I have a little more respect for Ms. Editor Almighty.

Maybe Ms. Editor Almighty used to yell at us because we totally and completely deserved it...

My head hurts and my eyes hurt. I almost had a major crying episode after school at newspaper, but managed to hold back any major melting-down until I left. That girl who was supposed to give me her article didn't start writing it until about 3:04 this afternoon. I know that because I had nothing left to do but wait for her.

I had a newspaper page to finish and a math test to finish today, and my plan was to get as much done at lunch as I could, do math after school, and go back to newspaper to make the last adjustments. That didn't happen. I got in there, asked this girl (I'll call her A2 since the name A is taken by "A the fabulous" and A and A2 have first names that sound alike) for her article, the one she didn't have yesterday, and she told me she has to work on her page now, she'll give it to me after school, so I did the math test at lunch. A2 didn't mention that she hadn't even written her article yet. She also didn't mention that she didn't even have all the interviews for her article yet.

So after school, I waited. And waited. She walked around the room, had some snacks, stopped to talk, checked out everybody else's pages, and after an hour, she had three paragraphs written. I wanted to yell at her, but people in there tell me I'm nice to work with, so instead of ruining that, I kept the nicest tone I could without crying and was like, "A, are you almost done? I have to leave soon and the only thing I have left to do is place your article."

She said she would do it and print my page for me, and I think she saw I was about to cry since she looked at me a little bit remorsefully. Well, she should be. If I knew someone was waiting for my article, one that was due four days ago and I should have had yesterday, I would have been so focused on getting it done. I wouldn't be eating boiled peanuts and chatting with my friends while the person who's waiting for me is sitting ten feet away. I would feel bad to make them spend an hour at school on a Friday waiting only for me. I guess none of this occurred to her since she couldn't have worked any slower. Sense of urgency, hun. Not starting your article until 3:00 the day it's due is kind of lazy. And it's a short article, not a big story. I could have written it for her if only I knew what it was about. Oh, there's another point.

A: Where's this article going?
Me: Page 3
A: What section is that in?
Me: News... (shouldn't you know that?)
A: Oh...um, it's not really an article about human trafficking it's about the Human Geography class writing essays on it.
Me: Alright...that's still news though, right? (Code for: it better be news)
A: I dunno...

But I printed out what I had and turned that in with a note on the top saying A hadn't given me her article and this is what the page looks like without it.

And we had a pep rally today. My head hurts now. I hate those things. Dealing with lazy people in newspaper after a pep rally is so torturous. And my eyes still hurt.

Sorry about the complaining.

Love,
Juliana