Last night, I earned a new record in length spent at my office on a Wednesday – 20 hours. No, I am not currently working on my medical residency and I’m not a cool crime fighter working on some crazy sting to catch evil bad guys. I’m just a pathetic editor/paginator who gets ZERO help from her co-workers.

There are multiple factors that go into my long work day.

#1 – the inability of some people to understand that a deadline is, in fact, a deadline. If I am late with my deadline, 30,000 newspapers are not published. If they are late with theirs, nothing happens (well, except I have to spend 20 consecutive hours in a shithole office).

#2 – For some sick and twisted reason, two of our cities hold their high school graduation ceremonies on a Wednesday night. Not to be outdone by our competitors, my boss felt me must include the photos and stories in our edition to beat out everyone else. My high school held its graduation on a Saturday, like normal people.

#3 – I am usually kept at work late while waiting for other people to finish their work, so this week, I tried to nip that in the bud by actually doing pages for them. My plan horribly backfired when they all went home at 8 p.m. and I was left looking at a tragically unfinished paper of my own.

Lessons I learned last night:

#1 – Screw everyone. From now on, I’m going to be the one to take a two hour break.

#2 – I must utilize my headphones more often to drown out the sound of my co-workers pleas for help. That takes up much of my time and effectively causes me to lose focus on my own tasks.

#3 – the supposed overnight parking ban for out-of-towners in the city I work in is complete crap because nothing happened to my car. Coincidentally, the mayor was lauding his program in the current edition I was working on.

#4 – I need a new job.