Archive: September, 2014 - Gary Borders

Back On The Sidelines

High school football season is approaching the halfway mark, with a half-dozen games left on the regular-season schedule. If one of the teams we cover makes it into the playoffs — and I hope they all do — naturally we will continue covering football. And that means I will continue pacing the sidelines, trying to get an action shot in focus while not getting creamed by a player knocked out of bounds. Before this season commenced, the last time I shot football we photographers still used film instead of digital. As it happens I was running the Fort Stockton Pioneer for the same company I am again...

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Adventures of a Word Nerd

I am a word nerd. Etymology fascinates me. I try not to use 50-cent words when a dime’s worth will do, but sometimes I can’t resist tossing in a word that might not be used in everyday conversation. I have learned the hard way to double-check anytime I venture into territory commonly occupied by the likes of George Will — the longtime conservative columnist who has the average reader reaching for a dictionary every few paragraphs. My trip to the literary woodshed came several years ago, when I confused “approbation” and “opprobrium” in a column. I used the latter, which means “a...

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Customer Service: An Oxymoron?

I listened the other day to a phone conversation between a customer and a Comcast employee that has gone viral on YouTube. National Public Radio even did a short piece about it. A fellow is trying to cancel his service because he is switching providers. He recorded the last eight minutes of a 20-minute dialogue with the customer service rep. Comcast is the country’s largest cable and Internet provider, and it hopes to buy Time-Warner, the second-largest provider of those services. This would be a merger of two of the most-despised companies when it comes to customer service, according to an annual...

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Old Photo of a Young Soldier

I came across an old photo while we were cleaning out files to prepare to move the newspaper office. The sepia-toned print is of a nice looking young man in an Army dress uniform. His tie is tucked into the shirt, cap on his head, and a slight smile on his face. Someone had written below on the cardboard frame, “Staff Sgt. Lee H.C. An inscription, likely from Lee is on the flap of the frame, which seemed to have served as a protective envelope for mailing. It is torn now, but the barely legible inscription reads: To Momma and Auntie. The photo was accompanied by a typewritten piece of blue...

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