Sunday, April 22, 2007

When you live at 5,000 feet and then you go to sea level, you can drink A LOT and not get drunk!

Read my title. It's not a good thing, actually. It means you spend too much money on drinks.

Anyway, when I came back with money and a drink, our table had filled. There were lots of interesting people. As I talked about my job, I began to feel a bit embarrassed. It seems that other copy editors read 8-12 stories a night and do a really thorough job, but we read 30-50. They asked how we could possibly be doing a good job. I replied that maybe we weren't, but what choice did we have if they didn't let us hire someone? They also made fun of the fact that we still use Xyrite, an ancient DOS-based program that uses "coding." Coding means that instead of clicking on a headline box with your mouse and typing, you have to type all these weird keystroke combinations to tell the computer what font and size and width. It's rather time-consuming, so add that to the fact that we read way too many stories, and you see the difficulties. I am not complaining about my job, I was just surprised at how different it is other places.

Anyway, three of the women at the table invited me to Miami Beach that night. I thought that meant, you know, a beach. I was ready for sand and surf. What it meant was an area with lots of revelers. It was really fun, though, and I bought a really cute dress. My dress comes just past my knees, which was about 3 feet longer than most of the dresses people were wearing in Miami Beach.

We had a drink and some snacks and went back to the hotel to prepare for the next day.

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