I’m taking a week’s break from a back-breaking work of sitting eight hours — sometimes nine — in front of computer terminal trying to make sense of all the words and sentences that pass through it.
Being a gatekeeper is easy if all you need to do is to keep the gate and let pass the worthy materials with minimal amendment. The hard part is when the materials come in their raw form — and in my desk most of the materials come in their raw form, with all the characteristics of being raw — that there is no way that we could just let it pass the gate without doing any processing to it.
So we — a very small pool of gatekeepers and already facing extinction as it is — end up being the gatekeepers and processing crew at the same time for all the raw materials that come our desk.
Sometimes we spend a lot of time confirming and verifying facts, plugging holes in a story, researching the background, putting things in perspective, reproducing the whole copy in English and mostly importantly, checking our own work, reading them over and over at least five times to make sure they are free from mistakes that we know of.
Making sure that my copies are free from the mistakes that I know of is the hardest part for me. I’m already struggling with my English and I’m also prone to making mistakes that I spend a lot of time trying to make sense out of the copies that I myself have processed or edited.
And all the time, the materials keep on coming and coming, causing bottlenecks on our end.
Don’t get me wrong though
I’m not saying this out of contempt for my job. I love my job and unless the term is really attractive, I wouldn’t want to do any other jobs in my organisation other than the one I’m already doing.
I like it because it allows me, and more importantly it challenges me, to improve.
By working on the copies written by others, I’ve got to be able to position myself where I have the ability to work on the copies and improve on them; because if I don’t, I would have no business doing what I’m paid to do.
So I’m on a week’s break, from today, that is. I’m still be playing with words during the period, however — by blogging actively here and in some of my blogs.
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