This is my last regularly scheduled column, though you’ll still hear from me when the spirit moves me.ĭamn, but I have been in an awfully privileged position for an awfully long time, though. I haven’t heard from him in a while, but hope he will be comforted to learn that he’ll no longer have to endure me that often. That was more than 4,000 columns ago - way too many for one particularly distraught reader who would periodically send letters imploring me to please, please, please stop writing. One day, just for fun, I wrote an (attempted) humour column, which eventually morphed into a full-time job. “CHEK television is right next door.” Sorry, CHEK. “I think what you have is more of a visual story,” I told him. He had popped by, he said, to divulge the seven top-secret secrets of the world, one of which was that Britain and the Soviet Union had engaged in a nuclear-weapon-testing competition that had knocked the Earth off its axis so badly that ships could no longer navigate by the stars. On one occasion, all alone in the newsroom at 1 a.m., I looked up to find a man whose coat was festooned in school track-meet ribbons. I spent my first seven years working nights, which is when a lot of the weird stuff happened. Once, in the wee hours of the morning, the night crew gathered in the parking lot to watch two guys settle a you’re-fatter-than-I-am argument with a foot race.

We had a switchboard operator who twice lit her purse on fire while trying to sneak a smoke.

I had a boss who, after a tough day, would kick another dent into my already-dented pick-up truck. The cot in the first aid room made sense, but the stairwell just looked painful.Īs it turned out, no such perks were on offer - at least to me - by the time I first climbed those stairs, though employees did get half-price newspaper subscriptions. LONG AGO, on my first day at the Times Colonist, I was toured around the building by an editor who cheerfully pointed out places where people had had sex. Jack Knox in the newsroom at the Times Colonist.

Jack knox dallas