Perks of working at a newspaper

It’s ironic, no?, that I had just written a column about all the perks of working at a newspaper (though it was never published) and a week or so later I was unceremoniously laid off.

The perk column went something like this:

You certainly don’t work at a newspaper for the pay but there are a number of perks that people may not be aware of. For instance, it’s the only place I’ve worked where you can legitimately read the newspaper at work. And you will not get scolded for this. You have to read other people’s newspapers to see what stories you might have missed and you have to read your own newspaper to make sure everything came out error-free.

If you like children, the newspaper can be a rewarding place to work. I say this because co-workers would often bring their children into work – because they don’t get paid enough to afford a babysitter. While the kids could be a bit of a distraction I think it was really because they were bored out of their minds and needed something constructive to do. Actually, combining the enterprises of a newspaper and a daycare might bring in some much-needed profits, while at the same time the youngsters could learn a trade at a young age. I know for example at my paper we hadn’t had a copy editor since the dark ages. Children could be trained for this job as well as selling advertisements and soliciting subscriptions. Who could say no to a kid?

Another unexpected perk of working at the paper was that I had my very own ant farm right under my desk. I am not kidding. There was a trail of ten or so ants that would come out from the cracks in the linoleum – probably searching for my muffin crumbs. I will miss them and they will miss me. Somebody please feed them.

Furthermore, when I worked at the paper I didn’t suffer from car envy and in fact I didn’t have to think about getting a new car at all. Though my car was over 12 years old, starting to rust, and sometimes smoky, it was by far not the worst car sitting in the newspaper parking lot. I could put my car envy aside and get some use out of that old clunker a little longer.

But seriously, one of the biggest perks of working at the paper was that I was rarely if ever bored. You certainly can’t say that about every job. It was also the only place I’ve worked where you could use humor on a regular basis. Humorous columns, humorous editorials, humorous headlines – you get the idea. Likewise, I will miss my witty co-workers.

But these perks all pale in comparison to the best and greatest perk of all of working at a newspaper – they laid me off. I am now free of the tyranny – the tyranny of the continuous piling on and on of more and more duties until the editor is downright worn into the ground and dies. Another laid off editor said the industry would have killed me. I was lucky to get out.

Now it’s hard to feel lucky when you get laid off and people tell me things happen for a reason. What that reason is I may never know but I do know this has left me wondering if anyone other than the ants will notice that I am gone.