Newspaper doesn't need great office to do great work (but we'll take it)
Christy Mullins
Issue date: 4/16/09 Section: Opinion
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Our new publications office on the second floor of the DiGiorgio Student Center will have brand new computers, desks with all the drawers intact and a work room about three times the size of the one I'm sitting in right now.
According to the floor plans I got this week, we'll be stationed right by the 200-seat movie theatre and live-entertainment venue, just down the hall from a coffee shop with outdoor café seating and an arcade lounge. Below us will be the student union and a study area. Everything at our fingertips.
And even better than all that: we'll have a restroom for the first time since we moved into the Bancroft basement years and years and years ago.
I won't be here to live the dream. Construction is expected to finish up next spring, a full year after I graduate.
But instead of feeling jealous, I'm feeling a little remorse: What is The Johnsonian without Bancroft basement?
What is The Johnsonian without chipped paint, ceiling pipes and mystery creaks in the night? What is The Johnsonian without fussy door locks and permanent pizza smell in the carpet?
What is The Johnsonian without upholstered dining seats as office chairs, some worn down to their original nails and staples, giving us all a little poke in the middle of production night?
Call me a traditionalist, but what is The Johnsonian without holding your bladder until that one last paragraph?
When I finally found the student publications office my sophomore year, I thought it could use some work.
When I became news editor, I tried making some decorations stick to the cement wall by my desk.
When I became editor in chief, I painted my single office a warm yellow and brought in some ambient light.
What is The Johnsonian without holding your bladder until that one last paragraph?
It still looks like a basement, because that's what it is. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," my dad would say, and he's half right.
A lot of magic happens here, ambient light or fluorescent, carpet or linoleum, Bancroft Hall or DiGiorgio Student Center.
The Johnsonian doesn't need a first-class office to produce first-class work.
But I sure can't wait to visit the new student center next spring, sip a latte on the second-floor balcony and bury myself in that week's Johnsonian.
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E-mail Christy Mullins at
mullinsc@thejohnsonian.com.
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