Part II Setting the Scene

In this office where I worked in the mid-nineties, we were like the folks below-decks on a sinking ship. Until the water rushed down the stairs, we just kept working away, waging little battles, acting like things mattered, engaging in playfully twenty-something destructive behavior, even the forty-somethings.

We put out weekly newspapers, toiling away in a squat low-rent office park in the shadow of a half-dozen trillion-dollar telecom companies that stud the rich side of Tyson's Corner in Virginia like the hairs on the back of your hand. Standing in line at the (now departed) Chik-Fil-a at a nearby upscale mall, my friends and I in cheap flannel shirts and jeans stinking of cigarettes and stained carpet past its prime looked radically out of place among the suits and ties of sales reps and account executives. We didn't care. We worked 40 hours in three days to put out newspapers of extraordinarily low quality. But it seemed really important at the time.

On the top floor of the office park, the various executive functions of the newspaper unfolded in mostly secret. The elite sales people cheated on their spouses and possibly did coke up here, while the president and publisher shifted money from one defunct ledger line to another. He drove a Jag while asking the rest of us to take a deferment on our paychecks for a couple weeks a year. By the time I quit, I kept getting paid this deferred salary for three months. Thinking I was a bad-ass (1996, I believe) I kept the office pager required to keep me on a short editorial leash until the arrears were paid in full.

The upstairs was mysterious to me and the other Doc Martens and jeans guys downstairs. The sartorial selections of the older folks who ran things veered from overly serious to jarringly casual. Unfortunately, both made us feel like teenagers because even the casual outfits were old: matching track suits with sweatbands, dark blue jeans with an ironed crease and loafers without socks, pink Brooks Brothers polos with the collars flipped up.

The accounting people -- sassy-talking frumpy black ladies with unattractive hosiery and (as it turned out) no heads for numbers -- similarly disdained the management team, and the strong scent of racial divide was heavy upstairs, another reason for us younger folks to avoid it. We functioned as if we were in constant battle with the short-sighted managers and their failure-prone decisions, but to the black folks in accounting, we were golden-boys just because we were subordinates who looked the execs in the eyes without shame. They didn't know we were too stupid to know otherwise. And those managers were getting twice what they were paying for from the lot of us. We paid them back in insolence, but they were more than happy to accept the terms; insolence didn't cost them a thing.

There wasn't nearly enough corporate functions to fill the upstairs area, and one sign of the various failures of the publications was that there were perilously few elite sales reps to bring up from the cubicle-sea below. Mostly there were rooms stacked haphazardly with lots of out-dated and archaic newspaper-making furniture and equipment. We still assembled the paper with wax and rollers, but most of the individual page creation happened on computers. We just printed these gigantic pieces of paper out and then pasted them up on huge tables on the other side of the floor. The discarded furniture upstairs included previous generations of paste-up tables, disgusting green metal machines clogged with paraffin wax and rubber-topped tables with millions of tiny lines from x-acto knives.

I worked a slightly-longer than normal day on Mondays, probably from 8 to 7, writing and editing stories and then putting together some of the first paper I would send to the printer that week. Tuesday was the longest day, because that paper would be going out first thing Wednesday morning. The first paper was completely electronically assembled, photographs were scaled and developed in the dark room (pre-digital photography, at least for this marginal operation), then the entire thing was waxed to stiff paper for delivery. The day normally began at 8 or so and ended at 2 am. Despite the fact that dozens of person deadlines ending my smoking habit had come and gone, I would routinely smoke most of a pack during this 18 hours of work. The first one would blaze to life before I was two blocks from my apartment, and the last one would light my way as I cut through a bird sanctuary and a darkened crossing over the Potomac river with nothing but cops and boozehounds on the road.

Wednesday morning I would arrive at the building just in time to see last night's deliriously completed newspaper leave the building, ensuring I would have regrets aplenty by five when the papers came back. I would beat back these concerns with two or three bottles of Coca-Cola and another half-pack of cigarettes as I set to work on the second, much larger newspaper of the two I served. This paper had an independent history and had resisted the assimilation that formed the multi-title office where I worked. (The newspaper I had sent to the printer that morning was for a wealthy neighborhood across the Potomac in Montgomery County, Maryland.)

This independent-minded newspaper was unique because they assembled the entire publication to length using pen and ink estimates of how many inches of text each story and photo would be permitted. With the first paper, I worked with (or was, briefly) the managing editor, and we would take a bunch of finished stories and photos and jigger them together in a layout until everything fit. Not exactly rocket science, but it's the way newspapers work.

The second paper had a sheaf of pages like storyboards for the entire week's newspaper. Each showed the photo hole and the news hole, and their writers and editors worked to this script like it was from the Lord himself. They transmitted the stories over to me using (sweat to god) some kind of dial-up-based non-network FTP connection which I never fully understood. They would just appear in a folder after I received a telephone call, and I would start building pages. I worked at a different desk for the second paper, one on the edge of the office, near a window where I could breath in fresh air when I wasn't outside breathing in the exhaust of burning tobacco.