In the past two months I’ve slowly transformed into a professional stalker – not the creepy kind, mind you, but the type that doesn’t stop calling until they get what they want. I’ve developed nerves of steel, a new and exciting vocabulary and the type of patience people associate with large boulders.
But I wasn’t always like this; I used to be a nice, mild-mannered Indian girl with a constant smile. Team TOAD are a cheerful bunch, and the office banter may have been the only thing that kept me out of the asylum. But let me take a step back, and run you through a typical day of mine.
Mornings start off slow, and the team leave me alone for about half an hour, to fight off my inner couch potato and get ready for work. As soon as I win, a stack of listings lands on my desk and I spend the next several hours reading (or skimming, ahem), fact-checking, typing up corrections and updates, and of course – the bane of my existence – making phone calls. Gah! Even typing this makes me shudder.
One would think that a simple phone call in a city that’s pretty much the melting pot of the Middle East would be a simple matter, certainly simpler than say driving over there and communicating via Pictionary. One would think, but one would be terribly and painfully wrong. Why not email them, I hear you say. No, no; that isn’t any better at all. Most people just can’t be bothered to reply to email, or SMS, or faxes, or carrier pigeons – well, that last one’s a joke, but my point stands. People on the other end are always oblivious to deadlines, and seem to take life at an infuriatingly leisurely pace.
But I’m not making this clear enough; one time I called a mall to ask when they had reopened, and the receptionist just couldn’t decipher that one word. I was struggling for synonyms: opened again? Opened newly? Opened recently? That time when you shut down, and then after a while you opened? Nothing, zip. The team supported my frustration of course, with fits of muffled laughter that took all my energy to ignore.
Another one? I called a spa once fact-checking on foot massages. Foot! Not floor, not food – who on earth massages food? I repeated the word foot so many times that I finally gave up and thanked her. My editor – the supportive boss that he is – printed out a picture of a foot and stuck it to my wall, a reminder he said, that I should never underestimate the effort required for even the simplest task. I think he just wanted to tease me.
But that’s exactly what I’ve learned during this internship: being a journalist is so much more than just getting comfortable behind a keyboard, you need to be a linguist, a PR trainer, a researcher, a clown and a rock – an endlessly patient rock upon which the great oceans of frustration can break and time and again. And yes, you also have to be a little bit of a philosopher (it helps you find Zen).
And I couldn’t have learned it in a greater place. I think I’ll just slink off to my desk and pick up the phone, maybe they’ll let me stay a while longer.
