Feb. 17, 2011:

I’ve been helping a newspaper make the move from QuarkXPress to InDesign this week, and it reminded me of a conversion I was a part of more than a decade ago.

When I was in California, the newspaper where I worked upgraded to the latest version of QuarkXPress, and the company they hired sent out a team to help with the transition. They worked diligently through the weeks, converting templates and running scrippts and just in general, making sure the conversion went OK. We got to know one woman pretty well, as she worked with us most nights on the copy desk.

When their time was winding to a close, they hosted a party for the newsroom, sort of as a “thank you” before they headed out to their next job. We gathered at their rented three-story beach house ($3,000/week) and dined on smoked trout and some cute party trays (they had an $1,800 food budget to use up). The woman who helped us on the copy desk said the most difficult part of the job was that she was away from home for weeks at a time, and it was difficult to see her girlfriend and family with any regularity.

But still, she admitted, the job was pretty sweet.

So as I help teach these new newsroom employees the ins and outs of InDesign, and listen as they bemoan Quark and all its little, well, quirks, I think of those golden years, before the Internet bust, when software upgrades came with a beach house and a fat expense budget.

And I remain thankful that there is a little room with four computers and the chance to teach someone something new.