On balance...

There are plenty of things I don't particularly like about my job.

There are long hours - for a start - which mean I frequently start and end the day feeling absolutely buggered and become a hideous snapping shrew to anyone foolish enough to ask me how I'm going. They mean I am constantly late to anything that happens on a weeknight and frequently too buggered to do much on a weekend anyway.

It is also high-stress, and while I guess everyone feels that way about what they do, there is something about working to a daily deadline that precludes much in the way of down time. Ever*.

Then there is the slightly embarassing fact that I'm not actually that frightfully good at it, meaning I frequently find myself lurching from one embarassment to another as gaps (more like chasms) in my knowledge are displayed for all to see, constantly hoping I might get away with it for Just One More Day.

And between you and me the pay's not too crash hot, either.

But the thrill of a day like today when you have a breaking news story that genuinely makes you excited to cover it and - more than anything else - to feel that you've got your part, however small, in what people will read about over their breakfast tomorrow (only the certain types of people who read certain parts of the paper, in my case, obviously) cancels a lot of that out. Exactly what proportion of the crap is cancelled out by the good, precisely, is a calculation to be done by someone with a better grasp of maths than me but it's up there.

Then again, ask me as I drag my corpse-like body out of bed at some ungodly hour tomorrow and I may have rejigged the sums just a little.

(*Also, in hindsight, this comment does seem slightly at odds with the fact that I inevitably DO find time for directionless blogging during work hours and excessive internet perusal for non-work purposes. So, you know, I might be full of crap.)