand how many bills adults have I went through a phase where I said I
wanted to be an English teacher, because that seemed safer. During my junior
year of high school, I took AP English Language, and we started off each class
period reading news columns by people like George Will and Gail Collins, and I
decided that being a columnist sounded like the perfect marriage of two of my
great loves: Writing and telling people my opinions.
I took a journalism class my senior year, and my teacher, who
went by Ms. Jennings at the time, was pretty cool.
Once, I was persuaded to skip her class by some friends who
had a free period that period and wanted to hang out. It seemed like a fine
idea at the time, until a few hours later when I found myself at parent-teacher
conferences and realized that:
1)
My locker was next to Ms. Jennings’ room and she
was sure to have noticed that I was at school that day but never quite made it
to her class.
2)
This seemed sure to come up when my parents
arrived at her room.
3)
My parents at this point had no idea that I occasionally
did not quite make it to a class I was supposed to be attending and I wasn’t
quite sure exactly how mad they would be about it.
As we made the rounds to the teachers Lance and I had, I
caught a lucky break when the rest of the family was caught up by someone in
the hallway and I entered Ms. Jennings’ classroom alone, looking, no doubt,
incredibly guilty.
She looked at me knowingly, and said lightly, “I noticed you
didn’t make it to class today. I figured after all the hard work you’ve been
putting in lately you had earned a mental health day. Just know you’ve used
your one for the semester.”
She did not mention anything to my parents, and out of
gratitude I worked harder than ever before in her class and attended all my
classes faithfully for the rest of the semester.
At the end of that class I had made up my mind that
journalism did seem like something that might be a good fit, and so I signed up
for some journalism prerequisites when I headed off to BYU.
Those journalism prereqs were kind of boring, to be honest.
Classes about the basics of AP style really fail to capture the excitement of journalism.
But I didn’t have any better ideas, so I applied for the program and was
accepted.
I don’t know if this is how they still do it, but back then
they throw you right into the fire your first semester in the program by making
you a reporter for the school newspaper, at the time known as the Daily Universe
(may it rest in peace). You were assigned a beat and spent about a million
hours in the newsroom for four credits.
I was assigned the science beat, which was kind of funny
considering I’m pretty sure the only reason I got a 4 on my AP Biology test in
high school is that even though I couldn’t remember how the processes I was supposed
to be describing on the essay portion actually worked, I had read that the
judges just looked for vocabulary to check off, so I filled the essay with
sentences that said things like, “Mitochondria are also involved.”
My very first story published in a newspaper printed on
actual newsprint was a story about nematodes, which is a fancy way of saying I
talked to a professor about his research on worms in Antarctica. It was not a
very exciting story, but my parents sent me flowers congratulating me anyway,
and every time I saw a student reading the paper on campus my head swelled with
pride at the thought that SOMEONE IS READING SOMETHING I WROTE, even though in
reality they were probably turned to the sports section.
I don’t actually remember a whole lot of other stories I
wrote that semester, but a few stick out. One was a series of stories for the
200th birthday of Charles Darwin, in which I interviewed biology
professors who were all very, very big fans of Darwin. Another was a story
about 2009 being the Year of Astronomy thanks to the 400th anniversary
of Galileo, in which I interviewed astronomy professors who were all very big
fans of Galileo. All in all, it was a good year to be a science reporter.
The other was an interview with a professor who was studying
rhinoviruses, and it’s ironic that the things that were groundbreaking to me in
the interview, like the concept that people could have an asymptomatic viral
respiratory infection they passed on to others unknowingly, are things that
more than a decade later I would be reporting on again, this time to much more
controversy.
Saturday, January 21, 2017
The straw that broke the camel's back
A (young, female) co-worker and I were walking back from lunch downtown together because we didn't want to drive on the ice, when a group of men in a van slowed down, pulled up next to us and yelled things at us out the window.
On its face, it wasn't really a big deal. Not the first time something like that had happened to either of us, and it certainly won't be the last. But if I had been alone, if it had been getting dark or on a less busy road, I would have been thinking about how if the men, just feet away from me, jumped out and pulled me into the van there wouldn't really be anything I could do about it.
You have to think like that when you're a woman, because from the time you hit puberty society tells you don't go out alone at night or you'll get raped. Don't drink alcohol or you'll get raped. Don't leave your soda unattended or you'll get raped. Don't be alone with men you just met or you'll get raped. Don't wear tight clothes or you'll get raped. Don't stay in a hotel alone or you'll get raped. Don't run with headphones in or you'll get raped. Don't park in parking garages or you'll get raped. Don't wear your hair in a ponytail because that makes it easier for a rapist to grab you and drag you into an alley.
It's hard not to let that color everything you do, to sit and wonder if the man on the other end of the phone you've never met will be offended if you ask him to meet you in a public place for the interview instead of his home as he just suggested. You know that probably nothing will happen if you break these "rules" for not getting raped or otherwise assaulted, but you also know that if something does happen everyone will tsk tsk and say "Well what was she thinking, going for a walk by herself at 11 at night? And in that tight of jeans?"
I personally know people who have been raped. I know women who have been stalked, who have been abused. These things really happen. And you know that if they do, the police might say there's not enough evidence to make an arrest, or the jury might not believe you, or the judge might only sentence your attacker to a few months in jail or even just probation because he doesn't want to ruin a young man's sports career or the middle school girl "came onto" her teacher and he's the real victim for having his reputation ruined.
Sometimes, men don't have to yell dirty, suggestive things at you to make you feel small. Sometimes it's the "harmless old men" who "don't know any better" than to treat the men around you with a certain level of professionalism while at the same time calling you "honey" and "sweetheart" and asking why you aren't married yet instead of answering the interview questions. There's a man who sometimes comes into the newsroom to drop off literature about how women's place is in the home, serving her man, and to chastise our almost-all-female office for having jobs.
This is an actual conversation I had a couple of months ago with a customer who came in to complain he hadn't gotten a newspaper delivered that day:
Me: Here's your paper, sorry you had to come in and get it.
Him: That's OK, it got me out of some housework. I hate housework.
Me: Haha I hate housework too.
Him: Imagine that, a woman who hates housework!
Me: ...
Him: Are you single?
Me: Yes
Him: Maybe that's why.
I didn't tell him to mind his own business because I wouldn't want to lose the company a customer. Most women don't say anything when men make them feel uncomfortable. If you "make a big deal" out of someone being sexist or sexually harassing you, you know you'll probably get labelled an uptight harpy or "Feminazi" or special snowflake or skank who was asking for it or gold-digger looking for an excuse to sue.
Sometimes it's not the personal conversations, it's the whole system that is troubling. Did you know that the government didn't require female-sized crash test dummies to be included in vehicle safety tests until 2011? Before then most automakers only ran tests using dummies that were the size and shape of a man, until eventually someone thought that maybe the reason women were 47 percent more likely to be seriously injured or killed in the same type of crash as a man is because seatbelts and airbags were all designed for someone taller and heavier. Or did you know that in 2014 the National Institute of Health had to tell drug companies and medical researchers to stop using only male animals and men in most of their trials, because that habit might have something to do with the fact that women experience much higher rates of adverse reactions to medication than men?
The idea of a "pay gap" for women and men is more complicated than both sides like to claim, but I do know that all of my brothers went to college with more money in the bank than me in part because before I was old enough for a "real job" people at church only wanted to hire me to babysit five kids for $5 an hour, while they would pay my brothers $20 to spend 45 minutes mowing their lawn. And I know that pay ratio continues into adulthood for unskilled workers who are in female-dominated "pink-collar" jobs like home health aids versus male-dominated "blue-collar" jobs like construction. Even though I'm pretty sure a lot of people would rather install windows than clean up bodily fluids all day.
These types of things have always bothered me. They've always bothered lots of women, sometimes from the time they sat in history class in high school and went days without hearing a woman's name mentioned once. But listening to the future president of the United States brag that one of the perks of fame is being able to grab women by the genitals and get away with it, and hearing about the radio interview where he bragged that the best part of owning a beauty pageant was being able to walk in unannounced on the contestants while they were changing into their bikinis and they wouldn't feel like they could complain ... and *people decided he still deserved to be the most powerful person on the planet anyway* ... that was the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of women.
I listened to men -- not just distant strangers on the television but also my friends -- defend him by saying that he hires women so therefore he's not sexist. I felt like I was being told that because I am allowed to leave the house and have a job, that's it. Sexism is solved. Everything else is "just locker room talk."
Screw that. I deserve better, and so do other women.
People were so offended by our newspaper writing an article about a planned women's march nearby that they took time to write hate mail and long rants on Facebook about it. They kept talking (in between their really mature, articulate comments such as "Babys.") about how women aren't going to have their "rights" taken away. But a conversation about Constitutional rights completely misses all of the above problems.
If you're a woman and you don't see what the big deal is, or you are a Republican who feel that despite these being nonpartisan issues today's marches are too anti-Trump for your liking, and so you don't want to march or cheer on the marchers, fine, I can respect that. But if you actively go out of your way to ridicule and demean the women who have decided to speak up, I don't respect that.
When I was a kid, I was told that if a strange man did something that made me feel uncomfortable I should loudly tell him "Stop that." Nobody told me that when I was an adult that would be considered "whining."
Sunday, January 8, 2017
Snowpocalypse
Most winters in the dry part of Oregon, this would be news. "Ah, we got a snowfall this winter," people would say. "How nice that the children get to use their sleds this year."
This winter, however, snow is not news. "It did not snow today" is news. Because for the last two months I think I have gotten more experience driving on snow and ice than I have in my last six years of car ownership combined.
It started out fun. My friends and I decided to celebrate the snow by making use of someone's hot tub, sitting in the hot water and steam as snowflakes gently drifted onto our heads, punctuated by the occasional yelps of whoever was most recently dared to go make a snow angel in their swimsuit.
Soon, however, the snow became less fun. People got into car accidents. Important meetings and fun events were cancelled. Pipes burst. Stores ran out of things. Everyone's car got stuck and had to be pushed out at least once.
Mostly, my own car has been trusty and reliable through the snow, despite its lack of snow tires. But two days when the snow was at its highest, I had to rely on others' better vehicles and winter driving skills to make it to such crucial things as work and the premier of Rouge One.
Driving in the snow in Hermiston is at least better than driving in the snow in The Dalles. Whoever designed the roads in Hermiston understood that it's OK if you have more than six inches of clearance between your side mirrors and parked cars while driving. Also, Hermiston is relatively flat, which means that if you are sitting at a stop sign there is much less chance that your vehicle will suddenly start sliding backwards down the hill while you resignedly make "Sorry" faces at everyone whose car you slide into (this can be fairly amusing to watch but not so funny to experience).
So far I've only had to make the "Sorry if I hit you there's nothing I can do please be nice and don't sue me" face at one person, and he got out of my way.
I used to live in this kind of weather all the time, when I lived in Iowa as a kid. But I've discovered that if love of snow were documented in a line graph, for most people that line dips very suddenly at the point in their life labelled "Got job that requires driving to work every day."
Now, I don't know why any adult would choose to live somewhere like Alaska, where it snows constantly and the temperature dips below freezing every winter. There are so many things about winter that aren't as fun as summer. You have to wear so many clothes in the winter, for example. A sweater, jeans, leggings and multiple pairs of socks take up so much more space in the wash than a T-shirt and shorts, not to mention if you don't want to shrink your sweater it will take approximately 4.6 years to air dry. And speaking of winter clothing, nobody's crush has ever said "Wow she looks really attractive in those snow pants."
Of course there are benefits to winter, some will argue. Hot chocolate, warm fires, an excuse to cuddle up with someone under the blankets ... but first you have to find someone willing to cuddle with you after they've seen you in snow pants.
Sunday, December 20, 2015
47 texts
No matter which group of friends you're texting, in each group text you tend to have a typical breakdown. There's the person who sent the text. There's the people who respond with a simple "I'm in" or "Sounds good." There is the person who decides it's a good idea to have an entire conversation with the original sender via the group thread instead of switching to a private thread. There are the people who get pulled into that conversation against their better judgment. There is the person who lurks, reading the entire conversation without ever actually responding so everyone has no idea if they ever saw the message and plan on attending or have actually been eaten by wolves. There is the person who at some point sends a random text in the middle of the conversation that no one is entirely sure what they meant but at this point no one wants to ask and add another text to the growing number of notifications everyone is receiving. And then there is the person who eventually puts a halt to the conversation with an annoyed text about how their phone is almost out of batteries and they're in a meeting and NOT EVERYONE CARES ABOUT THIS CONVERSATION (but you know I love you guys, smiley face emoji).
That's technology for you: With every new advance in technological communication comes new and inventive ways of annoying each other. When Facebook became popular you may have thought you stopped Aunt Bertha from sending you so many chain emails when you showed her how to post memes to her wall. But then she started sending you Farmville requests and that was somehow even worse. And when email was invented you may have thought that you had found a way to cut down on the number of times your coworker called a 30-minute meeting to come up with a schedule for more meetings. But instead those co-workers just switched to hitting "Reply all" and writing "Thank you for sending this" in response to every email, guilting half the office into doing the same thing so they don't look like ungrateful swine for not being thankful enough for getting the agenda for tomorrow's meeting.
Yay technology.
I'm not sure what the equivalent was back in the olden days.
"Sorry guys, we don't have enough wood to get through the rest of the winter because Dave had to send me 13 different smoke signals last week describing what he had for lunch."
"Dang it Dave, I don't have any more room in this cage for one more carrier pigeon about how the liberal media has been unfair to Napoleon!"
"Dave, I hope it was worth another Pony Express pony dying of exhaustion so you could write me a letter saying "Haha same."
"Dear Dave STOP that's not a period at the end of the sentence STOP I actually mean STOP STOP"
I'm sure 100 years from now there will still be Daves in the world, sending one too many holograms to his friend about what he had for breakfast. And since his friends know they have all been guilty of similar technology annoyances at one point or another in their lives, they will forgive Dave after sending him a hologram saying "Some of us are in a meeting right now, Dave!"