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Part 3 of 4
When my patience wore thin with the post-production industry in mid-August, I accepted a job with a local news company to be a video editor. Strange enough, since it was the only thing like it I applied for, I sent in my application via fax (something I'd never done before and will probably never do again), and they hadn't contacted me in a month and a half and I'd totally forgotten about it. But it was decent pay, full benefits, and most importantly a job, so I was happy. Plus I figured it might be interesting to work in the news for a while. And that it was.
The first thing was the hours. This was a 24-hour-a-day, 365-days-a-year kind of news station, and I would be working the elusive "Bitch-shift". Now, left to my natural body clock, my preferred sleeping time would be from about 3:30am to about noon. But now these were exactly the hours I would be on shift. I'd always envisioned post-collegiate life as having a somewhat more normal schedule than the three-two-hour-naps-equals-a-night's-sleep routine of my college days. But this new schedule presented an interesting query - whether it was better go to sleep at 7pm and wake up ridiculously early in the morning, or sleep all afternoon and never see the sun. Now keep in mind that I'd gone to sleep at 7pm approximately twice in my entire life prior to this - once when I was very sick and the day after I was born. But I chose this option anyway, mostly out of the fear of the rickets I would inevitably get from never being awake in daylight. Anyhow either way was invariably going to leave me very very tired.
A little about this job. I was a video editor, and by video editor I mean the old way. Like two VCRs hooked together. And I was just getting to the point where I was fairly proud of the fancy editing systems I could throw on my resume - AVID, Stratasphere, After Effects… the first day of working my boss took me into a little room straight out of a Cable Access station and told me I'd be cutting deck-to-deck. It was quite the rude shock - I hadn't worked on machines like these since Freshman year before Northwestern sold all their deck-to-deck stations to a museum for people to stare and laugh at. Plus they used MII tapes, a format I hadn't even heard of before. Who uses that? It sounds like the year of the first Olympics or something. Anyway, there I was, surrounded by archaic equipment to produce the latest news, but just happy to be getting paid eleven bucks an hour. The Northwestern Admissions Handbook people must be very sad if they're reading this.
My job was to work with another editor to help produce the 5:30am and the 10:30am news broadcasts. We edited video and sometimes interview packages to go along with the anchor's stories, and then one of us would run the live audio board during the show and the other would make sure all the clips played in the right order. Now this was live television, so when you screw up, it goes on the air that way. And boy oh boy, did that happen a lot. It was very nerve-wracking at first, guessing at which mics to bring up and down and trying not to play intro music in the middle of the weather story, but after a while you just got used to doing stuff over and keeping the especially good mess-ups for the blooper reel.
This was, of course, before That Day. I had been working at the station for about a month and a half or so when the president of the company called this big meeting and told us we'd been bought out and would be going dark as a station. In other words, everyone in the room was fired, but not quite yet so please go back to work for now and start thinking about other jobs. Now this came as quite a shock, especially to all the people who'd been working there a bit longer than six weeks and had quite a bit of history with the company. Talk about leveling the playing field. The boss who set your hours, the veteran who trained you, the producer that told you what to do, and the anchor that was like a celebrity to you… everyone in the same room, and everyone is just as fired as you were. Completely out of the blue. It was quite the panorama of faces.
Needless to say, things got a little slack after that. Nothing reduces productivity like getting laid-off, and if you didn't feel like doing something, you could just say "What are you going to do, fire me?" Minnesota state law requires a company to pay its employees for at least six weeks after a shutdown announcement, but after the show went off the air there wasn't much to do besides general cleaning up and inventory stuff. So we started getting paid days off, and on the days we did come in there would be about an hour of work to do and the rest of the time you could just hang out and read a book or watch all the Simpsons episodes you'd taped from the Replay system. Eventually they even ran out of closing-down-type stuff for us to do, and began paying us for staying home, on top of which we all got severance packages. It was the greatest thing ever. For the month of November I slept in 'till noon every day and wrote a screenplay and got paid full wage for it. Getting paid for writing? You've gotta be kidding me.
Despite my original reluctance to accept a job in news, a field I had little experience or initial interest in, this job turned out to be one of the more memorable I've ever had. I mean, it was kind of a slap in the face getting laid off after six weeks from my first job out of college, but as long as you get stories, right? First of all there turned out to be a fair amount of downtime, especially on the weekends. The Bitch-shift included working Saturday and Sunday mornings (my weekend was Wednesday/Thursday), a tall order after getting done being a bouncer at 1:30am the previous night. Usually after we were done with a show, there would be at least an hour where there wasn't anything to do until more stories came in, and on weekends there was only like one writer around so mostly we'd just re-use stuff from earlier shows and not do any work at all until an hour before the show. Sundays me and the other guy would turn on all the TVs in the editing bank to different satellite channels and watch like 7 football games at once. So I was able to get a lot of personal work done while getting paid, not to mention getting caught up on my early-morning cartoons.
Also the whole live-television thing lead to some interesting situations. Partly due to the fact that I got laid off two days after completing my training, I never was very good at my job. I don't know how many times I turned on the anchor's mic too late, or put two clips in the wrong order and watched the show go out with the anchor talking about George W's latest military push over video of an orangutan family playing at the zoo. One time (and I was only one of several people at fault for this), I was running the show and the headlines got out of order and the weather story just kind of disappeared, and we actually cut back to the anchor going "Ummm… I don't know what's going on" before the master controller pulled the plug and cut to an old show right in the middle of the broadcast. Before I knew it I had like four VP's leaning over my shoulder asking what the hell was going on. What could I say? We were crashing and burning on the air. Maybe that's why we got bought out.
Anyway, I was supplied with stories and an easy way out of a job I wasn't planning on staying with long-term anyway. Also, a company that gets bought out is left with two things very useful to its former employees - a lot of corporate guilt, and a whole lot of money to throw around to try and make this guilt go away. So besides severance packages and paid time off, we all got extended medical plans, paid job counseling, and chances to apply for all kinds of unemployment grants and whatnot apparently the government supplies for people like us. Not that qualified for them, with my ten other freelance jobs, but it was good, you know, to get that whole "getting laid off" thing out of the way with my first job. Because now I've used it up, and we all know lightening never strikes twice in the same place.
Right?
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Email me! paul@paulspond.com
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