Too busy to procrastinate

I am not sure if there is a term for a perpetual procrastinator who is suddenly too busy to procrastinate.

Try as I may the past couple days, I have been unable to properly waste time.

The cause for this is ELECTIONS.

That special time every year when normally good people turn into evil gossip-mongering beings from other planets with a propensity for putting little signs in your yard.

It’s currently 10 p.m. on the night of my newspaper’s deadline and we’ve all been at it for too long. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we’ve eaten a lot of Halloween candy, leftover, cold fried chicken and store-bought macaroni salad. I have banned my unfocused and apparently ADD-afflicted co-worker to her cubicle and done everything short of actually strapping her to her chair, I suppose even then she could roll her computer chair into my cubicle and blather on with an unnecessarily long answer to a “YES” or “NO” question. Ah, God love’er.

Elections make people throw mud. They make people take on the persona of someone they are not under normal conditions. The advent of the web forum has allowed for even more creative and underhanded ways for candidates to poke each other with sharp sticks.

It’s an amazing phenomenon if you ask me and although I know you didn’t, I am going to tell you anyway.

There is a web forum in the area I cover that has actually, in the past, dictated the importance of stories in the publication. I try not to read it, I have been able to distance myself from it. But often, I get a phone call, it always starts with a phone call. “HEY, did you hear about this…” and is followed by: “Yeah I read it on that forum..” and then I hang up. I just can’t go on that.

Forums are an interesting addition to the “citizen journalist” movement. The Internet gives everyone a voice. Does that mean I will be out of a job? I don’t really think so, not in my lifetime do I see journalism undergoing that great of a change as to actually eliminate the journalist. I still see them as a needed filter. You just wouldn’t believe some of the things we get in the office in way of media release, story requests and so on. Well, you probably have seen Fox News, so yeah, maybe you can imagine.

I remember all too well the woman who used to call the TV station I worked for in Cincinnati who tried to convince my boss the TV could hear her. My boss, if memory serves me correct, told the woman very plainly to make a hat out of tin foil and that by wearing it, she would block the evil TV from being able to read her brainwaves or hear her thoughts.

Back to that citizen journalist thing, let’s visit our good friend Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism

Wikipedia quotes another source as calling Citizen Journalism ” the act of citizens ‘playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information.’”

Kind of a scarey thought actually. But never fear, the wonderful thinktank people, or the “pointy head people” as a media friend of mine calls them, have presented tips for utilizing the citizen journalism movement.

http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=83126

Well…I have managed to adequately waste some time and must now contiue proofreading which will bring me into my 16th straight hour of election-related work.

Come back real soon.