It had been a long day.
Approximately 5 hours after I went to sleep on the night of the National Championship game, I woke up at 7 a.m. to pass out copies of The Daily Tar Heel.
I had then been promptly bombarded by a line of over 500 people for two hours while I ran between the Pit and the Student Stores parking lot to pick up more and more bundles of the paper.
After that, I attended two of my three classes (Data Journalism and Media Law made the cut, Feminist Literary Theory did not) and then went to the DTH. It was packed that day —we had a line outside of our office that wrapped around the building and stretched all the way to the corner of the street. While I passed the line and went in to read with a couple of equally cranky and tired writers, I knew the real work hadn’t happened yet.
After an hour at the office, I left with the other assistant on my desk and the City editor to the Dean Dome to hand out papers at the welcome home ceremony for the basketball team. I had thought the line at the Pit was bad — it was nothing compared to this. While the students and faculty that morning had been polite, the pushy families and entitled alumni filing into the stadium were anything but.
The paper was free, but we could only hand out one copy per person. I had to argue with elementary schoolers, dads and grandmothers to make sure I stuck to that rule. Less than 30 minutes in I was sweating bullets as I tried desperately to keep up with the crowd forming around me.
I started handing out papers robotically, not bothering to check who was on the receiving end and only snapping out of it when someone tried to fight my one-per-person rule. I came to as a tall blonde in front of me blinked, paused for a moment, spoke in a voice that I recognized from a press conference, of all places.
“Can I actually —,” Taylor Koenen started.
“Take as many as you want,” I said, surely eliciting groans from the sea of argyle around me.
