well, when i started summer job hunting, i had no intentions of working for an actual professional company like the oklahoma press association, where my dad is the exec vice prez (aka the boss man). i worked in a doctor’s office last summer as an “administrative assistant” (i don’t get my panties in a wad when called a secretary, though), but that was only so i could rake in the big bucks to use as spending money for my study abroad last fall. this summer, my highest aspiration was to be a starbucks barista or a movie/music guru at randy’s m&m, the local, well, music/movie store “chain” of three stores.
but then the girl who did the full-time “page shooting” (getting there, don’t worry) at my dad’s office, OPA, quit at the beginning of the summer, so the head advertising lady gave me a call and asked if i wanted to give it a try, since they knew i needed a job i could start immediately and then they wouldn’t have to waste time hiring someone while the workload piled up. this is a job that has to be done literally every day to keep up with the times.
so what do i do? it’s really actually interesting. the majority of my job is to sit in the basement and use a camera/computer setup contraption to take pictures of each individual page of (now) about half of the newspapers published in oklahoma. when they started the program, they had to do it for every paper, including the hooj ones like the tulsa world and the oklahoman and all of that. luckily, they now upload their PDFs to the program so it saves me some work.
so why am i taking pictures of newspapers? well, how it ends up: let me show you it. these pictures are uploaded to a program that rotates and reads them, and the other part of my job is to enter the program and search, using keywords in a boolean search, to find advertisements based on ad order number and an image of the ad i’m supposed to find, and make sure the ads ran in the right papers on the right dates.
it sounds pretty tedious, and sometimes it is, but it’s actually a really neat concept. the program just got started about a year ago, and we’re now selling subscriptions to it so people or companies can find articles that mention them or that they would be interested in (or for a higher fee, we can find those articles for them).
but my favorite part of the job, and the reason i’m writing this post is that a lot of the newspapers i see are small-town papers, the kind that make people think we’re so redneck (most of us aren’t, promise). and since the files get saved, i can access them anytime i want. so here are a few of my favorites 
these two links are PDFs – just be warned. i know i hate it when i accidentally click on a PDF and it takes a long time, so i just wanted to let you know. but “pet of the week” and “snakes slithering among us” are worth it.
these just make me laugh. one of them is in “rough” form before it got changed by the program, but that’s the only copy i could find today. still pretty hysterical.
