Upside to working during the holidays
Every year I work during Christmas week. While this schedule has its drawbacks, every year I’m reminded of how many benefits there are, too. Here are a few notes. Last week, I got a phone call from friends who were coming into town for the holidays. They said that “we” would all be going to breakfast on Tuesday morning, and continued talking about the croissants and the French-press coffee while I tried to squeeze in the necessary words for emphatic and immediate buzz killing.
“No, you will be going to breakfast,” I said. “I have to work.”
The words were met with stunned silence and a little lingering bewilderment. What kind of a commoner was I, having to work this week?
Those of us who work in journalism are used to such brief moments of disbelief. Journalism has become such an elite and endangered profession that even we can forget the elements of it that are more, well, blue collar: namely the fact that journalists, like retail and restaurant workers, have to be ready to work even while the rest of the world is taking a holiday.
Journalists like to grumble about this, but we actually sort of enjoy it — it reminds us that what we’re doing is im- portant, all year round. At least, that’s how we feel until we actually try to get some work done.
“The out-of-office e-mails are coming in” was a grumble I heard on Monday as I was walking through the newsroom. The journalist who said it shall remain unnamed for reasons of ubiquity — we’ve all said the exact same thing at least once this week.
We manage. We perfect the message that we leave on other people’s voicemails. (I always repeat my phone number twice, at the beginning of the message.) We spend lots of time with phone trees and site maps. We take advantage of the downtime to work on the stories that we didn’t have time to finish all year.
And when we get someone on the phone, we share the news as if it’s breaking.
On Tuesday, I managed to get a local district attorney on the phone. After hanging up, I crowed about my triumph to all of my colleagues within earshot. They greeted the news with high-fives, shouts of approval and questions.
“Who was it?” they said. “We might need a quote for a story, too.”
Which story? I thought briefly, then shook it off — during Christmas week, the right answer is any story.
So what if that D.A. had no experience with, say, the closing of a popular local restaurant or the proper valuation of a new Internet startup? A good journalist knows how to make the most of any available source.
I shared the name of the source, gladly. Christmas week in the newsroom is no time to be a Grinch: It’s actually one of the best weeks to experience camaraderie. We share sources, food, gossip, advice.
It’s not that we don’t do those things during the rest of the year, but this is the week when we have the time to do it in abundance. After all, it’s not as if anyone is calling us back or returning our e-mails.
Inevitably, the moment emerges when I feel a little sorry for myself about working this week. I feel some guilt over my pile of unwrapped presents, my plan for holiday meals that will go uncooked, my end-of-the-year projects that will go undone because I didn’t have the downtime that many other people did. There is, fortunately, a great antidote. It’s called working near Union Square.
A couple of days before Christmas, I took advantage of an empty work moment to slip out of the office. I needed to buy my brother a Christmas present, and there was no time to wait for an online order to arrive. So for a brief hour I joined the thousands of other people who were off work and flooding Union Square to load up on presents for their loved ones (and, I suspect, themselves).
Within five minutes, I was cured of any self-pity.
It was impossible to move down the sidewalk with any sense of purpose or steady movement. Impossible to move — until an unexpected collision with some poor suburban family set me moving. (I understand that they were horrified by the prospect of little Timmy seeing that half-naked man raving to himself across the street, but please, folks, watch where you aim your shopping bags.)
The garbage littering the streets was thick; the store lines were long. As I waited in line, watching the clerks deal with customers who demanded impossible things, I wondered how they were feeling about working this week. Maybe not as bad as I thought they might. I bought my brother his present, waited patiently while the clerk wrapped it up, and asked her how she was getting by. She smiled and chuckled. “It could be worse,” she said, nodding at the irate customers behind me. “I could be in that line.”
I laughed and inched my way back through the crowds into the quiet newsroom. After all, the holidays are here and I deserve a little time to relax.
Within five minutes, I was cured of any self-pity. It was impossible to move down the sidewalk.