Disastrous Beginnings

As I explained in “The Graduate” I was a little depressed.  My best job prospects were a part time gig paying minimum wage over a hundred miles away that discouraged side jobs, or I could get into a multilevel marketing pyramid scheme. Was my degree completely useless?  I didn’t have any networking connections.  No real skills.  I was not prepared for adulthood.  I was desperate.  I was ready to get back into fast food.  Maybe I could be a manager?  To me this was the bottom of the barrel. Rock bottom.

Then I hit pay dirt.  I saw an opening for a news video editor/photographer job at the TV station in Sherman.  Only half an hour away.  Thank you TVJobs.com!  I mailed my fledgling resume off and pretty much just dicked around on a dial up internet connection for a week.  Then the phone rang and the News Director Matt called me for an interview.  He asked if Wednesday at 2 pm was good for me.  Of course, it was.  I didn’t have a job!  I came over and was nervous as Hell.  Matt was also an anchor for the 5 pm, 6 pm, and 10 pm news.  He asked about my experience and my knowledge of the business.  What were my goals?  He handed me a camera and sent me outside to shoot some video.  Make sure I knew what ring to turn to focus and how to operate the rocker switch to zoom in and out.  What made me look amazing was that I already knew to linear edit.  That is, I had experience editing video tape to tape, no computers.  I brought him a mini DV tape of all my work from college.  Man, I wish I still had that tape.  I’d put all my stuff on YouTube. 

I thought the interview went well. I was very nervous. I tend to appear timid, unconfident in these things.  He said he’d let me know within a week or so if I got the job.  I went home and continued to just watch TV, DVD’s and surf the net.

Over two weeks went by and there were no phone calls.  I wrote a letter thanking Matt for his time and asking if he had any advice for what I could do to help my prospects in future interviews. Within a few days of mailing my concession letter, Matt called apologizing for not calling and offered me the job. A week or so later I started.

They got me insured to drive a company vehicle.  I passed a pee test.  A couple days of training and I was ready to edit by myself.  They shot on JVC digital S cameras.  This was a horrible format.  The quality was terrible.  It was okay to shoot on I guess, but the more you used the tapes, they tended to degrade in quality too quickly.  I was fine editing all the newscasts quickly and accurately on my own.  There was very little learning curve for me.  None required.

Evil Digital S. pic via
http://lazarbibi.blog.hu/2015/08/11/ujabb_10_kihalt_formatum

My first Saturday though, things got hairy.  Real hairy.  This was also my first day shooting video.  We had two SUV’s in the Sherman fleet.  Nissan Extera’s, and one sedan.  The SUV’s had boxes the cameras slid into rigged by an engineer.  The sedan required putting the camera in a bag.  I grabbed a camera and put it in a bag, zipped up the bag and drove off to some sort of event.  Both SUV’s were out so I had no choice.  I would later be told that this was the breast milk car.  There was an anchor who would pump in the car (I have no idea why) and spilled some from time to time.  In the Texas heat it stunk bad, real bad.  I didn’t notice, and didn’t care.  I had work to do.  Only when I arrived at the scene I was screwed.  I unzipped the bag and the viewfinder, the eyepiece snapped off.  The whole camera lens housing snapped off at the carrying handle.  WTF?  I couldn’t shoot video.  My first week and I broke a camera worth $1000’s.  I would come to find out that I wasn’t supposed to zip up the bag.  Nobody bothered to tell this to me though.  Now the camera would be out of commission for repairs.  Not good.  We only had three cameras at the Sherman bureau for News.  Now we had two.

The weekend producer, who also anchored, wasn’t too pissed about losing the story.  She totally understood how I could break the camera.  The 6 PM show got edited and looked swell.  Now I had to run off to a car accident.  It was dark out and I was shooting my first “spot news” story.  I was nervous and…I screwed up again!  I had the tape to put in the camera, opened up the deck and couldn’t seem to get the tape in there.  The more I struggled, the more nervous I got, the faster I tried until it…crap!  I got the tape in the deck, but I managed to put it in backwards, and it was stuck!

I drove back to the station and told the producer I just got fired.  She asked why?  I told her that, “I broke two cameras on my first day of shooting.”  I struggled to find this crappy paying job after 3 ½ years of college and I just flushed it away.  I wasn’t crying, but she could tell I was in distress.  She called the weekend director Jason over.  He looked at the camera and said he’d see what he could do.  He had a screwdriver and tinkered for a half hour or so and got the tape out.  Reassembly was a breeze.  No damage.  All agreed not to tell an engineer or Matt about it  My job would be saved.  

Meanwhile, they had heard that Matt once dropped his camera into Lake Texoma**.  I have no idea if this was true, but it did make me feel so much better.

Sunday, I went out to shoot and everything went off without a hitch.  I would love my coworkers and stick around another 14 months.  Matt gave my resume tape back and revealed that he never even looked at it.  He knew he’d hire me as soon as I revealed I could edit tape-to-tape.  I was mildly annoyed that the job wasn’t important enough to him to put more effort into picking out a hire.  But I believe his instincts were on point.  First Saturday aside, this was a great experience. And more adventures certainly came my way.

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If I picked a single song for this post it would be...

**Since posting this, I have been told that Matt never dropped a camera in the lake.  The story was true though.  A reporter and photographer were in a boat that was capsized.  The crew and passengers were rescued, but the camera was a casualty of storytelling.