The Path of Most Resistance by Russell Wangersky

Author:Russell Wangersky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2016-08-11T18:35:57+00:00

The Revolution

The newsroom was dark — the automatic lights worked the same regular hours that most of the reporters did, shutting off exactly thirty minutes after their shift ended and most of them left. Even the technology makes the point, Barry thought, the point that he was on the outside.

Barry could override the system, but he didn’t. He liked the half-light of the place, only the fading sun coming in through the shadows, all of the computer screens dark, the pinpoints of the LEDs flickering brightly on the other machines that never slept.

Barry knew he’d been hired for exactly that shift: overnights, three evenings and always weekends. It had been in the job posting, one that almost no one applied for. Barry Keilly had been ready to pass up on it himself until the producers on the hiring board had suggested — without ever really saying it in so many words — that nights and weekends would be a good jumping-off point, a foot in the door for bigger things.

His foot was still caught firmly in that door. It had taken Barry a full year to realize that, desperate to fill the post, they probably would have told him almost anything. Filling nights-and-weekends was even harder than filling the posts in Labrador, and once they had a warm body in the job, they weren’t likely to shoot themselves in the foot by letting him out of it. And then he’d failed at the negotiation, too. If he hadn’t jumped at the possibility when they’d raised it, he might have been able to sweat an extra week of vacation or more money out of them before agreeing to do it.

But he’d signed on with the very first carrot — the vague possibility of some future offer.

So Barry came to work when the rest of the newsroom was packing up and heading for home or away for the weekend, full of chatter, and ignoring him almost completely in the hand-off. There would always be an email from the news desk about the things they knew were happening and the stories that would have to be updated, and a handful of scripts for him to read in the five-minute, top-of-the-hour newscasts. He knew that it hadn’t always been that way, that once there’d been a technician in the booth as well, so at least there had been someone to have coffee with, but since full automation, everything was done in master control in Toronto. The only thing Barry had to do was walk into the booth, sit down in front of the microphone, watch the second hand tick to the top of the clock, and wait for the red light to turn green.

Barry would read five minutes’ worth of news and a snippet of weather, and then head back upstairs to see if the police had sent any updates about car accidents or forest fires so that he could at least re-top a piece or two.

There was never enough time to actually leave the building and cover a story.

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