The Night Desk
My very first job was working the Night Desk for the Daily Press. It was a really lonely, liminal time that feels like it happened to someone else, but it forged some of my strongest friendships, and I remember it fondly.
The overhead lights are hospital halogen, even at 11 p.m. The newsroom sits apocalypse-empty, aside from the last pod of desks in the last row of a block-long building. This is the Night Desk.
The editor and deputy editor have a darkened alcove, but the remaining three to six night-shift copy editors have cubicles, sterile white and cushioned with weeks of printed broadsheets and editing proofs (individual pages of the next day’s paper, on 11x17 printer sheets). A fly on the wall would think we sit in silence, but we’re each enrobed in our own soundtracks, at least until the A1 proofs come in.
We do not know what day it is, not really. It’s the Daily Press, so we make the newspaper for tomorrow. All day it is tomorrow. For our sports editors, sometimes it’s even a few days after that. We’re running so far ahead we feel perpetually behind.
We all have Ultrawide computer monitors turned vertically, so we can design broadsheets — the newspaper pages — in the size they actually are: 11x17. The recipe for Instant DJ is just to put your playlist on a vertical Ultrawide monitor. My Spotify has never looked cooler.
The songs that kept me company on the night desk were indie-pop, though by 2023 some of those artists are really famous. But back in 2017, the artists and I were all sticking our toes in the water, waiting on and wading into who we would become.
I think that’s why it’s been such a crusade for me to see everyone from this playlist in concert these past six years. They’ve come so far. I’ve come so far. I remember their music as being one of the few things I had back then.
When my Night Desk songs come on shuffle now, as I’m folding laundry on my king-size bed in my house I bought alone, I remember being the the girl in thrifted work pants whose crowning achievement was having a press pass and a key card.
I remember the way the shelves of old broadsheets behind my desk smelled, the way the sun-warmed paper scent would mingle with the just-vacuumed carpet I would immediately and guiltily spill trail mix on the second after Cedric the custodian cleaned it.
I remember being 22, mind wandering off as these songs played, wondering who I’d be one day. I am not any of the places 2017 Victoria thought I’d be, but she’d happy to be wrong.