I refused a reassignment that would have taken me away from hard-news desk work ... not because my performance was poor -- on the contrary, I got an excellent performance review recently -- but because they wanted to develop the other full-time copy editor's hard-news chops. The only way to do so was at my expense, so I said no -- that it was an excellent plan, but not right for me because I had moved past the grunt-work phase of my career (laying out community calendar pages, Food sections and the TV Guide, among other duties). I suggested that they should, paradoxically, not try to hire the most qualified copy editor out there -- stop snickering, now -- and instead hire on some fresh young college grad willing to learn it all from the very bottom up. They seemed to agree. I've been asked to stay on indefinitely, and will do so -- until I can find a better job. I'm quite certain that will happen long before they land somebody willing to work for peanuts in a remote and inaccessible corner of the extreme Pacific Northwest, so I should get the last laugh. In the meantime, we'll be both be using each other -- me a little more than them. It's all good.
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