I nearly had a heart attack today. So did about five others. It was total chaos. How the chief sub editor avoided a stroke/the temptation to punch someone is beyond me.
He may take to drink later.
A mixture of too much news and not enough people was exacerbated by a production crisis which left us in severe danger of being late to the printers. This goes down Very Badly Indeed with management.
It isn’t always so fraught, but on such days the gap between good and bad PR is massive.
So the heads-up from the informed agency director about an important story that was breaking later was invaluable. Quite possibly an actual life saver, since it allowed us time to prepare for what was coming, keeping blood pressures just below explosive.
The eight calls on a deadline we were already missing from people called either Jemima or Rupert asking if we had received a press release they sent yesterday were more than just an irritant. They were bad for our health.
Rupert and Jemima are just doing their job, as they perceive them. They perhaps can’t understand why a simple inquiry as to how we are doing (“badly”) followed by questions about a press release (“go away now”) can be met with such rudeness.
In a way, the rudeness is theirs, because they aren’t paying attention to what we are (sometimes) up against, nor allowing for the fact that they outnumber us.
