| Author: |
Lynda Williams |
| Dated: |
Friday, October 01 2004 @ 06:30 AM EDT |
| Viewed: |
1979 times |
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Ida rolled up stories on ticker tape for twenty years. She came in every morning before the rest of the newsroom assembled and sat by the machines in the little room behind the row of work stations, called The Desk, where each issue was edited: tomorrow's back pages in the afternoon and today's front section in the morning before deadline.
Ida worked early. Up before dawn in Northern British Columbia winters, she reigned over the newsroom of the Prince George Citizen in a landscape of abandoned desks laden with swatches of half sized, beige paper marked up in red or blue; cold ashtrays and silent telephones; coffee stained steno pads full of scribbles in a dozen, personal short hands.
All night long the news feeds scrolled out. Every morning Ida rolled the tapes up and attached them to a print out for Pete, the news editor, to choose from. When Pete came in he sat with a thin, brown cigarillo in his mouth, tapping a foot, picking out what to use and where to put it.
I never heard of Ida messing up: putting the wrong print out with a ticker tape, or failing to make the coffee. She liked her job. She was a creature in its natural habitat.
Computers came in the mid-1980s. Reporters had to clear their messy desks to make space for them. Authority more potent than the local management removed the old, tickety tackety, 'br-r-r- zing'-ing of Underwoods. Ida's job disappeared with the ancient typewriters.
From one day to the next, there were no long tapes to roll up in the little room behind The Desk. But Ida had a few years to go before retirement.
They put her in the library, filing. She was supposed to photocopy stories the librarian cut out, and tuck each one away in the envelope it was coded for, matching up titles like "Northwood Pulp" or "City Council, Elections," but she couldn't do it. She kept putting things in the wrong envelopes. Perhaps it was the wrong end of the news for her, the archival clippings cold and used, destined for storage, not warm and fresh from the world beyond the newsroom, spewing, live onto the floor, to be rolled up and paper-clipped, ready for Pete to decide which ones he would use in the paper.
Ida limped along for half a year, growing a bit nervous at first, and sometimes on the brink of tears by the end of it. Then she retired, early.
The newsroom was left all alone, in the mornings, to mourn her with its silence.
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