The blush of a Friday morning sunrise spreads its rosy glow over the Oberlin campus. The air is filled with the sweet, light chirping of songbirds as they gently shake their feathers. From the basement of Burton comes the sound of a telephone hitting the floor with a crash. And then the cheerful “good mornings” of the Friday 5:30 a.m. shift cover up the resulting offensive language emerging from the couch, where the chief news editor has been sleeping for the past few hours? Minutes? It just depends on the week.

But you’ve had some sleep, being a copy editor on the Thursday 7 p.m. shift, so you’re ready to start back in correcting italicized commas in the headers and trying to decide if that administrator’s job title should be capitalized because it comes before their name. The pages of each section of the paper are printed out and waiting for your colored marker to decorate. Five or six times. Per page. Before 11 a.m.

As people begin to trickle into the office the noise and stress levels increase moment by moment. Well ...until someone tells the story of how last night one of the layout editors, in an attempt to enlarge a photograph in the layout, somehow managed to activate a very strange little quirk in the program. The editors insist that a little multicolored gnome emerged from the left side of the screen, marched over to the photo, shot it with a magic wand, and made it explode into 16-color glory. Both gnome and photo then promptly disappeared. (And before the Grape decides to run an article about our “drug habits,” you should know that, according to our computer manager and Google, there are “Easter Egg” animations programmed into Quark that can cause things like this to occur.)

The resulting laughter and denials break the tension for a moment. Then the phone rings. “Oberlin Review...yes...20 pages...I don’t know, maybe 45 minutes?...Yes, I understand...” The hush of people suddenly working furiously is only obscured by the bad iTunes music blasting from one computer.

11 a.m. rolls around and for some reason — it couldn’t possibly be that copy-editing is a long and perfectionist process that makes your eyes glaze over and turns your brain to mush — the paper just isn’t ready to send. Oh yeah...and did anyone notice that the headline on the lead sports story hasn’t been changed from “Volleyball team spikes human heads”? And don’t forget that you haven’t fixed that italicized comma yet!

Oh no...but you came in at 5:30 a.m. You should definitely be gone by now. But since you are so dedicated...maybe you could help us out next week by doing layout? We’ll pay you for your time. And you won’t have to turn yourself into a myopic copy-editing micro-processor. Instead, you can do the newspaper equivalent of playing Tetris for a few hours. It’ll be good for you. People always say that change is a recipe for rest and relaxation. And you’ll get your own personal ticket to the cruise vacation that is Quark on the beautifully outfitted cruiseliner “Titanic II.”