Parking-lot wars

—When I started at the Mighty-Mezz, perhaps two years after my stroke, we were in the “old-building,” which had a single parking-lot west of the building.
I started as an unpaid intern, and wasn’t cleared-to-drive yet, so was being commuted by cab. I.e. I wasn’t using that parking lot.
In early ’96 that newspaper hired me; tremendous moxie on their part. They were hiring a stroke-survivor with a partly destroyed brain.
Perhaps two or three years after they hired me, the Messenger decided to expand and modernize their old-building.
That would be the “new-building,” which quickly became an albatross as the newspaper-biz collapsed. Addition was made to the north and west faces of the old-building, some of it two stories. The old-building was only one floor.
The old newsroom, which comprised a lot of the old-building, remained but was vastly modernized.
When I started, actual production of the newspaper took place in the old newsroom. But in the new building actual production of the newspaper was set off by itself.
A lot changed with computerization of newspaper production. I started in “paste-up;” long galleys of newspaper text were pasted to cardboard page-dummies.
Those page-dummies were photographed with a large camera to make negatives with which printing-plates could be produced.
The Messenger had its own press, and it was state-of-the-art. We went through a press upgrade during my employ, that being a new press. Both presses were huge installations over a story high.
One of my 3 AM Sunday-morning perks, after putting together the Sunday paper, was to yell “STOP THE PRESSES!” I noticed an error, so the first 20-25 printings were trash.
“If Bob Hope dies, it’s ‘STOP THE PRESSES!’” a friend told me. He was a page-editor during my employ.
Another pearl-of-wisdom he gave me was “if it bleeds it leads!”
The Mighty Mezz was the BEST job I ever had. The Messenger paid little, but was fun. Every day the entire newsroom erupted with nerf-balls and Fuzzy-Toys hurled at the office-TV because “Teletubbies” had come on.
I drove transit bus 16&1/2 years, but my stroke ended it. A stroke-rehabber wanted to get my job back driving bus, but I wasn’t interested.
“You’ll make much more money driving bus,” he told me.
“Yeah, but it wouldn’t be fun,” I countered.
With the new building a second parking lot was added, but it was east of the facility. Our press-guys started parking there, along with a few others = the so-called “riffraff” on our staff — the smokers.
I continued to use the original west parking-lot.
We now had two staff parking-lots, plus a third parking area out front for visitors.
I renamed the parking-lots the “riffraff lot,” and the “elitist lot.” And Yrs Trly used the elitist lot.