John Foley

We just met a key deadline in my yearbook class. Failing to meet that deadline would have been a big deal — graduating seniors would not have received their yearbooks before they walked. I became concerned a couple of weeks ago, when I asked if we’d make the deadline and received an unnerving “I hope so” instead of the “absolutely!” I craved. But the editors came through in the clutch, putting in long hours during the school day and remaining in the class until after midnight recently to get the job done — and done with panache. I walked in the following morning to see junk food wrappers around the computers and a note on the board announcing their triumph…That’s real life stuff, meeting deadlines, and it feels terrific when you do so…I miss deadlines myself. As a newspaper reporter, I had a deadline just about every day, and I came to enjoy the pressure. Some people respond well to such pressure, some do not. I remember, in my early days, an editor standing over another reporter and yelling, “I need the story now! I need it right #$%&@ now!” as the rookie frantically typed — and then threw up his hands, started crying and quit the business. I’ve also seen the flipside of that scene, an editor yelling and a reporter yelling right back, saying she’d be done in a minute, and being true to her word. Nobody held grudges over such sniping; it went with the territory of deadlines — those terrible, glorious, crisis-filled crucibles.