Bay Weekly’s Been a Fast-Paced Train
“At lunchtime, we pull out a tablecloth, spread it on the conference table and we all eat together,” I said. “It’s delightful.”
I had been working at Bay Weekly for a month, and whenever anyone asked me about my new job, I told them about how we shared our midday meal and talked about our editorial calendar, sales strategies, and weekend plans. As often as we spoke of work, we discussed of family, home repairs, favorite vacation spots and recipes.
Around the lunch table, relationships were forged.
I have always been blessed with good colleagues. Every office I’ve experienced has been warm and welcoming — or I would not have stayed. As my Facebook page will attest, I’ve met some of my best friends at work. Some, if not all, of my previous jobs involved at least an occasional communal meal.
As to why I felt the need to report on the Bay Weekly lunch — and specifically, the tablecloth — I did not know. Perhaps, I thought the tablecloth gave us a little more civility, sophistication and surprising elegance. We were breaking in the middle of a fast-paced day during an action-packed week.
I once heard Shonda Rhimes, writer and producer of Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, say that writing for a weekly television show is like laying track for an on-coming train. Working at a newspaper is like that, too. We are always on deadline. The train is time bearing down on us and we work at an almost impossible pace to staying ahead of it.
People are not always gentle with each other when on deadline. Tempers flare. Voices rise. Doors slam. I think of old black-and-white movies with scenes that take place in smoke-filled newsrooms. The actors talk over each other and give sharp answers without the pleasantries of please and thank you. In such an environment, it would be easy to lose all graciousness.
However, that is simply not true of Bay Weekly. At Bay Weekly, we lunch together. We talk. We laugh. We work. We invite others to join us.
Now, some of our Bay Weekly friends are leaving us, and we will have to make a real effort to get together over soup, sandwiches and microwave-heated leftovers. I hope we will.
Those of us staying will be moving to share office space with Chesapeake Bay Media. It’s my hope that we will take those lunch breaks together, and that our Chesapeake Bay Media colleagues will join us.
Customer service representative, writer and collaborator since 2016, Susan Nolan moves with Bay Weekly to Chesapeake Bay Media in 2020.