Not necessarily banker hours

Back in the old days, people always used to comment on my having “banker’s hours”.

Sometimes that was true. Go to work around 8 (in the morning), get off at 3 or 4 and play a full round of golf at the Choctaw.

Then I switched banking jobs and the hours got longer (egad!). For a while I sold insurance and the hours even got longer (double egad).

After that, tired of 8 a.m. appointments in Texarkana (four hour drive, trust me, I know well), I got another banking job in Poteau at a bank which will not be named because.

Argh! No more banker hours. Worked at least eight hours a day, seldom took a lunch break and figured out shortly the main part of my job was dealing with angry customers.

No, really. So in September I started publishing a little web site called The LeFlore County Journal. I had wanted to do this for a long time. Some days aren’t all that busy and then other days…

Like Friday, for instance. Got up at the crack of dawn, okay, it was actually a little after seven. But there was light shining in my bedroom window! Worked on the web site for a while and decided if I should cover games.

See, I had been sick all week and was finally starting to feel better. I knew it would be a long day, but dangit, the LCJ peeps hopefully wanted results on games involving the three county teams. That would involve a trip to Muskogee for two games and then travel to McAlester to cover another game.

I knew that would get me home around 11:30 or midnight, and then an hour or so writing stories and processing the pictures.

I decided to at least go to Muskogee and see how I felt. So took care of a few Craigdoos and left a little before 11 for Muskogee.

Got to Muskogee early, which was good since I didn’t know for sure where I was going. I covered two ball games (Heavener girls and Spiro boys), which finished around 4:30.

Talihina didn’t play until 8, but again, I wasn’t sure where I was going so off I went down Hwy. 65. Would I get there early enough to check out Pete’s Place? Millions of people undoubtedly wondered the same question.

The answer: No. It was around 5:30 or so when I got to McAlester and nature was calling my name: Craig, you gotta go! So I did, at some nasty convenience store. Good thing it was numero uno and I didn’t have to touch that toilet seat.

I had to go ALL the way through McAlester. I have never seen so many traffic lights bunched together. The lights would turn red as I approached, go green and hit red again at the next light. I would have said an obscenity except I don’t cuss.

Finally, I got outside of McAlester and kept driving. Passed the place where the bad guys go, I could almost feel the bad karma, but then decided it was hunger.

Then, I saw it! The Southeast Expo Center and a rearload of vehicles already parked there. I found a parking spot where a space was probably not an actual parking spot and made my way inside, after a short wait outside.

I thought at first there had to be a mistake. This looked more like a place to show a prized heifer than a basketball game. The seats were forever away from the temporary court and the score clocks were so far away I could barely see them.

But this was it! I waited in line at the concession stand for about 30 minutes and found a seat on the press row. Nobody asked for credentials, which is good because all I had was a bent business card.

I watched a war in the first game between Konawa and Savanna for the area championship. Savanna was huge, Konawa was the fastest team I have seen for girls.

Anyway, Konawa won. Now it was time for Talihina to play Haworth. The teams had to dress a football field away from the court, or so it seemed.

The Tigers blew the game open in the second quarter and cruised to the win. The game ended around 9:30 and there was a traffic jam outside which would make driving in Dallas seem like an easy chore.

I actually escaped the parking lot, shoving my truck in front of some little bitty car, I waved like I was thanking them but could see a scowl on the driver’s face. In fact, I thought for a second they were telling me I was No. 1!

Drove the nearly deserted two-lane highways and again got hammered by the traffic lights in Wilburton. Caught every one of those suckers. Sat there for a minute, while no cars ever appeared to my left or right. Got home around 11:20 or so, got the pics ready, wrote the stories and did some shameless plugging for the stories on the Journal’s Facebook page and finally got to bed shortly before 1 a.m.

So if you count all the hours I put in to driving, writing two stories and posting four pictures, it was a total of 14 hours.

How’s that for web publisher hours?