Some parts of my job are a lot more exciting than others.
On the plus side, you have the more interesting stuff, such as meeting famous or well-known people, like musicians, congressmen, United States senators and governors. I have met and interviewed every Kentucky governor going back to Brereton Jones.
One time I met Golden Globe an Oscar nominated actress Julie Anne Moore when she was down at one of the Whitley County elementary schools filming a promotional thing for Save the Children.
There is an old television and movie saying that the camera adds 10 pounds, which may be entirely true. The odd thing that really stood out to me meeting Moore in-person was just how incredibly thin she was in real life.
Perhaps the most interesting interview that I ever did with a famous person was with Kentucky Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert F. Stephens, who wrote the 1989 landmark decision declaring funding for the Kentucky education system to be unconstitutional. This directly led to the passage of the Kentucky Education Reform Act, which was a major deal for school districts for much of the 1990s.
He was quite an interesting man.
Then there are some other aspects of the job, which aren’t so interesting, such as sitting behind my desk uploading pictures and stories to our website and our Facebook page. (Much caffeine is usually needed for that job…LOL.)
One of the more time consuming, monotonous tasks I have each week is doing the public records page. You know it’s the page with the deeds, marriage licenses, lawsuits, district court records and inspections.
This has proven over time to be one of the more popular features in the newspaper.
There were a handful of occasions about 20 years ago where this page has been in a second section of the paper along with the obituaries, and that section didn’t get inserted into the regular paper due to technical difficulties. Boy did we get some upset callers when that happened.
Typing in the inspections that we get from the Whitley County Health Department is a little less monotonous. There is a little more variety there as you have inspections from local restaurants, country stores, coffee shops, schools, swimming pools and tattoo parlors among other things.
The public schools and swimming pools usually have really good inspections with many scoring a 100. When we first started running the health department inspections, I was concerned that I might never want to eat out again if I had to type in the inspections, but I was relieved to find out that most of our restaurants are pretty clean overall.
Some of our trailer parks, motels, and country stores, shall we say, struggle sometimes.
A trend that I have seen as of late for a lot of places is a lack of signs telling people, and specifically employees, to wash their hands after using the restroom.
This one has really surprised me as it is incredibly easy and cheap to fix.
Fire up the word processor on your computer, type in a few words, hit print, take print out, take a piece of tape and put on bathroom mirror. Stores, restaurants and others please fix this. It is really aggravating me.
