Signs of change

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I got a haircut yesterday. Not just a trim. I didn’t just get my normally-shaggy hair neatened up a bit. Oh no. That’s too easy. I got a chop. As in electric clippers instead of scissors and piles of hair on the ground.

It felt really good to get the haircut. In reality, it was a great cap to the week, I think. It seemed only fitting that my appearance changed drastically because I think I changed fairly drastically this week as well.

This last week saw a lot of violence in the Quad Cities. It started last weekend with a double homicide in Rock Island. It came to a head Wednesday with a shooting in East Moline that left a man named Kelton Trice dead and a police officer named Tom Peterson wounded. And I was right in the thick of it.

I was lucky enough to go to the press conference where Rock Island police announced they had made an arrest in the double homicide. I came back and then interviewed some relatives of one of the victims. By the time I got back from doing that, the shooting had happened in East Moline and the newsroom was in full swing.

I jumped right into the fray. I made phone call after phone call, frantically taking notes. I yelled details back and forth to my editors as they put them online. I made more phone calls. I got a lot of information that a lot of other people couldn’t get or hadn’t yet gotten. I wrote quickly. I made more phone calls and wrote more. All in all, it was a 12-hour shift for me.

The following day – Thursday – was spent cleaning up. There was all sorts of stuff to follow up on with the East Moline shootings. I was one of four reporters dealing with it. Again I worked the phones. Again I took frantic notes that I could barely read and put them into coherent sentences. It was not as long a day, but I was still running on all cylinders.

And when all was said and done, I was not the same person. For the first time in my (admittedly short) professional career, I did not feel like a rookie reporter. I didn’t feel like the new kid. The editors gave me a big job and I did it really well. And I got compliments from other reporters. They all said my work was pretty first-rate. The editors said so, too.

I’ve been having a rough time at work of late. My confidence was not high. My work was not what it should have been in terms of quality. But I think this was the boost I needed. I proved to myself that I can handle the big jobs. And I turned a lot of heads doing it. I proved to the veteran reporters I look up to that I’m not just the punk kid out of college, but instead am one of them. I proved to the editors that they trust me with big jobs. I’m not a rookie reporter anymore.

And so the haircut seems like a good way to end it all. After all, I feel like a pro for the first time. Why shouldn’t I look the part?

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Filed under QC life, The reporter's life

Tags: Quad Cities, reporting, haircut, East Moline, Kelton Trice, Rock Island, double homicide, Tom Peterson