40 years apart

The Professional Building (recently reopened as a Hilton Garden Inn) opened in 1932. The Chase Tower (glass) opened in 1972.

It's been a bad week at work. I was just given more duties and poorly trained on them, so I had a meltdown yesterday. Unprofessional, but you know what? There's only so much one can take. Story time:

So at my job, I write headlines and trim news, business, features and sports articles for a dozen newspapers. Well, 11 now since things are being reorganized. My designer co-workers lay out the pages (draw the boxes where the stories, photos and headlines go). There are other teams in the newsroom that put out a similar number of papers or have other duties. Our company recently bought a newspaper chain and will be giving all of those papers to us to produce. My team is getting three papers. So with one being dropped (from 12 to 11 in a slight reorganization ahead of the new setup), we'll have a gain of two papers.

That means two more deadlines and around 20 to 40 pages to work on a day. I'm told we'll hire people to help, but they're going to be fresh out of college, so the lack of experience doesn't help us.

On top of this, I am being trained to do wires, which means I have to get the lineups of maybe 20 papers (I work with other teams on this) and organize their nonlocal content (i.e. news from the wire services). So it's another busy duty I was given so more of us are cross-trained, and I didn't feel prepared for it. Thinking about taking on additional newspapers, making mistakes because there's no way we can't not make mistakes with this system, and anticipating the emails and meetings we get because of the mistakes just made me lose it. I freaked out. Cussing, shouting, throwing papers at my desk.

My boss pulled me aside today to talk about it. I didn't get written up. I told her this is just too much. I don't know how much more I can handle.

I took this job in desperation. I didn't want to go back to newspapers. I vowed I wouldn't because it's a dead end with low pay. I was jobless for three months after my contract ran out at my last job. I needed income and health insurance, and this job offered that. The pay is significantly less than my last job but is better than any other job before that, though my housing is now unaffordable. I'm looking for work but am having no luck. I'm getting way too stressed out.

But there's good news. I have submitted two photos for competition at the state fair. Maybe I can get some exposure there or sell a print. They are of lightning and a sunset. I doubt I'll even get them displayed, and the process is confusing, but at least I'm trying. Only cost me $10.