Tales from Suburban Bohemia: The Prague Post

This post originally appeared on Stumpy Moose on 30 October, 2001, and was migrated to PraguePig.com on 8 December, 2018.

So I’m back at The Prague Post, working as a business reporter.

I’d spent the last couple of years living an editor’s blameless life, sitting behind a desk and tapping away at my computer, oblivious to the world.

To be back on the front line, picking up the phone and talking to actual people is a shock to the system. Sometimes I even get to go out and meet actual people. It takes some getting used to.

But if you set aside the lonely, sweat-soaked terror of looming deadlines and unreturned phone calls I’m actually quite enjoying it.

I first started working for the Post, an American-owned weekly, in 1997 as a freelance sports writer. (I was also working as a dishwasher in an Irish bar at the time but I tend to gloss over that fact in the authorized biography.)

Back then, staff turnover at the Post rivalled McDonald’s. Pretty soon, the sports editor moved back to Canada and I got her job.

After about a year I was the longest-serving desk editor. I’d managed to persuade the editor-in-chief to use the word “football” instead of “soccer” and I’d covered a professional aerobics tournament. It was time for new challenges.

But while the newspaper and the two web projects I worked for since then are all now things of the past, the Post lives on.

The paper recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, and continues to inform and/or infuriate Prague’s English-speaking population, and they’ve gone back to using the word “soccer”.

Next week I’m writing a story about ostrich farms.