This is a small diary of an average workday. I've been told my job is somewhat unusual, or at least enough so that people tend to be a bit incredulous when I tell them what I do, which is this: I'm the weekend (and holiday) obituary clerk for a newspaper. The job sounds more interesting than it actually is, if that's possible. I don't write obituaries. At the most I edit them, and that sparingly. People are understandably touchy about these things, about how they look and how they sound. I make a few corrections when something particularly bothersome (and minor) turns up, like "1960's." (It's plural, not possessive.) And I fix spelling, but even that is risky. When someone has been cremated and the ashes, and their container, are buried, it's called an inurnment, a word I had never heard before working here. Spellcheck is no more familiar with funeral-related terms than I was.

Every Saturday and Sunday, and on holidays official enough to close the business offices here, I show up sometime between two and two-thirty in the afternoon. This is as precise a starting time as I was given while being trained. My cubicle is on the main floor of the building, and for a few hours there is no one else on it, until one or two pre-press people come in around four. Downstairs is the editorial department, the place one tends to imagine when imagining a newspaper. There's usual a handful of people here, sometimes even a reporter or two. There is another floor upstairs, referred to helpfully as "upstairs," but I have no idea what goes on there, or even, truth be told, how to get there. The only stairs I know of go down.

Most of my work is done on what looks to me to be a fancy Apple G5, though I might be wrong. It took me awhile to MacOS again (9.2, to be specific), after not having used a Macintosh since high school. It's all right, though I still feel hemmed in by the single mouse button. Apple's optical mice certainly look stylish, at least; little high-tech transparent lozenges with laser guts.

Obituaries are either faxed or e-mailed to me, so one of the first things I do, after turning on some lights (needed only in the winter, really; there's lots of natural light in here when the sun is out) and checking my voice mail, is to check the fax machines. Then I usually go get a candy bar. If there is time. (Yesterday, on my way to the lunchroom I was startled by three or four headless, armless, but well dressed female mannequins, stashed in a nearby hallway for reasons unfathomable.) But today there are, so far, no faxes, and no mail of any kind. When this happens I either do homework or, more often, read novels. Sometimes I open Word and scroll through the dictionary, which is as exciting as it sounds, but I make my own fun.

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I got one, eventually, but looking back over what I wrote reveals it all to be rather tedious. Or more tedious. To paraphrase myself: Cut, paste, Photoshop.