Here in Katie’s Head

I am in Miami. First off, I would like to apologize to the citizens of Miami for bringing the cold weather with me. It’s been cold (relatively) and windy since I got here yesterday. Second, I would like to apologize to my readers because the coherency of the following post will likely reflect how exhausted I am.

Last summer, I told my boss that when I was hired, the managing editor promised to send me to a conference somewhere interesting and that I hoped that promise would be fulfilled. And after I found out that Future of Web Apps 2008 was going to be in Miami, I told him that’s where I wanted to go. And given the choice between giving me what I want or listening to me whine until the end of time, he bought the plane tickets and booked the hotel.

And then this morning, when I walked over to the conference center, I discovered the Miami Herald was right across the street from FOWA. And then I emailed the web editor and begged for a tour.

Tomorrow, I get to tour the Wichita Eagle’s parent company’s largest newspaper. Maybe I’ll get to meet Dave Barry.

I’ll spare you all the uber-nerdy scoop from the conference. (Twitter, Digg and Flickr developers discussing how they partition their databases? That’s hot.) But let’s just say I’m enjoying being one of relatively few chicks at a tech convention.

Me: So where do you work?
Him: I work for the Census Bureau, actually.
Me: AWESOME.
Him: Uh, not really.
Me: I’m a data nerd. The Census is like Mecca.
Him: …

Okay, maybe I’m still a social wreck even among a sea of nerds.

Posted: 7:54 pm · Category: Geek, Work · Tags: fowa miami · Comments: None

Number one reason Twitter rocks: Totally blowing chain-of-command out of the water. A corporate overlord A McClatchy VP and I are Twitter buddies.

I haven’t officially met him. He visited the newspaper once last year, but there are so many rungs on the corporate ladder between us that I wasn’t introduced to him.

When adding a couple of McClatchyites to my twitter “following” list, I added him because as my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss, he’s relevant to me. And he seemed like the kind of executive who speaks in, um, actual words rather than execuspeak, so that’s worth watching.

He added me back. And he replies to things I tweet about.

And that makes me feel like in this big, giant, corporate, so-big-that-it-must-be-at-least-a-little-evil media company…I matter. (Sweet!) And that makes me a better employee.

(And after I tweeted “I’d kill for noise-canceling headphones” and received a Tiger Direct package from him a few days later, the rest of the newsroom is thinking about tweeting some death threats, too.)

Posted: 10:23 pm · Category: Geek, Work · Comments: 1

This season of The Wire features storylines from The Baltimore Sun. The only difference I can tell between the fictitious scenes on the show and real life in the newsroom is that the show’s writers slightly overestimate the sophistication of our speech patterns.

I hear that The Eagle used to have a photographer who pulled the exact same stunt way-back-when.

Posted: 4:33 pm · Category: TV, Work · Comments: None

Sometimes things that are too ridiculous, too unbelievable, too laughable to be true actually happen. At work. And they’re the most interesting things that happen all day, and I wish I could write about them because I’m sure they’re universally entertaining anecdotes.

What I can say is this: With the all the terrible concepts that get turned into reality TV shows these days, it’s damn time for producers to charm their way into newspaper newsrooms.

Posted: 11:11 pm · Category: Work · Comments: None

This would be so much funnier if I weren’t one of the douchebags in question.

My excuse is that at work they expect me to be up-to-date on all the latest web bullshit. And if I tell them it’s complete bullshit, they usually believe me.

But the more time I spend evaluating trendy new Web 2.0 shops, the more their shiny colors start to seep into my brain. And suddenly I’m a Twitter user. I’ve become one of them, one of the new media douchebags.

My solution is to stay as far away from my computer as I can during the weekends. And forty eight hours without email and IM is a beautiful thing. (Facebook updates on my cell phone don’t count.)

Posted: 11:25 pm · Category: Interactive, Work · Comments: None

There are some things I don’t understand about other people, like why they buy SUVs, why sweater twinsets exist and why people keep dumping leftovers into the drain on the ice machine when the sign clearly says not to pour anything into it. I chalk this up to being a nerd and thinking differently from most people.

But there is one thing that I will never understand.

When two or more people at work are wearing similarly colored clothing — it doesn’t have to be the same exact shade, it could just be that they’re both wearing green shirts — everyone needs to point this out and make a “clever” remark about it.

“Did you call each other this morning to coordinate?”

“Great minds think alike!”

“This is why everyone in my department plans their outfits the day before.”

Sometimes they take pictures the matching pair standing together, eyes rolled at the lame humiliation. I would link to relevant coworkers’ blog entries, but I don’t need to out people who outrank me, do I?

But every day — EVERY. DAY. — someone has to point out, “hey, you and someone across the room who is generally badly dressed ARE PRACTICALLY TWINS TODAY!!!!! WHAT ARE THE ODDS???!?!?!??”

Good. The odds are good.

A funny and otherwise charming columnist likes to call this matching phenomenon “twinkies.” Today, when he was wearing a brown jacket and I was wearing a brown jacket, he leaned his sleeve near mine, and declared, “almost twinkies.”

Because coats come in so many different colors.

There are a finite number of colors of manufactured clothing. And in a given year, most clothes produced come from a much smaller subset of trend colors. And there are a lot of people in the newsroom. On any given day, many of us will be wearing similar colors. It is neither a rare nor a meaningful occurrence.

I tried to be proactive. When I find shades that are less common, I buy them. Because the day I wear that garment, no one will call me twinkies. I am safe from twin-hood for a whole day.

So I bought an orange corduroy jacket. It was cute and looked good on me, and it wasn’t brown or black or charcoal or tan, so it was pretty atypical.

And the first day I wear it to work, I step out of my car. An editor — a noteworthy twin-labeler — steps out of her car. SHE IS WEARING AN ORANGE CORDUROY JACKET.

I may have to revolt. Hawaiian shirts everyday. Stripes won’t save me if they can still identify a dominant colors. The busiest, most multicolored disasters are my only hope. Don’t even bother following dress code. I’ll sell my soul to paisley and thin-striped plaids. Become a walking Jackson Pollock. As long as I’m fully covered, they can’t reprimand me for what I’m covered in, right?

Maybe I should just get a job somewhere with uniforms. I could go work on the presses where everyone wears navy coveralls.

Or I could become a nudist.

“Wow, you have the same mole on your cheek as Amanda. You two are practically twins!”

Posted: 10:25 pm · Category: Rants, Work · Comments: 2

I am trying to ignore the fact that yesterday, completely by accident, I learned that my dream job has opened up.

Because I am really, really happy here lately. I know this because I was waking up from vivid, pleasant dreams every morning this week (last week I had a nightmare about a certain editor at work, but only once). And if I’m dreaming, it means my brain has free time to dream rather than worry all the time.

Because when I’m worrying about applying for a job and relocating, I am at my very most stressed.

Because everything has been falling into place lately, and it seems like that can’t happen so beautifully too often, and I don’t care to push my luck.

But I think about that job, and the view I would have from my building, and all the cool places within walking distance, and where I would walk to for lunch, and what the significantly higher cost of living would do to my salary, and how much better access I’d have to bands I like, and — no.

Not today.

Today I have plenty of things here to give me the warm fuzzies. And I don’t want to think about tomorrow yet.

Posted: 9:58 pm · Category: Stress, Work · Comments: 1