“I was just offering since Holman’s gone. I thought maybe you’d like to see what it’s like to work with a reporter who isn’t certifiably insane. That goofy Canuck puts the ‘eh’ in crazy, know what I’m saying?” He laughed again, this time harder.
My anger spiked. I’d had it. It was one thing to condescend to me, but to insult Holman was taking it too far. Holman was a great reporter and a stellar human being, albeit a little quirky, but to hear him disparaged by this overgrown frat boy made my blood boil. I was about to let that nationalistic son-of-a-bitch have it when he started laughing again.
“Geez, you should see your face right now,” he said. “You need to learn to take a joke, kiddo. Relax.”
I didn’t consider myself overly sensitive, but if there is one thing that really lit my fire, it was people telling me to relax. I used to get that kind of thing all the time in college. It was usually some random guy who just told some off-color joke that I didn’t laugh at. Relax, they’d say, lighten up. It made me want to punch them in the throat. So far I had never resorted to actual violence, but Gerlach Spencer might be my first victim.
“You know—” I started to say, but his phone rang (he had a “Who Let the Dogs Out” ringtone) and he cut me off by answering it. “Oh yeah?” he said, looking right at me. For a minute I thought it was someone calling to tell him I’d been out working on the story. I froze, waiting. But then after a few silent seconds he said, “Be right there.” He lowered his phone and gave me a self-satisfied smirk. “That was one of my sources calling with a tip on a lead in the Davenport story.”
“Who?” I asked. “What’d they say?”
“I thought you didn’t want to work on the story with me?” He snorted out a gruff laugh. “Guess you’ll just have to wait to read about it online like everybody else.”
Hey Riley,
Okay, so it sounds like this Kreplach guy is a total nothingburger. But I have something that I think is perfect for this situation! Bestmillenniallife.com just launched their BURN BABY BURN app for iPhone and Android. It’s available in the App store for a one-time fee of $4.99, but trust me when I say it’s totally worth it!
The app allows u to choose from a drop-down menu of frustrations typical in Millennial life and then provides u with customizable responses. Example: Next time this Spencer dude calls u an intern, u simply find “underestimate” on the drop-down menu, select “co-worker,” select “male,” select “age-range 35+” and the app will instantly generate a burn like this one: “Whatever, you pimple-hunting kebab basket.”
The beauty of the BURN BABY BURN app is that although the burns are totally random, people from older generations will think they are Millennial code for something and spend forever wondering—or better yet, Googling—what it means. How hilarious is that? There is seriously nothing funnier than an old person trying to figure out slang on the internet! It was actually developed by some guy in IT as a joke against his parents, but the people up the food chain at BML.com loved it so much they totally monetized it. Turns out, it’s one of our biggest sellers. Anyway, in the wise words of Ryan Gosling, “Hey girl, you need this.”
xx,
Jenna B.
Personal Success Concierge™
Bestmillenniallife.com
CHAPTER 26
Fuming, I went back to my desk to focus on a couple of my more mundane stories: a write-up on the progress of the new roundabout at the corner of Fifth and Towns and a piece on last week’s ice cream social at the Methodist Church. Once I got through those, I decided to focus on the obit. I knew I needed to knock that out of the park if I was going to impress Kay enough to be put back on the crime beat in the future. So I pulled up the draft of the obit I had and gave it a quick read. It was coming together, but was still missing something. I had the basic outline of his life covered well enough, his early life, family history, professional achievements—still, it felt dry and stale. I needed to do more showing and less telling, as my high school English comp teacher would have said. Dr. Davenport was by all accounts a good doctor who meant a lot to his patients. What I needed was a glimpse of him from that angle. Maybe I could start with a vignette, a story in which Arthur Davenport was doing something so characteristic of him that readers who knew him would nod their heads and smile, and make the readers who didn’t know him wish they had.
I combed through page after page of notes, but I couldn’t find that one ace-in-the-hole story that I was looking for. But the theme that kept emerging as I looked over what I’d learned about Dr. Davenport was that his work defined him. Nearly everyone I spoke to called him either a “workaholic” or said he was “unbelievably dedicated” or something along those lines. I thought back to Flick’s advice about wanting to bring the deceased back to life, if only for a few paragraphs. Yes, it would have to be a story about his life as a physician, as someone who saved people’s lives, that would open this obit. But I didn’t have anything I could use yet. I picked up the phone and dialed Tuttle General.
Fred Kander had taken the position of hospital administrator four years ago, at the age of twenty-nine. Most people in Tuttle Corner were openly skeptical about a man his age being able to run the hospital that served four counties. But
