A dream come true, and the salt finally out of the wound

When one of my life loves left me, he set a card on my keyboard. In it, was $400 in $20s to cover the last month of rent he owed me and a note about how he knew he'd see my name published in Cosmo one day when one of my stories made it in there.

I was a newspaper reporter, but my real dream was to see my name in a magazine. I've always loved magazines. I think I got it from my mom buying People, The National Enquirer and Woman's World every time we reached the cash at the grocery store. I loved and still love People. But I also buy and read the crappy In Touchs to Vanity Fair to Men's Health - which is so much better than Women's Health. Women get the stories on lip gloss and shoes and the men get the pieces on abs.

I got that card around seven years ago. Or was it six? Eight? (Funny how one breakup feels like your death at the time and now I can't pinpoint the year).

For some reason, a part of me was always bothered that I hadn't made it into a magazine. It's fair to say that I stayed in my safe "smaller town newspaper place" - I was a big fish in a small pond. I gave up a gig at a big paper for my family. But then I also had a baby and took a year off writing completely and then I got laid off, which was completely soul destroying, humiliating and degrading.

Then, I switched careers and started doing radio.

It looked like I'd never make it into a magazine.

And then I found Canadian Running magazine. I'm a reluctant runner. I've done two half marathons, a couple of 8Ks, a 10 and other little runs. I take running classes and run at the gym, but it's a challenge because I have asthma from years of smoking. Any info I can get on how to make a run easier I want. I turned to the magazine and enjoyed the fact it's all Canadian, with info on Canadian runs, marathons and personalities.

I shot off an email to the editor and said I'd be available to write if he ever needed a running writer or a writing runner...

The January and February 2010 Canadian Running has my first magazine piece, a profile on a Quebec running club. I grabbed it out of my mailbox when it got here and did a little dance in my kitchen.

It was a little dream come true - even if it wasn't Cosmo.

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How not to do a job interview

Today is Panic Day.
It is the day I circled on my calendar two months ago.
I have now been laid off for two months and today was the day I needed to have a job by – or, it's time to panic. Not seriously panic, like I can't take care of my son, but panic because I've gone two months and no one has scooped me up.

(Which, let me tell you, is the REALLY annoying thing EMployed people do. They say, "Oh, Sarah. This was meant to be. You'll get something great. Someone will realize your talents and pick you up. You'll be fine. I just know it.) Sorry, I need to take a break from typing this. Apparently, 23 people are knocking on my front door wanting to offer me a job.
Not.
Remember in that great movie Gremlins when the good guys kill the Gremlins by exploding them in the microwave and blender? That's what my kitchen looked like last night. I was making Smartie cookies with my son for his daycare Valentine's Day party today and, thanks to an old blender and an excited toddler, there was batter dripping off the counter and down the toaster. (Don't worry. I washed our hands 10 times during one cookie-making session.)
I had just popped the cookies in the oven when the phone rang.
It was someone I'm really, really, really hoping to work with (you know who you are) returning my phone call.
Too bad my husband was at the gym – so my Mr. No. 1 is on the phone and my two-year-old son's hands are covered in Smartie cookie batter.
I pick up the phone and chat. And chat. And chat.
And now he's licking his fingers. (My son. Not my future coworker. Or, maybe he is licking his fingers in anticipation of working with me, but that's a dream.)
Now, my son's fingers are covered in liquidified cookie batter.
And the timer's going off.
And I have to get the cookies out - and oh, sh*t, they've spread into one massive cookie, so now, while they're hot, I need to cut them into cookies.
Chat, chat, chat.
"Mommy," my son says.
"What?" I mouth.
"Mommy," my son says again.
"What?" I mouth.
"I pooooeeeed."
I immediately put on my best wild-eyed look and put my index finger to my mouth in the universal sign of "SHHHHHHHHHH!"
My devil look inspires my son to play devil, too.
He runs to the counter with a stink-trail behind him and grabs the bowls of Smarties, plowing handful after handful of chocolates into his mouth.
Chat, chat, chat.
My son continues to yell at me about how Toot and Puddle (a cartoon about world-travelling pigs) is on, how it's not The Wonder Pets, nor is it the Backyardigans.
More chat, chat, chat.
Finally, my son is ticked with me.
He grabs his Fisher Price Corn Popper toy and starts to chase me around the house with it. And, so, thank god I'm training for a run, I run around my house, continuing the chat, not letting on for a moment that I'm jumping over Tickle Me Elmo, hurdling his Little Tykes tool bench and leaping over his Thomas the Train set while I try to (forgive me for saying this) run away from my son. (Just for a minute!)
Finally, my husband walks in the door.
The cookie batter is still dripping off our kitchen appliances.
My son's bum is a toxic dump and his face is a rainbow from shoving Smarties in his mouth.
And I am leaping around my livingroom.
And this, ladies and gentleman, is what it's like to try to scam a job for yourself, while being Betty Crocker, while getting some exercise, while making sure my child is getting dinner.
And you thought laid-off people sat around the house watching Oprah. Ha.

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Go on, give everyone an A+, Mr. Rancourt

The Globe and Mail today has the most interesting story I've read in ages – it seems a University of Ottawa professor Denis Rancourt has been suspended (and arrested on campus and charged with trespassing) for being radical.

Erin Anderssen of the Globe and Mail writes:

"On the first day of his fourth-year physics class, University of Ottawa professor Denis Rancourt announced to his students that he had already decided their marks: Everybody was getting an A+. It was not his job, as he explained later, to rank their skills for future employers, or train them to be “information transfer machines,” regurgitating facts on demand. Released from the pressure to ace the test, they would become “scientists, not automatons,” he reasoned."


The self-described 51-year-old anarchist is fighting back and has posted his side of the story on YouTube. This idea of not doling out grades is interesting to me as I sit here at 9:31 in the morning, laid off from my job as a newspaper editor. I should be at work, WORKING, but instead, today, I will finish painting my hallway that was done, but then the paint, (please excuse my anger here) god-damn bubbled and now I have to do it again. I will buy some 1% milk for cereal and go run on a treadmill and check in with the companies (harass, actually) that I'm hoping will hire me.

How did I get laid off? How did I become one of the thousands of people with no job? See, the biggest thing about being laid-off is that it's not fair. I graduated high school with a 94.6% average. I went to Queen's University, one of the top schools in the country. I graduated with a BAH. My last year of university, I also worked full-time at The Whig-Standard, school during the day, work at night and on weekends. I busted my butt for eight years at the paper and received accolades, pats on the back, award nominations. All I wanted in return for my hard work and perseverance since Grade 9 was a good job, a good salary, and some coworkers who I could share a chuckle with. Instead, I'm in PJs, wondering, literally, what it all means now.

And here's where I trace the problem to: School. Elementary school and high school.

Kids learn very early on how to play the system. In group work, when there's two smart kids, the class a-hole and a kid who tries really hard but can't manage anything more than a 60%, the two smart kids take over, push the a-hole completely out of the system and let the try-hard do something, but not too much. When I was in school, part of the Ontario curriculum had groups of four each assigned a role: One person was the writer, one person was the "thinker," the person who came up with ideas. So far, so fair. Those two jobs worked in tandem. But then – I know some of you will remember this – one person was the encourager. It was his/her job to say: "C'mon guys. Good thinking. You're really thinking hard on this one. Nice penmanship, Sarah." And the other job was for someone to be the timer. Yup, if you have 20 minutes, the timer gave us time updates. Guess what job the a-hole got? The timer. The smart kids never cared if the other two piggy-backed on their 95% because they got 95% too.

In high school, by the time I'd reached Grade 11, I'd dropped all the maths, sciences and geography classes and took only drama, music, English, French, history and sociology classes. Why struggle through a chemistry class and get a 65% when you take English and easily get a 90%? Why, because now that I'm 31, I wish I had more of a math and science background – but high school is a marks game. You need the best marks to get into the best school so you can get the best job. (Allegedly).

But I had the best marks and went to one of the best schools and now I have no job.

It happened when I was in high school and it happens today: Kids are given the most insane/inane projects. Bristol board projects on Macbeth. Ooooh, good cut-and-paste, Jimmy. Too bad you're 18 and in Grade 12 English.

Nice title page. It's worth 10% of your mark? Title pages are very important in the real world. I did them every day in my job, I swear.

But one of the biggest problems with high school (and I know geography and socio-economic status play into this) is that people my age were taught (wrongly, of course) that smart kids went to university and, well, the others went to college.

I vividly remember taking personality tests that lead everyone in our classes to job descriptions for doctor, lawyer, journalist, writer, dentist, teacher. Did anyone ever tell us that elevator repair people can make $100,000 a year?

Not once in five years of high school (when school in Ontario went from Grade 9 to Grade 13) did any teacher, guidance counsellor or guest speaker, tell us to do anything other than get good grades and get into university.

No one presented college as an option. If you were in "advanced" classes, you went to university. No one said take a year off and work, or travel.

Yes, as 18 and 19 year olds we should have had the independence and smarts to make these decisions on our own, but since kindergarten we were groomed for university – and it takes a brave spirit to abandon the flock and go out on his own.

I was not that kid. But could I have been?

I also had close friends whose parents wouldn't chip in for school unless they took what the parents wanted them to take. Guess what happened when the kids who wanted to study art were forced into sciences? Or the kids who wanted to go to a small school were forced to go to their parents' large alma maters? They dropped out, failed, struggled.

Sure, some kids will abuse Denis Rancourt's A+ system – but that's part of the whole experience, isn't it? It's part of learning.

As I sit here, still unemployed 21 minutes later, I say the economy is showing us we need to think outside of the box and consider all options. And when it's time for my son to go to school in 16 years, we will encourage him to do whatever he wants: College, chef's school, design school, travel the world, do an exchange, apprenticeship, go to Queen's University (which, for the record, I did love, but mostly because I made the experience what I wanted it to be and spent the majority of my time working at the student newspaper).

It's good to shake things up.

And to conclude, this is a shout out to high school teachers who did rock the boat, who did treat us like adults, who did give us some freedom to explore, play and learn: Mr. Court, Mr. Baird, Mr. Jones - you guys were my faves.

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Hi. My name is Sarah Crosbie and I am unemployed ...

OK, after a month and a half, I can finally come out and say it: I have no job. I am unemployed. I am a free agent.
I was laid off.

For more than eight years, I worked at The Kingston Whig-Standard (Canada's oldest continually published daily newspaper) as a weekend reporter, a copy editor, investigative reporter, music columnist, and features editor. I covered the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York City with my good friend and Whig photographer Jennifer Pritchett. We were there, in the Big Apple, to tell the story of Kingstonians affected by the attacks. One year later, we both returned to the big city to see how Kingstonians' lives had changed and to see if we could track down how some of the local charitable donations had been spent there.
I spent one weekend in Ottawa hunting down Avril Lavigne at the Juno Awards where her debut Let Go was nominated for a bucket-load of trophies in 2003. I watched Gord Downie pick a piece of fluff out of his star on Canada's Walk of Fame and call it "belly button" fuzz 2002.
I got my butt stuck in a soap box derby car when I was a young reporter. I'd gone down the hill at the charity race and when I reached the bottom, I was stuck. There were volunteers at the race who had walkie talkies at the top and bottom of the hill. The conversation went something like this: "Smoky, this is Bluebird. We've got a problem. The Whig reporter is stuck in the car."
"The Whig reporter is stuck in the car? What's the problem?"
"She's wedged herself in the vehicle. You got tools?"
"We'll look for a saw. She's really stuck, huh? Man."
Yeah, that was fun. I had a big butt, I can not lie.
I was once nominated for a National Newspaper Award, Canada's top newspaper honour for an investigative piece on disgraced choirmaster John Gallienne.
I also followed the rise of Kingston's Ryan Malcolm from unknown bar singer to the first Canadian Idol. Every week for an entire summer in 2003, I went back and forth to the John Bassett Theatre in Toronto where I documented his rise on the pop singing show. The issue where we ran not one, not two, not three but four massive features on him (The News Story, The Colour Reaction Story, The Look Back Column, The Evolution of a Person Story) the day after he won – that paper sold out. It was the best story – documenting a guy achieving his dream, with the support of his city behind him.
My idea, Cool Kids, was published last spring - a special magazine dedicated to the amazing high school students in this area.
Every week, I edited The Whig's entertainment magazine The Ticket.
I worked on that magazine every week. Forty pages, every week. All year. I have a son, but The Ticket was my baby. Now it has new (and capable) parents, but she was mine to make for you, the readers.
I've worked with incredible editors – and I married one of the best.
The highlight of my time there was when the paper was alive and screaming with energy, big (sometimes sensational) headlines (but you do want people to stop at the box, look at the paper and then buy it, right? Of course) and colourful, meaningful, important, well-written stories. It was around 2002-05 and I was a reporter, writing everything and anything and then an editor. Noreen Rasbach (now an editor at The Globe in Toronto) was the editor and Rob Tripp (now the police reporter at The Whig) was the city editor. It was a good time to be a reporter at The Whig. Every year, we went to the National Newspaper Awards and dominated the Ontario Newspaper Awards. We did kooky stories (like my piece on a Big Beaver attraction wanting to move into the area) and investigative pieces on sex offenders and health care.
That was then.
Now, I do kooky things like laundry and investigate where cheese is on sale.
One week, I went nuts buying cases of water at Food Basics for $2 each.
The next week, they were on sale at No Frills for $1.88 each.
"I lost money!" I screamed at my husband. "I should have waited!"
"Baby," he said. "It's 12 cents."
Oh, yeah. Right.
In December, I was one of 600 Sun Media employees who lost their jobs.
And I'm heartbroken to no longer be at The Whig, but what really hurts is worrying about the future of the paper. What role does local news have in an world (and economy) dictated by the Internet? Yes, it's hard for a newspaper to compete with websites on things like celebrity gossip. People magazine can report on an issue the second it happens on its website, but newspapers can't give out the information until the next day in its issue, unless the paper has a sophisticated website going, but most local papers haven't perfected (or figured out, really) how to balance the news in their pages and on their websites at the same time. But websites and national chains and the big dailies can't give local readers important local stories (the ongoing halfway house battle in Kingston, Queen's University's struggle with Homecoming, Kingston General Hospital's restructuring efforts) ... and without a local paper, who will review Kingston's theatre productions? Who will tell you about the new restaurants in town? Who will profile the up-and-coming bands that are dying for attention?
Local news is critical to a city. A local newspaper bands citizens together. It tells us about local boys heading off to the Olympics, Good Samaritans who stopped a thief in our city, how our tax money is being spent and how our OHL team is doing. (Well, I can also tell you that – the Frontenacs aren't doing well, but who am I to judge? Some days, I don't shower.)
It's an interesting time to watch newspapers and see who survives (and thrives even?) and how they do it. It would a great time to be a sociologist working in media studies because mass media is changing every second.
Will I ever be a newspaper girl again? I don't know.
Being laid off gives you a lot of time to think, (which gives you an excuse to not do the dishes), and I've realized that life is short and the career I thought I'd have forever didn't even get me to age 32.
There have been some highs and many, many lows being laid off (I haven't slept through the night in six weeks, however I have ripped arms from going to the gym so often) but that's for another time. Something a journalist would call The Followup Story.

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