You-know-what is a virtue I have yet to aquire

Copy editing at a small newspaper has taught me something about myself. I'm impatient. I'm on the verge of throwing a very childish temper tantrum and cursing the I.T. person out loud before I even attempt to address and fix a problem on my own.

There are just so many steps, especially to the web site end of things. The stories on the page have to be "grouped" a certain way in a very specific font and saved to a particular version of the program in order to work. Then there's the waiting for the upload to go through and then editing the stories for the web site and saving the changes and making sure all the tags are correct. I could scream or tear my hair out.

Or make jokes. I told my co-workers that working in our department is like going through a 12-step program. Nothing, nothing happens seamlessly and simply, and if you skip just one step you'll find yourself choking on your tears of frustration and fumbling for a bottle, muttering something about being fired.

Of course if they fired just one of us that would be eliminating 1/3 of our department.