Title: The “Lost” Issue
Informant Info: Charles Jang is an Executive Editor Emeritus and former Office Manager of The Dartmouth Review. He is a ’16 from Fort Worth, TX. He was interviewed on May 24, 2016 at the Review office in Hanover, NH.
Type of Lore: Verbal, Legend
Language: English
Country of Origin: United States
Social / Cultural Context: Adobe InDesign is the program used by the Review to digitally create the issues. The informant is also one of the major characters in this story. The legend refers to actual events and serves to remind its listeners within the Review that working at the Review is not all fun and games. This legend makes light of the difficult work that goes into the issues.
Transcript:
There’s another time that we thought we had lost an entire issue. This is one of our previous Editors, and so we didn’t finish laying out the issue but we made a lot of progress one night, and our editor was in class, and I didn’t have class that morning so I decided to head into the office early and get some work done on laying out some more pieces. And so I got to the saved file for like, May 20th, whatever, and I look and to my horror there is the cover and 15 blank pages, and I started going into a panic attack and I texted our editor, and he started panicking and we’re both freaking out because we have to lay the entire issue that night, and I decide to make the job easier and to start laying out as much as i can, so I go into all of the template pages and I start to paste the articles into the page template, and then I finally open the cover template and the entire issue is saved there. It’s just that we have a love-hate, kind of a love-hate-hate relationship with InDesign, which is the program we use to edit our paper, because our editor, he was famous for just quietly typing away, clicking away, trying to get everything to fit on the page, he’s kind of like a volcano, he’d just like be sitting there quietly mumbling under his breath, and scotch sipping intensifies, and then when something just goes entirely wrong he just throws down the mouse, says “screw InDesign,” and just walks away for awhile. His hatred for InDesign was pretty legendary. He used more pungent language than I did there.
Collector’s Comments: One of the collectors has actually attempted to use InDesign. It is a slow, frustrating, and irritating process. The struggle of laying out the issue in InDesign is a unifying experience in the Review, and making fun of it through legends helps bring the organization together. Angry, almost violent outbursts at InDesign’s perceived faults are common within the organization.