Make deadline or else

When I’m asked how I manage to fill this space each week, my go-to answer is, “It beats me.”

All I know is I have less than an hour to bang out something coherent (or sort of coherent) so I don’t get yelled at by the real authorities at work, who are, apparently, everyone but me.

By Stewart Dobson

That’s just how it is in this business at this scale. If you are working on one thing, that means that you’re not working on the other thing, or the other, other thing on which someone is impatiently waiting.

The funny thing is, these people are yelling at me, “Hey, let’s wrap it up, bud. We have deadlines, you know,” are doing this because ... they don’t want to get yelled at by me for missing deadlines.

Clearly, this makes no sense. First of all, if I’m the one making people late, why would I yell at them for being late? Secondly, I don’t yell at people (anymore).

There was a time I might have done that, but I was generally more prone to throwing things, a bad habit I picked up from my friend Gee Williams of Berlin, who was the only person I know who could plant a tape dispenser a good three inches into the drywall from 15 feet away.

It's a fact, folks. Unfortunately, we didn’t have speed guns in our office back then, when

Gee was my editor and I was a reporter, because I suspect he topped 95 mph, maybe more if he went with the four-fingered grip.

I don’t remember why he threw it, but I seem to remember having to call on the fire company to employ its Jaws of Life to extract that thing from the wall.

In any event, I was deeply impressed by this approach to editing, just as I was by his ability to communicate his concern about quality control on the printing end.

It is 100 percent true that I happened to walk into the office on a Friday morning as he was busily tearing an 80-some page newspaper into confetti.

“Where’s the party?” I asked innocently.

“You’ll see,” another reporter replied, as Gee took somewhere around 1,600 stampsized pieces of paper, stuffed them in a big manila envelope, sealed it with a pound of tape from the recently rescued tape dispenser, scribbled out an address, took it to the receptionist and said, “Mail this to the printer, please.”

That was it. Nothing else was enclosed, no phone call made in advance and no little attached note saying, “Strong letter to follow.” All I’m going to say is that you could have framed and hung the following week’s edition in a museum.

It was then that I realized that actions really do speak louder than words, and that yelling is no substitute for creativity.

Speaking of which, it is now 12:56 p.m., and I’m wrapping this up with four minutes to spare. So, no yelling, please.