The brink of new

In a week's time I've gone from hum drum to completely nostalgic for my place of employment.

Tomorrow will be the last day for 30-something colleagues who are choosing to accept a buyout offer. One has been working there for 42 years. 42 YEARS!

I've been there exactly a year and a half. It doesn't seem that long and yet it feels like ages. In recent weeks I feel I've grown even closer to my colleagues. This nostalgia as a chunk of us prepares to leave has made me fall in love all over again with my job, my desk, my coworkers and my industry. The romance is rekindled!

I've been wondering what it must be like for someone who has been there 4, 5, 17, 25 or 42 whopping years to come to their last day of this ingrained routine and to say goodbye to this family of sorts.

It's virtually unfathomable for me at this point, to imagine how that must feel. I'm totally nostalgic for them. And nostalgic for myself that I won't get to spend the next however-many years working with them.

Tomorrow will be one tick in the timeline of "the way things were."

I've entered this business at a strange time. I work with people who have been here since the days of typewriters, since the golden days of newspapers, since the days of a 90% smoked up newsroom, since the days when my job didn't exist. They reminisce about those days, and I suppose in time I will reminisce about the days before our paper shrunk (for the second time since I've been here), for the days before the buyout (the third one since I've been here) and who knows what else.

I can't kick the feeling that we're on the brink of a big turning point. A turning point in a good way. This huge decrease in our numbers will be a sad and difficult hit, but I think those of us who are left (assuming I am even left) will be invigorated with a new fervor to be efficient, beat our competition and pave the way for the future of top-notch journalism.

I have hope that this is the kick we need to get ourselves back up. Our product has never been a problem. It's just our revenue stream. But our product has to change to make way for a new revenue stream.

I need to stay focused. I do not work a 9 to 5 desk job and I can't let myself fall into that slump. If I want to stay here and I want my industry to survive, I have to be highly efficient, highly innovative and highly enterprising. That will be my new mantra.

I am so blessed to have my job. I am not yet sure how it fits into God's plan for my life, but I know it somehow must. The timing of everything, from my serendipitous finding of the job posting, to the fact that my editor replied to my e-mail query, to my ability to graduate early, to the timing of the economic recession and essential hiring freeze. I don't know if the fact that I'm in the city I am or the fact that I work at a newspaper are the key parts of this blessing, but either way I feel compelled to embrace every aspect of it and give it my all.

So tomorrow I will breathe it in and commit it all to memory. I will refocus and begin the next chapter.