Gimme a Break Already!

As I have explained about our on-call system, there isn't one. All the photogs are "on call" all the time. We have our addresses marked on a map in the newsroom, and when something happens the closest photographer is supposed to be called.

What I failed to mention earlier is that we're not supposed to be called on our days off unless its a true emergency. That means that since I'm the only photog on weekends, I will usually be the only one called out on weekends. It also means that on Thursday and Friday, my days off, I'm not supposed to be called out, especially since the rest of the photog staff work those days.

That didn't stop our producer, Wendy, from paging me tonight for a "Pedex" with a child involved. "Pedex" is what our newsroom calls an accident in which a pedestrian is struck by a car. I don't know where they got that name, because the cops don't call it that.

When I called in, I told Wendy that it was my day off after seventeen days straight. She didn't care. She asked me to go do it anyway.

"You're closest, and I don't have anybody else available," she said. I can't help but wonder if she actually called anyone else. But I got my gear together and went.

When I got there, there was nothing. Not a thing. No cops. No kid in the road. Nobody around. I double checked the location. I was in the right spot.

"Drive around that area and see if you see anything," Wendy instructed me when I called in. So I drove around. I still didn't find anything.

A few streets over there was a convenience store, so I stopped there and asked inside if the clerk had heard anything. In fact, she had. One of her customers had told her a teenager walked out in the road and got clipped by a car, but that he was okay and went home. She said that conversation had happened more than an hour earlier.

"Spray it and come back," Wendy said, when I told her what I had discovered. "I'll get the info from dispatch." So I "sprayed it," meaning that I quickly shot video of the scene where Wendy believed the accident had taken place, and went back to the station to edit.

"Oh, don't bother with that," she said when I came into the newsroom. "It turned out to be nothing. Some teenager got bumped by a car, but he didn't even go to the hospital."

Now I'm back home, and I can't help but feel a little irritated. She called me out on my day off, after I worked seventeen straight days through the holiday, for something that was at least an hour old when I was contacted and turned out to be nothing. On the other hand, I feel guilty for being irritated, because I know this job requires personal sacrifice. Still, I'm wondering if this job is going to stay like this. I'm enjoying it, but sometimes I really start to think maybe I should have listened to the naysayers when I first took this job.