Tube Strike = Armageddon

The past couple of days have been a little bit crazy, especially at work.

 Today at work was our press day, so everything had to be done. Shandi and I were on a roll yesterday, calling to ask last minute questions, doing small interviews with salons for our feature about Most Desirable Salons, searching for pictures to put next to names, and finding a replacement for our Reader Panel, but then the power went out in our whole building! It was chaos considering that a lot of the magazines in our building were going to press the same day as us. We sat around trying to do things without a computer, which proved to be quite difficult. Eventually, our editors decided to give up and figured they could do a lot of their work from home. But they left us measly little interns to stand guard and call if the power returned. We literally had to sit around a deserted dark building and stare at our computers hoping they would switch back on. Around 3:00, one of the head honchos of the building came around and told us that the power was not coming back and that if the fire alarms were not working we had to go home anyway because it was a fire hazard to stay. He didn’t have to say this to many people being as Shandi and I were pretty much the only ones there. So we called Jenni, our editor, and told her the situation. She let us go home at which point we had to begin working. We worked until 6:30 and it was way more exhausting than being at the office. We had none of the resources we usually have and we were communicating with Jenni via e-mail. We phoned reader panels, wrote little blurbs to go with our feature, and figured the final order of our top 50 salons before calling it quits. It was a very long day!

Today was not any less chaotic. As of 19:00 last night, the city of London's tube Union workers went on strike. All tube stations have been shut down for 48 hours. For millions of people who commute to work everyday via the tube (including myself), this is the equivalent of Armageddon.  The tube ride to our work usual takes about 40 minutes, so walking the whole way was out of the question. We had to figure bus routes to work, which was exactly what everyone else in the city did. We ended up waiting for a bus for 30 minutes, pushing our way onto a crammed Baker Street bus, we took that bus for about 40 minutes, and then couldn't find another bus that was empty enough to get on. We had to walk (partially blind due to the fact we had no idea where we were) for 45 min. The cherry on the sundae was it started raining (no umbrella). We finally arrived at the office 40 minutes late (we left 2 hours early, too). Once we got there it was straight to business. We had to edit every single page, look up new statistics, call for product prices and find two new people who we could interview and get pictures from for Reader Panel. We had to leave early from work to try and get to class by bus. We got most of our stuff done at work, hopped on a bus, got lost, walked 20 minutes and got to class about 10 minutes late :)

Good news is since we worked Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.. we don't have to work until next Monday! Yay!