News of the tragic and untimely death of my dear former colleague and friend Eileen last week has had my head swimming in anecdotes about my 12 long years at the TIME Magazine News Desk, a lengthy period of my life that seems like both ancient history and strangely only last week or so. As I may have mentioned when I first left that job back at the tail end of 2005, I learned more there than I ever accrued at any school, and made countless friends that feel more like family than like former colleagues.
In any case, prompted by a Facebook post by a friend from a totally different gig, photographer Pat Blashill (who I interviewed for this old post), I was reminded of another News Desk story that left a big impression on me.
As a News Desk editor – essentially a liaison between the magazine’s senior editorial staff and the network of reporters and correspondents in the field around the world -- I had a somewhat unenviable graveyard shift: I would work a regular business day on Monday, I would have Tuesdays and Wednesdays completely off, I would work on Thursday evenings from 4pm and 4am and then the week would culminate in the all-night, Friday-night shift, from 8pm to 8am, the most crucial evening to man the desk as the magazine was being “put to bed,” as the saying went.
It wasn’t that bad, for a long while. It was great having such sizable swathes of time off in the middle of the week. Obviously, the Friday-night overnight put the kibosh on a lot of social plans, but I more than made up for it on the following Saturday nights (when, having only risen from my slumber in the early afternoon, I had lots of energy for late-night shenanigans). It was rough on my circadian rhythms (probably still re-adjusting to this day), but I made it all work for over a decade.
But being that most of my time in the office was spent during the small hours when no one else was around, I used to dress in a manner that could best be described as “informal.” My rationale was that if I was going to be there at 3am when the rest of the world was asleep, I was going to damn well be comfortable. It made sense, at the time.
One telling Friday evening in 1994 as I was just starting my shift, I checked in with my teammates as they were packing up and passing the baton, so to speak. They briefed me on the stories that were in the works and developments to watch out for. I fully expected yet another quiet night with minimal amounts of actual work in front of me. I’d even brought a book to read during what promised to be a long evening of newsless doldrums.
After a little bit, my fellow News Deskers checked out, leaving me the sole editor on duty for the remainder of the night. As if on cue, the phone rang. My colleague Katie asked with some bemused alarm the following question. “Did O.J. Simpson kill his wife?” I glanced up at the television across the room, always tuned to CNN, to see a strangely slow pursuit of a white Ford Bronco being tailed by a phalanx of Los Angeles police cars.
Like a shot, I leapt from my desk and took a sharp left towards the managing editor’s office, sprinting down the hall. I burst into his office with needlessly dramatic aplomb to dutifully relay news that beloved football legend, erstwhile actor and Hertz rental car pitchman O.J. Simpson was being pursued by police under suspicion of brutally murdering his spouse.
The managing editor calmly peered over his glasses at me from behind his desk. “Mr. Smith, …" he finally spoke, glancing back down at the story mock-ups on his desk. “What exactly is a Butthole Surfer?”
I was wearing this t-shirt, at the time.
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