Friday, 4 August 2017

#209 Demand and supply

I wrote an article for The Economist today. Sort of. My ex-housemate Naino had forwarded me an advert for an internship that they were offering. The application process involved writing a 600 word post for their Explanations blog.

I decided to write about the increasing use of happiness as a metric for assessing the wealth of nations, rather than traditional measures such as GDP per capita. It was hardly breaking news but a quick review of the publication's history revealed that they hadn't covered it before. Given the inherent value of the subject matter, it seemed like a worthwhile topic.

I spent the afternoon researching and writing the post. Not that I was clock-watching. By the time I clicked 'Save' on the finished draft, it was about 5pm. I decided to PDF the file and ask Naino to review it. I opened up the Word document again and then felt my heart sink. Half of it was missing. I'd definitely saved it. I checked the recent documents list and ran a search. Nothing. Damn it. The one thing I had to do today. I'd never remember those last three hundred words.

I was hungry. I'd been writing for several hours but if I didn't start typing again, I'd forget more of what I'd written. Come on, think. What would a writer for The Economist do? Begrudgingly, I remained in my chair and began typing again. An hour and a half later, I was done. I'd managed to re-write most of what I'd put before and had even added some points.

I sent the final draft over to Naino as intended. She read it quickly and told me that she liked it. I'd always said that writing blog posts was like baking cookies. No matter how bad they turned out, your friends and family would probably still tell you they liked them. Would The Economist like this though? Would they even read it? They'd probably received a thousand entries already. Well now they'd have a thousand and one. "It'd be cool if they gave me some feedback" I thought to myself. Even that would make me happy.

4 comments

Running on empty said...

I hope they accept it!

Fizzfan said...

Good luck Dan.
Must say I admire your cool approach to losing what you wrote. I think my response to a similar situation would have been far less measured, along with the language :)

Profound Familiarity said...

Hahaha :) :)

Running on empty said...

Agree with Fizz.