Worrywart

CHARLEY PORTER is a copyreader on the Daily Times and a copyreader is a funny kind of critter. He is a comma watcher and a word butcher and a mighty tide of judgment set against the news. He's a sort of cross between a walking encyclopedia and an ambulatory index.
Occasionally you meet a reporter or an editor or you see their pictures or you hear them spoken of. But you never hear about a copyreader.
The copyreader sits with his fellow copyreaders at a horseshoe-shaped table. If he's an old time copyreader, like Charley is, he wears a green eyeshade and rolls his shirtsleeves up above his elbows.
Inside the curve of the copy-desk sits the man who directs the copyreaders. Since the inside of the desk is known as the slot, this man is called the slot man. To the slot man comes the daily flow of news; he passes the copy to the men around the desk and they edit it and write the headlines.
Because there is always copy enough to fill twenty times the allotted space, the copyreader must trim all the stories and see there is no excess wordage in them. This brings him into continuous collision with reporters, who see their ornately worded stories come out chopped and mangled, although definitely more readable.
When work slacks off in the afternoon, the copyreaders break their silence and talk among themselves. They talk about the news and debate what can be done about it. If you listened to them, not knowing who they were, you'd swear you were listening in on some world commission faced by weighty problems on which life or death depended.
For your copyreader is a worrier. He worries because each day he handles the fresh and bleeding incidents that shape the course of human destiny, and there probably is no one who knows more surely nor feels more keenly the knife-edge balance between survival and disaster.
CHARLEY PORTER worried more than most. He worried about a lot of things that didn't seem to call for worry.
There was the matter, for instance, of those impossible stories happening in sequence. The other men on the copydesk took notice of them after two or three had occurred, and talked about them—among themselves, naturally, for no proper copyreader ever talks to anyone but another copyreader. But they passed them off with only casual mention.