Stringers used to send three or four pages of hand-written foolscape papers, which, when edited, turned out to be just single column stories. I wonder how the scene is now. In those days, there was no re-writing desk and the sub-editors had to do all the dirty work of re-writing, editing and making a page. It was a tough job but it improved one's editing skills and my patience and perseverance too. So how could one be blamed for opting to take a few hours for a harmless passion like watching a football match? I footed hefty petrol bills for this by the way, but could not claim the travelling allowance. One's desk job also threw up some funny situations. For one, there was the traditional rivalry between sub-editors and reporters -- an unpalatable and unacknowledgeable fact to many. In the Herald, we had another kind of rivalry. This running feud was between compositors and sub-editors on the Goa desk. The intensity of this feud became more pronounced during the night shifts. It used to turn into a bitter fight complete with the usage of the choicest abuses available. Department of Information press notes (trust the politicos and their wise words of wisdom to have a hand in any kind of fight) and hard copies sent by stringers were the cause. The compositors used to concentrate on composing advertisement, after reporting to work regularly irregular, while we sub-editors breathed down on their necks to type our stories which were our life-line to fill the page. I think that Herald was the only place which recruited an assortment of a government servant, wannabe-advocate and a shoe-shop vendor as compositors. In short, Herald became their heart break club. Mehboob was one of the finest composer we had, although he could not discern the difference between bail and jail. One night shift, I gave him a faxed copy from Margao bureau filed by Minoo Fernandes. It was a court case and Radharao Gracias was the advocate for a defendant. Our man, Mehboob, usually is deadpan on the keyboard but that particular day, he finished it on time. When I opened the copy, suddenly, the story seemed to be different from what I had read earlier. Wondering whether I got my story wrong, I rechecked the hard copy and found that apparently, Mehboob misread the surname of Radharao wrongly and so it read like Advocate Radharao Greasiness instead of Gracias. From that day onwards, I opened a new file called 'MTV Enjoy' and stored all the bloomers of composed copies, courtesy Mehboob. This same guy, during the Lent season, decided to skip work on Maundy Thursday, because someone told him that Good Friday fell on Thursday that particular year. All said and done, Mehboob was a sweet guy because he would come with delicious beef kebabs for all of us during Ramzan evenings.