I suppose everyone is back in school safe and sound following Spring Break and the final countdown is on. Before we know it school will be out for summer. I wish work got out for summer!
Work’s a strange thing these days. Those of us from the old school that have opted to stay on the job until retirement have learned to multi-task like never before to keep everything moving smoothly and take up the slack for those slackers that have opted to not work until retirement, or better said perhaps, not to work at all.
Yep, work’s a strange thing these days and seems to be getting stranger all the time. They say the job market is strong but I’m not sure I understand what that means. Seems to me that, post pandemic, employers around these parts are still struggling to find qualified help that is not only qualified, but that will actually show up to do the job they literally asked us for longer than a couple of hours or a couple of days.
Our office used to be staffed by 8-10 people on a daily basis. Today it is staffed by one full time person, me, one part time person who does clerical work in the afternoons, and our circulation guy that works on Tuesday nights getting the paper out.
Modern technology has a lot to do with that in several different ways. Faster, smarter computers allow one person to do the job of two, or three, or more. Facebook and other social media platforms have put a drain on revenues while also stealing our content from our own website to sell on theirs.
We’re trying to adapt, but honestly, it is difficult.
Obviously, no matter how skilled a person is, or how efficient technology becomes, there likely isn’t enough time in a day, or week, or month, or even a year to cover all the bases. We’ll keep trying though.
Even when a computer dies on a Friday and it has to be running by Monday, we’ll keep trying. That was last Friday. Yes, last Thursday night the computer that generates the mailing labels that are affixed to these papers so that the mail carrier can get them to your homes, or should be able to get them to your homes, decided it needed to update and reboot, only it didn’t reboot on Friday morning.
It didn’t do anything on Friday morning.
It didn’t do anything on Friday night, or Saturday or Sunday.
That would be considered a major problem for our production schedule, since we have a deadline to get the papers to the Post Offices or they don’t get to you. We rarely miss those deadlines, come snow, or sleet, or rain, or dark of night, or anything else.
It seems that computers always have to break down at the worst possible times leaving little if any breathing room. Why couldn’t it break down on Tuesday afternoon after the paper is off the press — the press which is in McComb, not in Forest because of that modern technology — and back here ready to have those preprinted labels affixed? Well, clearly that would not cause enough challenge to this broken down old newspaper man.
In the end it must have been one whopper of an automatic update that took three days to complete because by Monday morning the old box did fire back up, and although running slow, as was its operator, was able to process and print the labels for this week’s newspapers as you can see in front of you if you do in fact subscribe by mail.
So, back to the job market. When the pandemic broke out and everyone was getting free money to do with as they pleased, apparently a good many folks decided they could live just fine without a paying job, or insurance, or 401k, or any other benefit a job might have to offer. They must have decided that they could live off of less money than pre-pandemic, or they figured out a way to get by just fine on something else that I’ve yet to figure out what it is because I’m still on the job and none of them ever returned and asked for their old job back.
Unfortunately for them, should they change their minds now, I will have the pleasure of telling them that we too figured out how to get by with less.
More out of necessity, than desire though, because desire doesn’t pay the light bill. But, get by, we do...so far!
