The year’s just started, but we’ve an early, strong candidate for the worst blog post of 2014.
Over at the Gazette, while working a white-collar job as editorialist and blogger in blue-collar Janesville, Greg Peck has a 1.7.14 entry entitled, My job is “stressful”? Well no kidding.
Blogger Peck writes that a study listing news reporting as a stressful job doesn’t surprise him, since he’s a blogger, editorialist, and sometime reporter. I don’t doubt that Peck considers these tasks stressful, and that reporters consider their lives difficult.
There’s just one problem: no matter what Peck or a few others might believe, there’s simply no catalog of hardships that reasonably includes blogging, writing editorials, or spending a ‘part of each day reporting.’
Peck contends that “[i]it’s not surprising that this is a stress-filled job. (That beard you see in the accompanying picture once was black, and the bald spot on the back of my head is growing).”
Oh, dearie me.
You see, Mr. Peck tells us that his days are
….perpetual races against the clock. I get up at 5 a.m. As I write this from home before many of you have eaten breakfast, I have to hurry even more this morning because I have a 9:30 dental appointment. If I’m writing an editorial for the next day’s paper, I’m supposed to have it ready for editing and posting on our website by 11 a.m. so it catches the eye of lunchtime web readers. It’s not always possible….
I try to exercise at the athletic club three times a week. That, too, is not always possible. If some other commitment comes up on one of my three usual evenings, that workout gets scrapped. Even getting there is a stressful race—particularly on Thursdays when I play racquetball and sometimes arrive for our 6:30 p.m. court time still dressed in my workday attire, not even finding time to swing home and toss on a sweat shirt and jeans….
Contra Peck, actual stress is having no breakfast, having no job, having a job where one is exposed to the elements, or being unable to leave work for routine medical appointments. Stress has no credible claim on those who have club memberships, and whine about not playing racquetball thrice weekly.
I’ve been blogging for years, and yet there has never been a day when I’ve counted blogging among the hardships of life, in Whitewater or any community. There are sometimes disappointing or absurd moments of politics and policy about which to write, but there’s never been a day when blogging or similar pursuits have been – or could be – legitimately stressful.
To think otherwise – especially in places that have suffered genuine misfortunes – isn’t simply to be wrong, but to be wildly, laughably wrong.
Peck’s post may be a poor attempt at a joke; if he’s serious, one may confidently conclude that he’s actually anything but serious.
Either way, a list of the worst blog posts of 2014 now has at least one solid candidate.