Finding family
If there is one thing I miss about working for a newspaper it is how your co-workers transform into members of your extended family.
No one quite understands that sinking feeling when your story makes a reader irrate or how a local government meeting that stretches into the late night hours can just zap all your energy quite like those who share a workspace right next to you.
At the paper, we would snap candid photos of each other or laugh about interviews that took unexpected twists and turns. We would pack into each other's cars to go to lunch for escape after some tense and trying hours in the morning to make the paper's deadline.
We laughed together and smphathized with each other. We had each other's backs. It's was fantastic - feeling a part of this family.
I imagined us as somesort of version of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. We worked on the outskirts of town and had a workplace and work days that seemed so unconventional and unruly compared to some other jobs. We were like a merry band of misfits.
But then I decided to get "off the bus." I left the paper and watched this extended family fade off in the horizon.
At my current job, a new family has not cropped up. It is too professional and cleaned-line to ever venture into the messy arena of family relations. Happily, the drama of work-family dynamics is absent but sadly, so is that comfort of feeling a part of something.
But you can never really escape family - even when that family tie is a job description rather than blood. When I joined the Los Alamos Daily Post staff, I got my old family back.
And sitting with the publisher, the lifestyles editor, the finance expert and one of the photographers, during Friday's night summer concert, which the Post sponsored, I felt that warm, comforting feeling of belonging to something once again.
So my heart swelled that night when the publisher gave me a big hug and told me, "You belong with the Post." There is nothing better or more valuable than having a place in a family.
No one quite understands that sinking feeling when your story makes a reader irrate or how a local government meeting that stretches into the late night hours can just zap all your energy quite like those who share a workspace right next to you.
At the paper, we would snap candid photos of each other or laugh about interviews that took unexpected twists and turns. We would pack into each other's cars to go to lunch for escape after some tense and trying hours in the morning to make the paper's deadline.
We laughed together and smphathized with each other. We had each other's backs. It's was fantastic - feeling a part of this family.
I imagined us as somesort of version of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. We worked on the outskirts of town and had a workplace and work days that seemed so unconventional and unruly compared to some other jobs. We were like a merry band of misfits.
But then I decided to get "off the bus." I left the paper and watched this extended family fade off in the horizon.
At my current job, a new family has not cropped up. It is too professional and cleaned-line to ever venture into the messy arena of family relations. Happily, the drama of work-family dynamics is absent but sadly, so is that comfort of feeling a part of something.
But you can never really escape family - even when that family tie is a job description rather than blood. When I joined the Los Alamos Daily Post staff, I got my old family back.
And sitting with the publisher, the lifestyles editor, the finance expert and one of the photographers, during Friday's night summer concert, which the Post sponsored, I felt that warm, comforting feeling of belonging to something once again.
So my heart swelled that night when the publisher gave me a big hug and told me, "You belong with the Post." There is nothing better or more valuable than having a place in a family.
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