Sometimes You Need A Stressful Morning

via frontrowfuture.com

Tuesday morning was stressful. I didn’t bit my laptop, but I seriously considered poking my pens in my eyes before 7:30 a.m.

Thanks to the release of the the School Performance Index (or SPI), my morning was flipped upside down. It isn’t as bad as I’m making it out to be, but I had my morning all planned out before I got in.

I have a bunch of stories to get in the paper and they got pushed aside. Mike said he only needed me to write the local roundup for Tuesday morning. That’s all he needed from me, but I didn’t want to pitch him something else because I was worried the SPI story would suffer.

Call it apprehension or a lack of confidence, but I really didn’t want to screw up the SPI story. I had a bunch of ideas ready to go, but I didn’t want to overwhelm myself.

The story  “Local schools fare well“  actually came out okay. Only 20 percent of the people I called got back to me, so the story wasn’t over-budget. I actually got pretty nervous after I made all of my initial calls when no one was getting back to me. I had a good 40 minutes of nothing before I slowly got people to either pick up the phone or call me back.

I can’t remember the last time I got that stressed, but it kept me on my toes. I needed some fear, for lack of a better word. It was a wake up call for me to not get comfortable. I need to be on my toes and I need to be ready for anything.

Granted I didn’t pout, I should have been more than happy to put aside everything that I wanted to do for Mike and the paper. And like Mike always says it’s not about doing something easy, it’s about doing something hard because you know you can do it. Louisa, who wrote the Windham sidebar, and I pulled through and had close to 35″ total for both stories. It all came out great and we got a “good job” from Mike, which almost never happens.

Same time next week? I hope not!

Jonathan