The threes of late night

There are certain strange things that happen to people when they stay up into the wee hours of the morning every day. First of all, you get tired during the daytime hours when you’re supposed to be awake. This can interfere with classes and can be embarrassing. I won’t discuss how I know this. Secondly, you drink a lot of caffeine. My personal favorites: triple shot espressos from Starbucks, a HOT perfect man from Cool Beans! and Red Bull (sugar free). Thirdly, and most importantly, you start to go kind of crazy, notice simple and strange things and laugh at anything -- even jokes that aren’t jokes. Or funny.
During the day, you have an 80 percent chance of catching a staffer sleeping on one of our two sofas and possibly Riley sleeping on the floor. Amanda, the girl at Starbucks, knows me and probably other staffers by name. We go down in groups to get our caffeine dosage around 11 p.m. So, while we have all three signs that we stay up too late in the newsroom, it’s the third that sometimes affects us in very strange ways.
I feel the need to share the most recent “crazy” things with you because they aren’t quite important or interesting enough to make a story, but I really want to tell more people than the guys at SGTV.
So strange thing No. 1: there’s a stone -- a very hot stone -- on the Russell House Patio while walking between the RH and the library. One cold night, a couple of staffers left the paper late to find some freezing kids lying across the walkway. When asked what they were doing, they replied that they were cold and wanted to get warm on the hot rock. Night after night now, on rainy, freezing and warm nights me and my late-night staffers will stop to check the rock. It’s always hot. On rainy days, its dry while the rest of the stones are wet.
Strange thing No.2: If you clap your hand over the center stone in the circle by the RH patio, it will sound sort of like an eagle. I was shown this by John Cooper, SGTV’s station manager, another late night a couple of months later. I’m not sure how someone discovered that clapping your hands over that stones makes a funny sound, why anyone would care or how it happens at all, but like I said, strange things happen late at night.
Even stranger, we can make a paper on nights like these. Sometimes we giggle uncontrollably over headlines that sound kind of dirty and sometimes we guzzle cups of coffee for enough energy to laugh. But that’s the nature of our wonderful jobs. Late nights with no sleep, coffee and very strange experiences.

-- Liz White
Editor in chief