Griz Bear Comments

How do I like the new office?

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Since the move and the merger, I often get asked how I like my new office in Gravette. My answers have usually been brief and without much explanation, so I’ll provide a little more detail here.

It’s nice being in a Main Street office once again where people can walk in and visit while they are tending to other business in town. It was hard for people to do that at our most recent Gentry office and very few came through our front doors there.

Being on the highway in Gentry may have made the newspaper office more visible than it had been, but it was a little more tricky to come and go without being run over by all the traffic on Arkansas Highway 59. To be honest, I feared someone might get hit backing out of a parking spot and sometimes wondered if a wayward car or truck might turn our Gentry office into a drive-through.

And so, yes, the quiet and more relaxed atmosphere in my new office is nice. Cars and trucks are not speeding by at 50 mph and people can come in without risking life and limb to do so. The quiet makes it a bit easier to write and edit news stories, too.

Another plus at the new office is that we have four employees there rather than one or two, making it possible to share office duties and have more time to get out and cover news events. That was a difficulty in Gentry on most days because I was the only one there to keep the office open. Add to that, we all get along and work together well.

Dodie Evans, longtime editor of the Gravette News Herald, was a little worried that the noise of his typing on a manual typewriter might bother me. Even though he knows how to set type and build pages on the computer, he has always written his news stories on a manual typewriter and things somehow flow better for him to sit down at his old typewriter when he writes.

I told him, the sound of the old typewriter keys striking the paper and roller didn’t bother me a bit. In fact, it is a pleasant sound in my ears and brings back so many memories of sitting at my old portable Smith-Corona late at night pounding out papers for classes when I was in college and graduate school.

I sometimes wondered how that old machine I bought used survived all the term papers and reports which passed through it. And, if I recall right, I used it for sermons and bulletins too, until I managed to scrape up enough money to purchase a used electric machine.

Dodie’s typing style is a lot better than mine ever was because I used the old Hunt and Peck method which, by the way, has nothing to do with anyone with those last names. I hunted for the letters on the keyboard and pecked away using my right and left index fingers.

And to be totally honest, though I type volumes on my computer key board, my style is still a modified Hunt and Peck method involving only about four fingers instead of two. I think that’s why I sometimes invert letters in a word. It’s not just dyslexic fingers.

When my brain, through my eyes, locates the right letters on the keyboard, it sends a signal to my arms and hands, telling me which letter to peck. The problem is that the signal from my brain sometimes travels more quickly down one arm than the other, with the second signal arriving a millisecond before the first and causing the wrong index finger to strike a key before the other.

When that happened on my old manual typewriter, it caused a collision of type keys and sometimes a major traffic jam of letters which I had to carefully pull apart with my fingers before proceeding. On the computer, there’s no traffic jam of letters, just inverted letters if the wrong key gets hit a microsecond before the right one.

Another plus to the new office is the close proximity of numerous restaurants — one on each side of our office, another on the corner and more I haven’t even found yet just a block or two away. If I starve in Gravette, it won’t be because of lack of opportunity to eat a good meal. The hard part, when I do eat out, is deciding which restaurant to visit.

The only complaint I can raise — and it’s not really a complaint — is that I have to drive a bit more to get to my new office. But even that is proving to be less of a problem than I thought due to the use of a laptop and Internet.

All in all, the office is nice, the company is good and the new newspaper is going well. With a little more time to adjust, things should work out just fine.

Randy Moll is the managing editor of the Westside Eagle Observer. He may be reached by e-mail at rmoll @ nwaonline .com.