Far, far ago, there was a meeting of the very boring people

My editor has been out of town the past two days, and the same woman who filled in for him my first two weeks and made me cry with frustration every night because my stories never seemed to get into the paper under her watch was back in control.

On Tuesday she had me go to a meeting our governor would be attending. I told her they wouldn't be talking about anything we cared about, but she wanted me to go anyway to get some quotes from the governor for another reporter's story. I sat through two and a half hours of excruciating boringness (the gov was even nodding off) and dutifully snagged an interview with him afterward. I sent his transcribed quotes back to the reporter, but in the morning I checked out his story and they were nowhere to be found.

That's Waste of Time numero uno.

Yesterday I went straight to cover a House subcommittee meeting in the morning because one of our congressmen sits on the parent committee. My fill-in editor thought they were talking about one thing, though I told her repeatedly they were talking about something entirely different. When I got back and told her that, like I thought, they didn't talk about what she wanted them to, she decided we didn't need a story about it.

That's Waste of Time numero dos.

When I returned to the office at 12:15 or so my coworker told me the powers that be wanted him to concentrate all his efforts on a story about another of our congressmen, so I was to go to a different subcommittee meeting in the afternoon he had been planning to cover. I barely had time to retrieve and eat lunch before leaving for this hearing, which started at 2. Forty-five minutes into it, before the guy I was there to cover had even testified, they took what became an hour-long break for floor votes. I didn't end up getting out of there until 4:35, landing back at the office at 5:10. I raced to file my story by 6 and was proud of myself for being successful.

This morning I searched my name on our website to read my story and see how it had been butchered. I couldn't find it. Instead I found a wire story on the hearing.

Yup. WoT #3.

So, in sum, I may as well have been dead these past two days.