Another Messenger party comes and goes.......

.....This time, Thursday, February 1, 2007, the retirement of Mark Syverud, who is only 53, but retired on disability due to Parkinson’s.
Marky-Mark retired before Gateway (i.e. when the Ewings still owned the paper). Under Gateway he probably would have been laid off and left dangling.
To the angry dismay of strident tub-thumpers everywhere, it was a gathering of word-geeks, of which I am one. What Garrison Keillor would call a society of English-majors.
Only it was better because included were past employees who worked during my tenure.
Primarily was Bill Robinson, who together with webmaster (Matt Ried) and I comprised the original mighty Mezz electronics-team.
Matt was the ‘pyooter-guru, and Robinson the writer, and I was included because I was fairly ‘pyooter-literate — as was Robinson. Robinson was also the newspaper’s local-editor.
Robinson and Ried drove the web-site at first: iteration #2, Z-Wire; but eventually switched to pagination when I got so I could drive it.
Robinson eventually quit because of two reasons: 1) he was stretched way too thin for little income, and 2) his girlfriend, a Messenger ad sales-rep, was fired by a jerk in a silly macho move.
Robinson switched to what I call “a stupid, meaningless job” that made a viable income, like bus-driving.
When Robinson left, the web-site was left to me and Matt Ried; although Ried was webmaster, and me only a driver.
For years Ried did the daily, and me the weeklies; but we switched when I went part-time. Ried was also doing pagination.
Another past employee was Anmari Linardi, once a photographer at the mighty Mezz, and driver of web-site iteration #1 after an earlier guy left.
In fact, she quit because she felt she had been hired as a photographer; not a web-site driver.
Robinson began recounting facts from my e-mails to the ne’er-do-wells as soon as he saw me.
“You mean you actually read that stuff?” I asked.
“Sure; keep sending it!” he said.
Anmari, another one of the ne’er-do-wells, said the same thing, and then Syverud gave me his e-mail and requested I include him among the ne’er-do-wells.
Boss-man read a paean from outside regarding what a great writer Syverud was, suggesting that he keep writing.
Syverud then commented that why the mighty Mezz was such a great place to work is because the employees were throwing themselves into the job — i.e. beyond what was required. To me that means the employees cared about what they were doing. Enough that “if this is what’s required to put out a quality product; I’m figuring it out!”
It’s why I stayed at the mighty Mezz. Years ago my job-coach from Rochester Rehab suggested he could try to get back my job driving bus.
“Not interested,” I told him. “I prefer working at the Messenger.”