When your graphics guru takes off the eye patch ...(The Last Laugh)

You're busted!

Admit it. Like many women we meet at conferences and even long-term professional colleagues who've become friends, you read The Last Laugh first.

Then you may browse thru the rest of the issue, marking articles to copy, planning to get back to it later. Some do.

Whether or not you read The Last Laugh first, every month it's there for you. Even tonight, at 9 p.m. on a rainy Sunday night when I was cozied up in my fleece pants and top and sox, I was ready to write this column for the first time on a computer in my new condo. But the computer had other ideas. It refused to admit that it had ever heard of Microsoft Word, repeatedly. Our WIHE director of operations made a house call, and pronounced it inoperable, so I had to write it at the office after all.

Writing The Last Laugh

While most women on campus are familiar with the word deadline, few of you have the specific pleasure of having one come up each and every month.

Because our production schedule calls for the issue to get to the printer's pre-press operation by noon, so negatives and plates can be made that day and the issue goes on press first thing the next morning, there's little wiggle room. If the column isn't finished and we aren't ready by noon, we could lose a day of production and the issue could get mailed 24 hours late. That happened in August 1997 with my column on Carolyn Desjardins' death and in July 2003, with the one on my dog Dickens' death. (Tears can make it tough to see the computer screen.)