It’s 3:30 a.m. A quiet hush has fallen over the Oberlin campus, sleeping under its cold blanket of snow. From somewhere beneath Burton, amidst the clanking noises of hot water rushing through the ancient pipes, come the agonized screams of a layout editor just notified that the article expected to be 700 words long has reached a final count of 350. And then, with a collective sigh, the layout staff and news editors resign themselves to yet another week of sleeping on the couch in the office.

For all those who have ever wondered why anyone who works for the Review is absent either mentally or physically in their Friday morning classes...the answer is here. Since the Grape declined our offer to have an Oberlin Review correspondent, we’re going to do the job ourselves. And maybe, even if you don’t have any more sympathy for the staff after reading this column, you’ll at least come away with a deep sense of gratitude for your Thursday night and Friday morning freedom.

Thursday night and Friday morning freedom...as if we don’t work every other day of the week as well. Well...at least some of us do. But we’ll save that for later. What better place to start this column than the nightmare that is a typical Thursday night?

Let’s picture you as a member of the Oberlin Review staff. We’ll give you one of the jobs that require less hours of work to start out: copy-editing. So, you arrive at 9 p.m. in the office for the night’s second round of copy-editing. The first group of copy-editors is just leaving, having finished their shift that started at around 7p.m. The section editors have been in the office since 6:30 p.m. and by this time have a mountain of articles for you to start working on...right? Yeah — if you’re lucky. If not, your shift might get extended until 1a.m. when, in frustration, the section editors tell you that you can go home and they’ll just edit any more articles that come in themselves.

But before you leave at 1 a.m., you have probably been a witness to any combination of the following: a) complete computer meltdown as the server with all the pages for tomorrow morning’s paper crashes to the accompaniment of some rather creative expletives, b) a journey into the realm of the insane as one cartoon from albinoblacksheep.com — pick a new one each week — gets played in a loop to the tune of hysterical laughter that gets louder as the clock ticks toward midnight, c) a combination of office gossip and inter-section invective as sports realizes that they don’t have that photo of the winning shot from the women’s lacrosse game that they definitely requested on Monday night and d) an assorted variety of other possibly undefinable noises emerging from computers and people.

Had enough yet? Or is this just tempting you to come into the office on a Thursday night and experience for yourself the rich and beautiful culture that is the Oberlin Review? Just wait. In our next installment we will touch on Friday mornings (being here until 12:45 p.m. is still considered morning, right?) and then maybe even turn to the sordid activities of our favorite computer program, Quark!