Thank you for your patronage

I was asked a bunch of questions today.

A bunch of off-the-clock questions by people who needed to know information that they couldn’t find right away.

Questions which I was able to answer.

Why? Because I am paid to know how to find things out.

Because, no matter what social media might say, I am actually, like most of my fellow journalists, a professional.

Because — wait for it — I am paid.

There is a lot of uninformed discussion out there in the social media universe. Not from people who couldn’t find the right information, but from people who have other jobs and other lives and other things to do and simply don’t have time to track down the things that are the pith and substance of what I actually do.

Do I mind that?

Of course not. I love to help, especially when I’m helping someone who’s found themselves suddenly at the end of their rope. To find definitive answers. Because that’s what I have been doing for 37 years, ever since I started out in a very different world of journalism at the Queen’s Park legislature in Toronto, where, every day, I clipped scores of news stories from seven different newspapers and assembled them into a huge, 20-filing-cabinet vertical file of subjective story listings, because — wait for it — computer search engines did not exist. Whoa!

The news business has changed: years ago, research was hours of foot leather, talking on phones, driving to dusty corporate registries, trekking for miles to look at microfilm and microfiche. I have a box of tiny microcassettes, taped shut with yellow tape, on which a businessman from the 1980s explains what he had gotten from a premier to whom he had promised a job. I don’t even have a tape player that would play those tapes anymore. I spent two and a half weeks once tracking down land registry records on microfilm of properties owned by Hamilton mobsters, in detail, for a story I was one of 15 staffers working on.

But though things have changed, I can still find things out — because every single day, I adapt, despite the roadblocks thrown up in my way by legions of communications staff with different ends who both outnumber me and are paid far more than I ever will be.

But that’s OK.

Because it’s my living.

And if it isn’t?

I’ll do something else. Make charcuterie. Learn to sous chef. Find a job in a craft brewery. Write more books. But it would be a loss, because I’m good at what I do.

It’s not magic. It’s not special. It’s not particularly hard, not after doing it for so long. But it’s what I and my fellow journalists actually do.

We know where the buttons are.

And if we don’t? We know where to find them.

If I had a nickel for every offline question I have answered through my career, my eventual pensioned future wouldn’t look like the nuclear wasteland it does now.

In a single day, I’ve been asked about which bank is Newfoundland and Labrador’s banker. About what the provincial plan is for post-secondary institutions during the current stage of pandemic lockdown. About where Gusset’s Cove is, and the easiest way to get there. About which polling station — “Street address please?” — had a poll employee who later tested positive for COVID-19 in a town outside St. John’s. About fish quotas and climate science.

I am a professional. I am surrounded by professionals.

I am paid to be a professional. Thank you for your time.

Last Friday, record high temperatures were tumbling across Atlantic Canada; the grass was green in backyards throughout the region. A lot has happened since then; none of it unexpected. Winter finally kicked in.

For months now, you’ve heard me talk about La Niña; it wasn’t in a hurry to get here, but it has arrived. The overall weather pattern across North America is being influenced by this cyclical phenomenon.

La Niña is a phase where the water near the equator of the Pacific Ocean is cooler than normal, which, in turn, affects the atmosphere. The effects of La Niña vary; overall, the pattern is quite cold out west, and cool and stormy in the east.

While snow shovels and back muscles have been getting a workout, remember to pace yourself.

As winter morphs into spring, La Niña can create quite a volatile situation, with active, severe weather well into March.

In the short term, this weather looks ideal for outdoor enthusiasts; the stalled storm off the coast of Newfoundland is finally pulling out, taking that icy north wind with it. Temperatures will moderate a little, but not enough to make a mess of backyard rinks.

Get out and play — it’s good for the body, the mind and the soul!