My Day

This might sound like a random post, but I'm going to just do this as a kind of log of my day. In news weird things happen and today was just odd. I don't know why, maybe the reason is I was working with The Serg, those days always seem odd.

When I got to work I could not get into the building. For the past year and few months we have been using these key fobs" on our key chains, but that was not good enough. They recently decided to go with the lanyard and ID bag. There has been some discourse over this system, but I don't care, we had it at The Network and it was fine. The problem was, I'm not use to the badge yet and I left it at home. So all day I had to either borrow some one's badge or coordinate my comings and goings with people schedules. Of course I'm the first one to forget my badge... yeah me. I know I have a tendency to be a little flaky, but to be the first really sucks.

It's hard to explain working with The Serg sometimes, it's not a bad thing, but our conversations go all over the place. We have had actually people listen into our conversations and tell us we are strange. We had time to kill so we stopped off at a local coffee shop called the Mad Hatter. That led to me talking about why the mad hatter was actually crazy. I though it was starch in the hat, but, it's actually mercury vapor used in hat making. Then that divulged into crazy relatives, and then into all the people around us using lap tops, then strange movie characters. It's rather fun way to waste time, I never know where the conversation may lead but I will know that it will some how always go back to Emo Phillips, Paul Lynn, Las Vegas New Mexico, and Ice Pirates.

While at the Mad Hatter I was asked "What kind of milk?" for my drink. I was confused, many of you might know what she was getting at, I missed it by a mile. As I was about to say cow she could tell I was about to say something stupid. "You know skin, 2% or whole." I seriously thought they had options on what animal the milk came from. This was a froo froo coffee place and you never know, maybe I had a choice between cow, goat, llama or some other exotic animal.

We finally get back to our OH SO exciting story... drought and construction at city hall. If you want to know my least favorite story ideas that's all three right there: drought, new construction whoas and meetings. Plus we had one of our beat reporters there as well, she was not pleased we were on "her turf," but hey, I didn't pick the story. Well, our story changed within the first 10 minutes of the story. Durham city council honored the officers that caught the suspected killer of Eve Carson and Abhijit Majahato. It's a meeting, but the mayor wants to find out why these guys were let out on bond with multiple court hears within the near future. He felt that they system did not check itself and Durham has to do something so this will not happen again. I'm giddy, this is much better than our other story, yet who gets it... us the night side crew or the beat reporter. I look at it this way, dayside are the lions we are the hyenas and they are the other animals. You see our original story was taken by dayside so we had to find something else and that else was Durham city council. In the wild the hyenas kill the prey and then the lions scare off the hyenas and have their fill. The hyenas get the left overs and what ever is left is up for grabs. I hate doing that to the beat reporter, but we HAD to turn something that night, and she didn't fight for the story so I don't feel guilty.

Maybe it was karma for taking the story, but I almost did not get the story on air. We get back a little later than we wanted, so there was not a large room for error. The Serg's laptop started freaking out and he couldn't log everything that was recorded. By the time I got it, my laptop started to get a little nutty. The docking station would not read my external hard drive that had all my Eve Carson file. My computer froze and I had to restart it, then it would not open the editing software. I finally had to give up using my computer and work in an edit bay. I had 25 minutes to get it done. In news when you are in a crunch and need total concentration, everyone wants to talk to you. The Serg asked where the video was, and the producer kept asking how I was doing. I finally snapped back "If people would stop bothering me I'll get it done!" I got it in 5 minutes before the start of the show. I've only missed "slot" once, and that's because the guy taking in my story was being picky about audio and had me keep making changes, so I don't even count that as my fault. When will they realize that I will get things done, I know we are the lead and if I can't get it done the show goes to hell in a hand basket.