Killing time

We often have a lot of waiting time in the newsroom. First the design team waits for us as we get our copy in and edited. Then, at the end of the night, we wait for the designers to finish, tweak and ship the pages. In the midst of all the waiting, we have become very creative with how we spend our time.

Now, I should remind you that we spend close to 40 hours a week in the newsroom. And we're all full-time students and most of us have scholarships to keep up. Which means it would be wise to put every idle moment toward reading, studying and homework. But instead, we spend hours reading blogs, watching YouTube videos and doing crosswords. Nothing too crazy -- pretty standard for a bunch of 20-something-year-olds.

But lately, we've gotten into a few peculiar hobbies:

Here's David trying to stick a pen into the ceiling. He says it's like playing darts but harder because pens aren't sharp and pointy. I challenge you to try it. It really is more difficult than darts.

Next: http://fmylife.com/
It's a hilarious blog that we've recently become really obsessed with due to journalists' inherently dark humor. Here's a recent post that makes me a bad person because I laughed:

Today, my family gathered at my 96 year old great-grandmother's surprise birthday party that was my idea. When she walked in, we surprised her so much that she literally had a heart attack. She is now in the hospital. FML

Third: Neener neener
Writing and talking in neener. I won't be offended if you never return to my blog after this paragraph. I'm just trying to be frank about what we do for fun. It's like Mad Libs but every blank is a neener. The same guy you see trying to poke the ceiling with his pen also wrote our first cop story in neener.

Here's what a typical crime story might look like in neener: FORT NEENER -- A Fort Worth neener died at a local hospital Neener morning after he was neenered shot outside of a neener on Berry Neener, neenering to a neener release.

Oh, and I don't know if this warrants its colon to separate it from the rest of our time-killing activities, but we once ordered some midgets to a weekly staff meeting. They haven't called us to confirm our order, though. Does that make us bad people, too?

Anyway, here is a classic time killer: Eating.

If someone has ever told you to never leave food in a newsroom, this is because it's true. It's not just because we're starving college students. My copyediting professor has asked me to bring brownies to a professional newsroom when I visited for a class assignment and the brownies were gone in a blink of an eye. No joke. Anyway, our production manager pops so many bags of popcorn a day that we have become convinced that it is part of her official job title. At peak times of the evening, which is around dinner time, she pops two, one after the other.

As you can tell, we aren't really picky about how to kill or waste time. Have any suggestions? My comments are enabled in case you were wondering.