Thursday, In Which Rebecca Teaches the Office Something New and Almost Gets Catapulted

(new record for longest post title?)

So today was Thursday.

On Tuesday, I wrote some copy for an advertisement page. I wasn't actually writing the advertisements... well, scratch that, I did write some advertisements, but then the person in charge of me told me I wasn't supposed to do that. Whoops. I wrote the little blurb that goes before all the advertisements. It was about spas. I looked online and found that mindful living is apparently a trend this year, so I wrote about mindful living and how Virginia spas can help you do that. Nothing grand. Just three paragraphs, typed in a Google doc so other people could jump in and edit or whatever.

On Thursday (earlier today), soon after I arrived at the office, one of the guys who was working on the advertisement came over, looking a bit glum, and informed me that one of the paragraphs of the copy I had written had accidentally gotten cut out and lost at one point. He asked if I had a copy saved on my computer, and I didn't. I offered to try to rewrite the paragraph from memory.

When I pulled up the document, I sat and tapped my chin for a moment. At some point in my career of using Google Docs and randomly pushing buttons, I had stumbled across a way to view the document's revision history. After a moment or two of poking around, I found that one can do this by clicking the little announcement that says "All changes saved in Drive."

I was able to pull the missing paragraph out of an earlier edition of the document and restore it! Hooray!

But the best part was that I got to go tell the guy how I did it. And he was pretty impressed. So impressed that he came back to my desk and got me to show him how he did it, and another staff member came with him. I received some blush-inducing praise for my button-finding skills.

The magazine office is full of sophisticated software that I have limited skill on or have no earthly idea how to use, and it is also full of people who are highly trained in the use of said software. But even if I get nothing else out of this internship, I will always be the person who showed the office how to access the revision history on a Google doc.



And then I had issues with my chair.

I've actually been having issues with my desk chair since Day One. The seat has always been reclined too far back, which means I've always had to either sit up perfectly straight or slouch way back. Since sitting up straight is exhausting, I've always gone for the slouch option. However, the angle of the seat back and the slipperiness of the chair have always resulted in an endless cycle of me slipping down farther and farther in my chair until my chin can rest on my desk (very professional), and then boosting myself back up again.

I tried messing around with the levers and knobs on the chair. Nothing ever worked. I even asked the intern who sits next to me how to fix the chair, and we determined that it was broken. Yet hope springs eternal, and every day I found myself trying fruitlessly to adjust the chair. Nothing ever happened.

Until today.

Today I played around with the crank and flipped one of the levers up. Nothing happened, and I went about my business.

Later on, I happened to lean forward in just the right way, and--

WHOOMP!

"WHOA!"

The back of my chair came swinging up, nearly catapulting me right onto my desk!

Well, whatever part was stuck is now fixed. I can adjust my chair with ease.

Unfortunately, the adjustments have not fixed my sliding problem.

I Got The Power! ...except I kinda don't.

My computer is rather confused right now, as it is running without a battery. At least, I assume that's why it's running a little more slowly than usual.

Why is it running without a battery?

Because I took the battery out.

Why did I do that?

Because the battery was BURNING HOT.

Why was the battery BURNING HOT?

I can only guess.

I assume that part of the problem was that I had my laptop sitting on my bed. I assume that another part of the reason is that I'm not using the original power adapter (as you may recall, that got fried in Ireland). The battery hasn't been quite right ever since I got back from Europe, anyway. I've been getting a message that the battery life is decreasing for months, and sometimes my laptop freaks out and doesn't recognize the adapter. So between the European electricity and the not-Dell power adapter, my battery is slowly losing its patience with me.

So, yeah. My laptop wasn't charging, as the blinky yellow light informed me, and upon doing all the normal investigations to find out what was wrong, I noticed that the bottom of my laptop was as hot as a few choice words.

I popped the battery out and put it on the nightstand. Hopefully it'll cool down and work again by morning. If not... Well, as I discussed last summer when my power adapter gave up the ghost, I'd rather have a bum battery than a bum power adapter. At least this way I can still use my laptop!

In other news, I edited some copy today! Yaaaaaayyyy!!!! It was a small collection of short news blurbs known better to Virginia Living readers as the Bellwether.

That, of course, was in the middle of the interviewing and research I did today, like I do on most days. It's getting easier. Sometimes I actually find someone really interesting to talk to. Some people are really passionate about their high school programs, and it's just refreshing to know that there are good people out there to guide and direct those crazy teenagers.

I can call teenagers crazy. I, myself, was a crazy teenager not too long ago.

But tomorrow's my day off! All I know right now is that I want to go to the candy store. Hey-- as long as I walk there, I oughta get my 10,000 steps for the day. That justifies the chocolate.

Copy Editing

A while back, I signed on as an assistant copy editor for Dewpoint, which is the literary magazine of my university's chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the English honor society.

I had to read through one poem and three short stories, find all the typos and grammar errors and all that, and compile of a list of them and their locations to send on to the editors.

So I did. I went through each piece with a few colorful pens and marked all the things that needed to be corrected. Then I put them all into a big, detailed list and sent them on to the chief copy editor. It took a while. I kept finding things. I was definitely nitpicking, but I feel like nitpicking is kind of a copy editor's job.

Today the chief copy editor sent out an email saying that the copy editing staff had sent in a total of thirteen Microsoft Word pages of corrections.

I personally contributed seven pages and a smidge.

I guess some people only had four little poems to read... but still. I contributed over half of the corrections in the entire lit mag. By myself. I'm still trying to decide whether that's impressive.