This morning I had an interview (yay!) for a pretty neat job (sadly, only part-time, but still!) and my interviewer was of course looking over my resume and asking me questions. Eventually he came to a job I had almost forgotten.
"I see you wrote for The (Insert Name of DC Newspaper Here). Why did your employment there end?"
I had a bit of a moment while I scrambled for words. "Well, originally it was my uncle's column, and when he passed away, I took it over for a bit and...we...the editor...I...well I was living in Pittsburgh and the column was about D.C., and it just became difficult after a time."
Which is ALL TRUE.
And we moved on.
However, it is also true that the final issue that led to my termination at The Paper was something more specific.
The column had to do with numbers. A typical daily article looked like this:
Approximate number of movies filmed in Washington, D.C.: 185
Movies filmed in D.C. between 1900 and 2000 that won Academy Awards: 12
Domestic films released in 2008: 610
Movie screens in the U.S: 40,000
Amount the TV/film industry contributes to the American economy annually: $80 billion
After many months, it was becoming more and more difficult for me to find original ideas every day for this paper, especially since it was D.C. oriented and I was living in Pittsburgh.
One day, while going over website after website searching for interesting facts and figures, I came across this one:
1/3 of all self-inflicted deaths in males ages 12 to 24, are caused by auto-erotic asphyxiation.
I found this totally fascinating. Apparently I am pretty much the only one.
In any case, I included that fact in the little article I sent at the end of the week to the editor.
I very soon received an email that was almost entirely composed of:
??!!!???!?!??!??!???!???!!!???!????!!??!?!?!!!
I wrote back something along the lines of, "So...I should take that one out?"
I took it out and looked for another equally interesting fact. I was very excited when I found this one:
Number of children who drown, annually, in buckets: 30
Does anyone else find this incredible? Who is watching their children so poorly that they manage to drown themselves in BUCKETS? I felt it was my duty to get the word out there, to make people aware that they need to be watching their children better.
Only minutes after I sent this one in, I received a phone call from the editor, who informed me that it was time to end our partnership.
In hindsight, it should have been obvious that maybe not everyone would find these facts as completely fascinating as I did. Although I still believe that people should be educated on the dangers facing our adolescent males and our particularly stupid children.
But my decision to take it upon myself to educate the masses did end up getting me...let go. So probably a Poor Decision in the end.
After
what was the editor thinking? i found both of those facts incredibly fascinating and certainly would have liked to read about them in your column!
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