THINGS CHANGE

Yesterday was April first. But it's no joke. I have two weeks until my job ends. My work in television, I direct newscasts. I never wanted to direct newscasts, but sometimes life throws you curve balls. At Christmastime, 2006, I was struck by a curve ball, and it's been all downhill since. How did I get here??

I am a child of the sixties, and I loved my television. The TV Guide would be in the mailbox on Wednesdays, and by Saturday, I could tell you when The Addams Family or Gilligan's Island would come on, and on what channel! So choosing a career in television was a natural, it's what I knew best.

I'm far more outgoing today than when I was going to college, but then as now, I never wanted to be on the air. The behind the scenes stuff is what excited me. And it was exciting! Live television was thrilling, and I liked being friends with famous people, even if newscasters were only local celebs.

I worked for nothing for most years in the beginning, and it went like this. The beginning for me was a local cable company in Tacoma, where I made $4 an hour for about 18 months. My first television station was in the deserts of eastern Washington State, Kennewick to be exact, also for $4 an hour in 1983. Later that year, a promotion to Reno, Nevada, and at least a place someone's heard of, for $5.25 an hour. Eight months later, I was off to Chico, California for $6.50 an hour.

Chico was where I discovered my limits. I was a technical director, the guy pushing buttons during a live show that determines what you see at home. The pressure turned me into a raving lunatic in just a few months. I was mercifully fired after fourteen of them. The lessons were learned. I'm not a technical director OR a director for that matter. Never again, I thought, but I was wrong.

Monterey was the greatest place I've ever lived, truly a paradise, unless you're poor like I was. I returned to my favorite job in television, master control. Your friendly Master Control Operator is the guy who does all the things that allow you to see your favorite programs when you look for them, and the guy to blame for all the commercials you don't want to see. But to live in Monterey meant having second jobs for all the ten plus years I lived there. Driving an overnight delivery truck, working the overnight shift at your Pacific Grove 7-Eleven, delivering pizzas for Dominos for 30 days in relentless driving rain, selling men's clothes at Mervyn's. Still, I was always poor in Monterey.

For a while, I even lived in my truck, parked under the station's satellite dish farm. That is, until the day the General Manager came up to me and personally asked me to find another place to live. That wasn't too embarrassing at all.

Near the end of my time in Monterey, they made me a technical director, and after four months, I was flat on my seized-up back and immobile for weeks, while sick with a horrible flu. Stress again. They let me stop being a TD, and I went back to master control where I belonged. My health came back. Then came April 24, 1996, and more change.

Out of the many hundreds of desperate resumes I sent everywhere during those over-worked years on the California Central Coast, a station across the country in New Haven, Connecticut, dusted off a year-old version they had lying around and offered me a job. Suddenly I'm making $45,000 a year, and I can begin to breathe a little. No more part time jobs for awhile.

The New Haven job had a price tag. For two years I would work the overnight shift. On a 10pm, off at 7am, with a little 30 minute lunch period at the rousing time of 2:30am each morning. Not a time to risk leaving the barbed-wire enclosed parking lot looking for something to be open for, uh, what? Dinner? Breakfast? What is a meal called at 2:30am?

After two years of that, I had my first heart attack. On the fourth of July, no less. 1998.

While I was away from work rehabbing at the Middletown Hospital, I got the call that I thought would forever change my life. And I guess, in many ways it did, good and bad. The number one station in San Francisco, the NBC affiliate KRON4 came calling! On September 8, 1998, I began working in the master control job I thought they would have to take out of my cold dead hands. My salary almost doubled!!

Dreams don't last, do they? If you don't like the way things are, just hang in there, things will change. If you like things the way they are, start worrying, things will change. The only constant in life is things change.

On December 6, 1999, things changed. After 50 years of ownership, the San Francisco Chronicle decides to put all assets up for sale, including KRON4. From that day forward, some ten-plus years, there would be no such thing as job security for anyone at KRON4.

Young Broadcasting stole the station from the desirous hands of NBC, and was NBC pissed off! KGO then bought KNTV San Jose's ABC affiliation from them, and shortly after, NBC took their ball away and, not going home with it, instead gave it to KNTV, the new home of the Bay Area's NBC. In July 2001, BayTV, our little cable channel 35 experiment morphed into the Food Network. And also disappearing into that good night did our NBC affiliation at the end of the year. That image we all have of the Twin Towers in flames with billows of smoke pouring out on 9/11, was actually a metaphor for KRON4 and it's future.

The Bay Area's News Station, the home of Dr. Phil, hyper, hyper, hyper, local, local, local! Yada yada yada...

Try, bankruptcy, bankruptcy, bankruptcy.

Every year since 2001, hundreds of good, talented people left KRON4, either by layoffs, or by choice. Do you know that after 12 years, I am STILL the last person hired in Engineering there??? My lack of seniority always made me vulnerable, but always, as the ax was poised above my neck, somebody would leave voluntarily, or change departments. My luck would finally run out.

On December 24, 2006, I was downsized from Engineering at KRON4. The job they were going to have to yank from my cold dead hands simply vanished into the mist.

Things change.

In a cruel irony, the only way that I could stay at KRON was to assume the position I had learned to revile. DIRECTOR. Gulp.

That should have been my cue to leave, and many long-time, talented directors did just that, took a buyout and left. But I was buried in debt, making car payments for the Highlander I loved so much. And I was afraid I might have to leave the Bay Area and the friends I made here that I love so much. So, I sucked it up, and taught myself over time how to operate their horrible little monster called the Ross Overdrive, the tool directors at KRON must use to produce a newscast you see at home. I didn't sleep much, and I tried to live with the incredible stress level I owe so much to the Ross monster.

After fifteen months of operating the Ross Overdrive, I had a major heart attack. Doctors tell me it was a combination of my family history, and stress.

I had a beautiful $13,000 helicopter ride over Lake Tahoe on the way to the hospital while waiting for seven hours for people to get their s--t together, things like, a bed, in what hospital, waiting for which cardiologist to take my case. All the while I was not able to breathe, and had the worst pain in my chest I could ever imagine. Finest healthcare system in the world? Then we're in trouble baby! And I have a damaged heart to show for it.

After a few months of rehab, and a slow return to work, by December 2008 I was back working with the Ross monster again! Oh, the things we do to not have to sleep on the street and keep our bellies full!

What made it manageable for me was that KRON was not asking for too much of me, just a couple of friendly weekend shows each week. And for a year, I actually dealt with it okay, or so I thought. But then came a cold, then a flu, then an endless bout of bronchitis that would not go away. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't relax, and I could not hate operating the Ross Overdrive more.

Ahhhh, sweet blessed change!

Last month, I was told we would all now direct the weekday shows! Yes, all of us. All those manic, crazy, changing live shows we do from 4 to 7p, would now be part of my weekly life. Every week!

You really have to love moments like these! When things get so ridiculous, so absurd, so overwhelming that you feel yourself give in to smiling, to laughter. To resignation.

I knew at that instant, the insanity was over. I could relax now. The Ross monster was dead. And so was my job.

We have a union. It's called IBEW. But it's really just crap. You pay your dues, they negotiate away your benefits at every contract renewal time, then you pay more dues. I finally told my doctor what's been going on for the last three years, and before I was done, he had a letter written that I was NOT to operate the Ross Overdrive again. The company then tells you that you must operate the Overdrive anyway, and you tell them, but I have this letter from my doctor! And the union says, "Do what they tell you to do." My union rep at the station is angry with me! He wants me to save my job, "Do it anyway! Forget the doctor!"

My kingdom for a voice of sanity. Ignore the doctor. Yeah, right.

So, here we are. The Gods of KRON want me to take my little disability and go away. They gave me a little severance and a tentative final day of April 15th. And in doing so, because they couldn't deal with someone not operating the Ross Insanity machine, KRON probably saved my life! And now I'm free to pursue another career and another life.

My television career. Born June 30, 1981 at Cable TV Puget Sound, Tacoma, Washington. Death comes at 11:28pm, April 14, 2010.

This blog will be about me trying to recapture my health, and my sanity, and a new life with a new profession.