Volume CXXXII, Number 6 October 25, 2002 f

Giving up their Thursday nights...
KALA HARDACKER
CONTRIBUTOR

I thought it was part of the dream I was having when I heard light tapping on the back door of my apartment last Friday morning. With a quick glance at my alarm clock and half opened eyes, I read 7:03 a.m., and since I had only been sleeping for about three hours, I wasn't too pumped to be woken up. Assuming one of the Brunswick apartment residents had been locked out and needed my resident assistant key, I bounced out of bed and ran to get the door. I did find a locked out resident waiting at my door, but it was my own roommate Kitty, just now arriving home after a long night at the Orient.

She and many other good friends of mine have been devoted to the Orient since our freshmen year. They are not present at the long meals in the dining hall Thursday nights, they weren't there to watch the season premiere of "Friends," they are not part of a bowling team, and they have never been regular attendants of pub night or other "Thursday activities."

Orient staff members are rarely home before 1 a.m. on Thursday nights, even during the weeks that I am out past 2 or 3 a.m.. They give up their entire night-from dinner until the wee hours of Friday morning-to ensure that the Orient is out by lunchtime the next day.

Despite their modest paychecks and (so I've heard) impressive stock of snacks and pizza, the staffers work these long Thursday nights without much compensation. Much of the editorial staff rounds up writers and story topics all week long on top of their Thursday sacrifice. While the Orient staff members are compiling the next edition and stepping around excessive story jumps and cluttered PSA's (terms I have learned from living with an editor), many others of us are out having an otherwise normal, fun Thursday night.

I'd like to take this chance to remind everyone that the Orient doesn't just magically appear in the bins in the Union or on the dining hall counter each Friday as you stroll into lunch.

So thanks, guys, for all you do; waking up at 7 a.m. on a Friday morning made me realize how hard you work and how that commitment sometimes goes unappreciated. I can't imagine that many other Bowdoin students would volunteer for your job, so props to the Orient staff for keeping the oldest continuously published college weekly in the nation available for readers, week after week. We appreciate it.