“Well, I guess I have no use for you.”

I remembered this sentence from a day during my junior year of college. I was a news editorial major in the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. Earlier that summer, I worked at an internship at the Youngstown Vindicator, where I was to write metro or city types of stories, since I knew the area. Unfortunately, two other OU Journalism students also got internships there. They were a year older, and, I suppose more polished, so they got the good stories and I had to create stories based on features, entertainment reviews, and local festivals. This suited me fine, actually, because I was able to write these stories pretty easily. My editor, Carl Basic (an appropos surname to be sure), usually had the red pen out when it came to my stories. This wasn’t unusual. Most interns–hell, most writers–get their first drafts hacked up by editors. Carl Basic made a meal out of my work all summer. I did put together a pretty impressive portfolio, but I’d had my fill of news writing and wanted to move in a different direction–advertising and public relations.

I told this to my advisor, Professor Donald Lambert. A tenured old salt of the newspaper world. He wrote one or two of my textbooks, I think. I told him that based on my experience last summer and my realization that newspaper reporters are not paid very well, that I’d like to switch to public relations as my sequence of my journalism degree.

He closed the book he was reading before I walked in, said,  “Well, I guess I have no use for you,” and ushered me out telling me that I’d need a new advisor.

I looked up the word superdickery in the encyclopedia later that day (this was 1990) and found a full page bleed of Donald Lambert’s face.

What. an. ass. I mean, I saw his point. He had probably seen a lot of promising writers forsake news writing for other sequences and had just given up trying to advise any of them after they moved on. That stuck with me for a while. I can’t remember who replaced him as my advisor–he was an advertising professor whom I’d had for a magazine writing/editing class, but the name escapes me. I’ll always remember Donald Lambert though.

My life has turned out ok jobwise. I’ve sold advertising, written copy, planned and ran events, presented and sold internet services, and raised money for colleges and hospitals. Still, I haven’t done as much writing in my life as I would have liked. I’ve been doing some grant writing recently, and sonuvabitch, if I’m not a really good writer.  I’m going to try to branch out into other forms of writing–for work and for fun. I don’t think I’ll send anything to Professor Lambert though.