Wages: A Job for Life

[This is the 11th of 14 excerpts, running Tuesdays and Thursdays, from John Armstrong's memoir of the working life: Wages.]

When the summer contracts expired, a few of us were held on with short-term extensions. A note appeared on the newsroom bulletin board and the reprieve might be anywhere from a week to a month. All it meant to me was however many more pay cheques it added up to. I applied for every position that was posted. Not that there were many of them -- the only way the regular staff left was in an ambulance or a sack.

By October there were only a few of us left, held over on temporary extensions from the summer. One of the last to be let go was Milo, a brilliant 24-year-old with movie star good looks and a mortal lock on the front page. No matter what crap assignment the desk handed him he'd turn in a masterpiece of reportage and if he couldn't spin gold out of the shit and straw they gave him, he found a story of his own. If anyone had a shot at a staff position it was Milo and we were all shocked when he was summoned to Skipper's office for The Talk.

"What did he say?" we asked Milo as he packed up his books and clippings.

"He said, 'You're a good reporter, Milo, a very good reporter. But the Standard is a place for excellence.'" Milo put his coffee mug into the box and folded up the cardboard flaps.

That was a line guaranteed to bring bitter laughter and put beer up the nostrils of anyone who heard it and it was repeated endlessly around the Press Club. If someone made a nice shot at the pool table it was a race to see who could say it first.

"You're good, very good, but this is a place for excellence."

We all knew we could never rise to the management level even if we could somehow weasel our way into a permanent job -- you had to be able to say things like that with a straight face.

Trick or treat?

And then one morning my run was over. I'd held on until Hallowe'en, applying for everything from copy runner to coffee wagon girl, but my last extension had run out and there was no reprieve posted. My final assignment was on the night of the 30th, at a local art gallery in what was once a private mansion. Over the years the gallery staff had reported strange knockings and bangings and at times the art on the walls had been found hung upside down or moved to different spots. Sometimes the gallery staff heard voices when they knew they were alone. I interviewed the director and some current and former employees and wrote up the history of the place. I talked to a psychic who said the building was "rife with manifestations" and a priest who described the ritual for cleansing the place of spirits. Then I rolled out a sleeping bag on the gallery floor and settled in for My Night in the Haunted House. At about 3 a.m. I was woken by a loud noise like a slammed door, but nothing much happened besides that, except that I regretted not bringing a larger bottle of brandy.

On the morning of the 31st I took a cab back to the office, wrote it up on deadline for the evening edition and went around the newsroom to say goodbye to a few people.

"Where are you going?" the first one asked me.

"I don't know -- back to freelancing."

"You're not going to take the job?"

"What job?"

"It's on the bulletin board. You're hired."

Between the brandy hangover and eight hours on cold floorboards, I was not at my best. I went over to the board and there it was, a piece of letterhead with a pin through it: "John Armstrong will fill the posted position for a probationary regular cityside staff reporter. Our thanks to all who applied."

It was dated that morning. I hadn't checked the board when I came back to the newsroom.

If I could get through three months of probation without fucking up, I had a job until the last working day of my life, with dental and medical benefits and regular raises for the next six years. By then I would be a senior reporter at the top of the pay scale with eight weeks of paid holidays. They had chosen me and passed on Milo, not to mention a half-dozen other qualified, highly trained, sober, sane and presentable young journalists. If any further proof had been needed that the place was run by babbling madmen, I had it now, and these were the fools under whose yoke and lash I was destined to spend the next 14 years. God help us all, I was a lifer. I went home to tell Mary.

That's Adolf on the left

It should have been the best job in the world, but if you looked around the newsroom you'd find more happy faces in a children's cancer ward. It wasn't the money. The first time I had opened the pay envelope with my name on it I had to sit down and read it again. It had to be a mistake. The federal tax alone for two weeks was more than I'd ever made in a month, before deductions. And I was only at the first-year rate.

No, it was the job itself. For all the tripe and cant about excellence and "writing history's first draft" the place was wholly devoted to mediocrity. Incompetence was rampant and if the errors weren't already in the copy the editors added them and as readers bled away, management ordered the senior staff to aim even lower. They already had a rock-bottom opinion of their readership, so much so it was a surprise they didn't print the thing on rubber sheets so as to be drool-proof....

The weekend Books section ran a file photo accompanying a review of a book on the Second World War and helpfully noted in the cutline below, "Adolf Hitler (left) reviews troops in 1942." It was hard to imagine anyone who couldn't pick the Führer out of a lineup but the paper erred on the side of caution rather than risk a nation of readers playing Where's Adolf? If we wrote about the Crucifixion, no doubt the desk would supply a helpful caption: "Jesus (on cross) surveys the view from Golgotha."

The only way to get your copy down to an acceptable level of idiocy was to smack yourself in the head with a hammer every so often and try to keep the blood from dripping into the keyboard. You needed a serious head injury to write the shit and brain damage to live with yourself after it was printed.

Only 12,077 days until 2021

During my first week at the paper an envelope from Human Resources had arrived in my pigeonhole and among the Welcome to the Staff memos and forms was a small piece of cardboard with the notation: "Your internal identification number is 0214. Your normal first day of retirement will be September 1, 2021."

I pinned it to the corkboard over my workstation. Every time my eyes fell on it I shuddered and chunks of ice formed in my bowels. I would be 65 years and two weeks old when they opened the gates to let me out. If I lived that long. Between the job, the drink and the rats chewing on the edges of your soul you would have aged in something like dog years, five or ten years of physical and psychic wear for every one you spent in the Word Factory. Should you live long enough to retire you wouldn't be good for much more than sitting in a chair somewhere and mumbling, but you could afford a nurse to change and wipe you when you shat your pants, if that was any consolation.

On the upside retirement wasn't likely to last that long. Ex-employees had a habit of kicking off shortly after they left the place for good, as if only their hate for it was keeping them going. One night as I was racing to the parking lot to meet a photographer and head out to a story I met an old reporter who had been gone for a month or so. He was standing across the street from the building, just staring up at it with his hands in his pockets.

"Hi Archie, what are you doing back here? Haven't you had enough of the place?" I remembered his retirement party and the fake Front Page the old reporters had put together for him, full of bad jokes about his biggest stories and his career at the Standard.

He looked back at me and then up at the building again. "Some nights I just like to come down here and sneer at it."

A few months later he was dead, too....

Helen Keller, visual art critic

I was shuttled back and forth from the entertainment section to the newsroom every few months. The city editor decided I had a nice touch with the "light and bright" assignments and I took up residence on the front page writing zippers, the stories that ran along the bottom.... After reading about a mother who drowned her children in the bathtub and African genocide, the reader needed something on a scale they could relate to, so we gave them 40-pound housecats -- a half-dozen senior editors put their heads together and came up with FAT CAT! as a headline.

At the top of one shift I was called in by the entertainment editor and informed that effective immediately I was the paper's new theatre critic. This was a surprising development and it seemed only fair to tell her I knew nothing about theatre. Ignorance was the very quality they were looking for, and I was perfect for the job.

The new policy was No Experts. Someone high above us had decided that the arts coverage was reaching only a small audience because the writing was too rarified. What it needed was the common touch, a real ignoramus, someone as ill-informed and pig-ignorant as the average reader. They looked around and for sheer philistinism, I was the boy to beat. I wasn't the only one press-ganged into a job I was hopelessly wrong for; the classical music critic was summoned and told that he was the lucky winner of the art beat. He could barely speak but managed to sputter out reasons why he was the wrong choice, all of them brushed aside as proof he was exactly the man they needed. Finally he pulled out the capper: "But I'm colour-blind." The only way he was going to get out of it was if Helen Keller were available....

On Thursday, in the 12th of 14 excerpts, John Armstrong discovers the trouble with the Irish, and other seasonal newspaper truths.