Carla and Gareth stressing out
Pete seriously getting stressed out
Carla and Gareth... slightly more relaxed
As a child, I always thought that when things had reached the eleventh hour, that was it; anything would always be finished within eleven hours for some reason. In the years since then I have learnt this cute piece of American slang is completely untrue. The team and I are slaving away in the media resources room, desperately trying to get yet another issue of the Wessex Scene completed and I'm sure we've been here more than eleven hours. Last night (or so the rumor has it) the server room became flooded at the university, preventing any sort of network usage; essentially rendering our thriving media room useless. After waiting most of yesterday for the network to return to us (it didn't,) the Wessex Scene has been thrown into something of a panic, trying to hit our deadline in spite of the fact that we've lost an entire day. The resulting panic has been a revelation to us. None of us had any idea of how much work the paper would take and as printing deadlines mingle further with university ones, we're all struggling to cope. My method? Pretend it's not happening and write a blog post.
In all honesty though, the amount of work required to get every issue out is phenomenal. Next time you pick up the paper, don't just read it, really look at it. You see that line? That took one of us 30 minutes to fit EXACTLY in the spot. Notice how all the stories end on the same grid line? 1 hour of editing, and re-editing the story, seeing if it fits perfectly with or without a pull-quote, if it's all in article text and not accidentally all first paragraph. You see that spelling of Novmember? Um...yeah, I don't know how that happened.
In spite of this, being part of the Wessex scene is probably the most rewarding, career enhancing extra curricular at Southampton University (providing you're interested in going into publishing, journalism, editing, etc) because nothing will give you the level of hands on experience we all develop. Working with industry standard software. and absolutely no training wheels, we're all slowly training ourselves to become professional editors. We might have reached the eleventh hour this time, we might be struggling now, but the stress and the trauma all vanish into nothingness as our sports editor (Daniel Webb) reveals to us the hole in the crotch of his trousers and we remember; maybe it's best we slip into the twelfth...
Dominic Falquero
News Editor
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