So, you’ve finally started your long-anticipated first job in journalism and the conditions of this initial venture into the happy world of publishing have you asking yourself whether you made the right career choice.
Your employer’s computer system is more than 10 years old, with outdated programming and teeny-tiny monitors. The phone at your desk is also a relic with no hold or redial or call-waiting features. The paper still uses a darkroom that looks like it belongs in a funhouse at a carnival and your publisher thinks the page-design program QuarkXPress is a special train service in Toronto.
And you’ve calculated that, at the rate those first-job bucks are rolling in, you should be able to buy a 1981 Chevy Corsica by the year 2008. The picture looks bleak, I know. Believe me, I know. But what do you do? Pack it in, run to the local Food World and start stocking those shelves for $17.50 an hour or keep tapping out those stories like the one about the woman who makes quilts out of her husband’s old neckties and hope that some day, the Toronto Globe and Mail will leave a message on your answering machine desperately asking you to call about a position?
To be honest with you, I don’t know what you should do. (But if you do end up at Food World, can you lend me your employee’s discount once in a while?)
I do know, however, that few people start at the top and that many of those who do hit it big early end up spending the rest of their careers working their way down the ladder. I also know some people have had it worse than you and have survived. Some have even thrived and believe now that that first tough job built character if not a bank account.
Take me, for example. I’ve been there. It seems, sometimes, that I created there. At my first job as a reporter with a weekly newspaper (circulation 3,000), I was paid $4.20 an hour to be there. I typed up my stories directly onto paper on a manual typewriter (as in not electric) and developed my photos in a lab so small that I literally had to open the door to turn around.
The paper I started with was located in an old, old building that I believe was standing when the pioneers came to clear the bush to make way for the town. (One theory runs that it was built by extraterrestrials as a halfway house on their way to Mexico.) Besides housing the few employees who regularly cranked out the newspaper, the building was home to several other equally furtive creatures.
One day, for fun, I closed the darkroom door to discover to my chagrin that I was sharing the space with a bat. And on the frequent occasions when I had to visit the office at night, I would turn on the lights and stand in the doorway for a few seconds to give all the cockroaches time to scurry under the panelled walls before I entered the room. Even the mice in the place seemed spooked by the roaches.
On Monday afternoons, I had to package up all the stories and photos in a big brown envelope and take it to the restaurant on the corner where it would be placed on a bus and sent the 30 miles up the road to the publisher for printing. Now and then, the bus would fail to pick up the package and I would have to drive it there myself.
But those of you who think these pay and working conditions should have been enough to make me quit haven’t taken into consideration the status associated with the job I had. On Wednesdays, for example, I would fill the back of my little hatchback with bundles of the latest issue and deliver them around to the stores, remembering, of course, to pick up the copies that hadn’t sold the week before. This gave me a special opportunity to be taken to task by storeowners and customers alike who found just about everything that was published the week before highly objectionable.
However, my best opportunity to “touch base” with the readers came during winter, when I often had to clean the snow and ice off the sidewalk in front of the newspaper office by 9 a.m. and could expect to be accosted by readers who hadn’t connected with me in the stores.
And what stint covering the troubles in Iraq or Afghanistan could equal my annual assignment photographing my town’s Santa Claus parade where the major fun the little juveniles riding on the floats had was to bounce candies off the balding head of the hapless, hatless news photographer trying to take their picture.
But I survived and despite the odd memory lapse brought on by those direct frozen candy strikes, I have enjoyed the ensuing 25 years in this business. And I have only four payments left on my ’81 Corsica.
So buck up. And for Pete’s sake, either stop whining or phone Food World.
©2004 Jim Hagarty
