Home Blogs Bathroom Break, Boss? Week of 21 April 2002
Week of 21 April 2002
What's worse than working freelance design in your cold-ass room on a Saturday night?
Working freelance design in your cold-ass room on a Saturday night with shitty copy. Is it so hard to write well? It's painful to have to work this crap. A list of things that should never be done if you have any respect for yourself, for those who have to wrestle with your copy or for the art of writing itself:
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Oh, hello! First time posting here because I never really had anything to bitch about before, but today is an exception. Well I work for a hamburger fast food joint, we are basically what a hamburger is all about. So we have lockers in the back where we change. When dumbasses either quit or get fired they think it's a fun idea to keep their locks on their lockers so no one else can use them. Well about a month ago they started clipping locks that had collected dust or "look like they haven't been used in a while". They had us fill in our names where current employee lockers are so that they would not cut our locks off by mistake. I was worried because my dad gave me the lock that he used when he was in the Coast Guard service in the 60s and 70s, so I made sure every manager knew which lock was mine. So I thought everything would be all good seeing how they took proper precautions and everything right? ... Wrong! I come into work to find my lock snipped off and thrown away. Now it's not like my dad died in Vietnam and it's the only thing I have to remember him by. I simply enjoyed the fact that my dad gave it to me when I started the job, and told me all about how he used it for 15 years in the Coast Guard. Then I got to hear all the stories about his Coast Guard days and I thought it was pretty neat that I was using the same lock he used 20 years ago. But the lock is no longer and they all know I'm livid about it.
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Dear Manager,
Thank you. Thank you for sending me home a total of six hours early this week so far. I know business is dead, but can't you send home one of the high schoolers that don't have to...oh...I don't know...PAY BILLS?? You've cut out almost an entire day so far from my next paycheck.
I'd just like to say thank you.
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Bloopers
So I used to be a tv news reporter. The main occupational hazard: making an utter ass of yourself on tv. I've flubbed my words hundreds of times... made asses of the anchors when they've asked stupid questions... worn blouses that were probably a bit to sheer... but two instances from my first job stand out in my mind:
#1. It was a small station with a small staff. Especially in the mornings. A bare bones production staff ran the morning show: one guy on cameras, one guy in the control room, the anchor usually wrote and produced the whole show. So there was no one running prompter (the words the anchor reads on the camera) -- the anchor controls it with a foot pedal. It was an antique teleprompter, too. You placed pieces of paper on a conveyor belt, that would run the paper under a fixed camera. No computers in this newsroom -- it was all typewriters, baybee!
I was subbing in one morning, and was getting ready to do one of those two minute local cut-ins during the Today show. I had anchored only a few times before and was still nervous. "Good Morning! It's 7:26. I'm Deliza DaNewshound. --" So far so good. I stepped on the pedal to advance to the next page -- it backed up into nothingness. I was totally puzzled -- and boy did I show it! "Uh.." While on camera, I pushed my chair back to look under the desk, sure enough, the forward/reverse switch for the prompter's conveyor belt was on reverse! I flipped it back and couldn't stop laughing. I only got thru two of the three stories I was supposed to read, and even then I couldn't stop giggling the whole time. Yeah, Katie Curic, I was not!
#2. We'll call it physical comedy. There had been this rash of sea plane crashes, so naturally I had to do the "sea plane safety" story. (*gag*) At any rate, I found a nice old man with a sea plane to take me flying and show me what makes a sea plane different from a regular small plane. (duh.) It was a nice day, I got some good pictures and sound. (It was such a small station, I was both reporter and photographer.) We flew up to a lake and set down so I could get pictures of him taking off and landing on the water. You always get better pictures if you get closer -- so I tried to get close to the plane to get video of it moving from the shoreline into the water. Everything is all well and good and I'm rolling -- when the plane suddenly turns. The wing comes swinging around and smacks me in the head. In slow motion, I see the microphone fly out of my hand into the water... I see the videocamera fly out of my arms and into the water... I see myself fly backwards and into the water. The pilot never noticed.
Other than a big, fat headache I was fine. The video of the camera flying thru the air and into the water was comical. And at my next job, I always had a photographer -- who always seemed to be smarter than I was standing on the shore of that lake!
