House of Burgess

Until 3 p.m. today I had been under the impression it was Friday, not Thursday, which in case you were also confused, it isn't. It wasn't until I checked the dateline at the top of an inside page of the paper I was reading that I realized my mistake. This is probably a good thing since I was just about to head to the grocery store and get some food when I was snapped back to reality. I could have still shopped, but as my check doesn't get directly deposited until tomorrow morning, I wouldn't have been able to actually take it home with me.
I know I made this mistake because I work at a newspaper. I am constantly thinking about things in terms of at least a day in the future. A story I write today won't be in the paper until tomorrow at the earliest. When the assignments are written on the big dry-erase board, we list them by the day they come out. Since I'm working on them before that, confusion often ensues. Hilarity unfortunately does not.
All this is rather ironic because, by reputation, the news in a newspaper is often out of date well before it reaches the reader. This is the nature of the business. This is unfortunate because we are stuck in the unenviable position of constantly thinking ahead to the future, knowing that when it becomes the present it could very well be obsolete.
A perfect example of this was Monday. Our great new photo assistant Sarah went out and took some shots of a slippery road to go along with a weather story that was coming out. The picture, while good, didn't illustrate the snow that was expected, but as we figured that the paper would reach readers by the time snow actually was on the ground, we went with what we had. Had we waited on putting anything in we'd have absolutely no art the day it actually happen and then tardy art the next day that was being published 24 hours after everyone already knew what was happening.
The saving grace to all this is of course, the internet (or internets if you want to pay homage to President Bush's famous misstatement, which I sometimes do.) Putting breaking news online is something we've had to get used to and some of us, me included, need constant reminders of this fact. This kind of forward thinking is actually helpful, as opposed to my less constructive forward thinking when it comes to what day it is.
Of course, what would really fix this all this is a time machine.