Work, and life, and stuff
If you work for a newspaper that hits driveways every morning of the year, you're going to work nights and weekends. That's a given. You're also going to find yourself adjusting your life pretty dramatically on the whims of breaking news. Say you had plans for Tuesday evening, Sept. 11, 2001. Sorry; canceled. You're at work. Horrendously hung over on a Saturday morning? Pray God it's not the Saturday morning the space shuttle falls out of the sky. A fire breaks out in a warehouse downtown at 6 p.m., just as you're about to head home for dinner? Put it in the fridge, honey; I'm grabbing a notebook/camera/mouse instead.

Then there are the nights that don't involve breaking news. I can look around my newsroom at any given time and see some mid-level editor heading for his or her 11th or 12th hour -- even on normal days. On my staff, overtime is routine; somebody's working it pretty much every week. Some weeks, I have people working double shifts just to get the paper out.

And most of these people are working all of these wacky hours and subordinating their personal lives to the greater mission of daily journalism for less than $50,000 a year -- despite the fact that many have advanced degrees, despite the fact that they've worked here for five, 10, 15 years, despite the fact that the company that owns the newspaper is profitable in bad years and wildly profitable in good ones. They aren't busting their asses for doctor money or lawyer money or even car-salesman money. They aren't busting their asses because they might someday be editor of the newspaper if they do so. They bust their asses because they care, and because they love their jobs, and because they believe passionately in the greater mission of daily journalism.

As for me, I'm one of those mid-level managers. On a routine day, I put in 10 hours. If something happens, figure on 11 or 12, maybe 13. For the extended coverage we did on the shuttle report for Wednesday's paper, I was in at 10:30 a.m. and done at midnight -- and then sat at my desk decompressing for an hour before leaving at 1 a.m.

I'm lucky enough have a wife who loves me and supports the fact that I'm living a dream through my job. She's a full-time parent, which means, during the week, she's a full-time parent. I'm out the door not long after our oldest goes to school at 8:15 a.m., and I'm not home before the kids are in bed. On many days, I'm not awake at 8:15 a.m., which means that it's not uncommon during the school year for me to go the entire work week without seeing my oldest kid awake.

I don't work all those hours because it makes the paper better. I work all those hours because my boss expects me to; because his boss expects him to; because her boss expects her to, all the way up the line. And they all do it, too. Overworking yourself is almost a fucking badge of honor.

That's wrong. And stupid. And really not an investment in anything, because my raise is already budgeted and it's going to be the same whether I bust my ass or not. And really, it results in diminishing returns, because the more you do it, the more you're expected to do it.

Yet I do it, and I work with at least 100 people who do it, too. I ask people on my staff to do it. Some of them say no. I think that's to their credit. I don't get angry about it; I respect it.

The downside is that, if somebody on my staff takes that step to protect his personal life, the work is still there and must be picked up by somebody. That somebody often is me. It's a tough balancing act. I do it voluntarily, so I can't whine about it. But the cycle continues.

Some co-workers get sanctimonious about their roles as parents. I disagree with that attitude. I understand that for people without children, a bowling league or a pottery class or a yoga session or whatever is just as important. The bottom line is the same: A journalist who doesn't have a life outside of work is a damn bad journalist. You can't expect to tell people about the world when all you see of it comes to you through a computer screen or the CNN on the TV over your left shoulder.

I left this place four years ago to work for the nation's eighth-largest newspaper -- a paper that was staffed-up enough so that I worked in a department where night workers had four-day workweeks, where overtime wasn't necessary just to put the paper out, where if an editor had to leave for a family commitment before a story was ready, another editor was available to step in. For the most part, it was good to its people, but it lacked the frenetic energy to which I had become accustomed and which, for some reason, makes this career both worse and better than every other career.

I left that environment and came back to this place, because it's a better place to live.

I can't complain, because I have everything I ever wanted. I'm paid well, I work with people who care, and I live with the best four people on the planet. And I can't complain, because I chose this career, I chose to work at this level and I chose to have management responsiblities.

Absent my petition to extend the day to 32 hours from 24 being accepted, I must choose to be better organized and more energetic.