Afternoon Like Afternoon

I am pretty sure I just witnessed a colleague letting her phone ring once and then dropping the receiver to hang up on whoever it was. Like, it rang four times. Thirty seconds went by, it rang again, so she picks up the phone and drops it into the cradle.

I should mention here that we don’t have caller ID (yes, I know, we are a newsroom and we never know who is calling us), so her hanging up is a particularly irritated gesture at nobody in particular.

Way to start a day.

A particularly humid day. A day with water thick in the air. A morning so dark that you know it will feel off-time all day—morning like afternoon, afternoon like afternoon.

In passing, I want to say goodbye to Peter Jennings. I always had great respect for that man, and chose him to watch if I watched evening news. I knew someone who used to work with him, and said Jennings went over every piece of copy and changed whatever he had not written himself into his own language before each broadcast. That, the fact that he apparently ad-libbed as a master, not to mention his charm—I’ll miss him.