Meltdown

After months of doing the reporter shuffle, with different reporters getting assigned to the shifts I cover, I finally seem to have settled into a routine with two reporters. Lizzie works with me on weekends, although she isn't happy about it. Sarah, the new girl, works with me Monday through Wednesday at night.

I have worked with Sarah several days over the last two weeks, and some disturbing personality traits and working habits have manifested themselves. I guess the worst problem is that Sarah is slow. It sometimes takes her twice as long as other reporters to write her stories. I'm not sure what the problem is, but she has consistently put me under the gun when editing time has rolled around. It seems like the problem has grown steadily worse over the last two weeks.

She also tends to panic and, for lack of a better word, freak out. For example, one night last week she was trying to get in touch with a school contact for a story about a teenage girl who had been accosted on her way home from school (but got away). We got the story too late to catch anyone at the school itself, so she was trying to track down the principal at home. When she could only get his voice mail, she turned bright red and said, "What am I going to do? WHAT AM I GONNA DO? Why won't this FUCKER answer his PHONE?! This is CRAZY! How am I supposed to get a story like this?!"

"If you can't reach him, you can't reach him," I said. "It's not a big deal."

"Shut up!" she said. "I didn't ask for your opinion."

"Okay," I said. After a prolonged silence she apologized, but still...

And that brings me to tonight.

We got our story early this afternoon, right after the afternoon meeting. It was a rather boring story on a plan to rezone an area to allow a housing subdivision to be built. The county guy was easy to reach, and we knocked out his interview quickly. The landowner took a little more time, but we got our b-roll of the area in question while we were waiting for him to call back. We managed to get out to his house for his interview, and all the elements of the package were in house with three hours to go before the show. Although we were the lead story, we weren't even live.

Yet, somehow, she managed to give me the package to edit almost exactly twenty minutes before the newscast.

I know there are guys out there who do twenty minute edits on a daily basis. I'm still pretty new at this, however, and so far the fastest I've been able to do it is thirty minutes. I told her when she gave me the package that she needed to tell Wendy, the producer, that we would possibly miss our slot, and I wasted no time getting to work.

Unfortunately Sarah didn't tell Wendy that there was a problem. Apparently she went back to her desk and didn't say a word. I became aware of this fact at five minutes before the newscast, when an AP came into my room and asked me for the tape. I told her I was almost done but didn't think I would make it, and to tell Wendy to be ready to float us. I'm glad I wasn't in the control room for Wendy's initial reaction.

Unfortunately I wasn't completely off the hook. Less than a minute after the AP had left, Sarah burst into the room and said, "What's the problem?"

"I don't think I'm gonna make it," I said.

"Why not?" she asked.

"Not enough time," I said. "I'm workin' on it."

"How much more time do you need?"

"A few more minutes," I said. "I'm WORKIN' on it."

Sarah stepped out, but outside the door I could hear that Wendy had turned the corner and was discussing it with Sarah. "He won't tell me how long he needs," I heard Sarah say. A beat later, Wendy burst into the room.

"Are you gonna make it?" she asked.

"I don't think so," I said.

"You don't THINK so, or NO, you WON'T make it?"

"I'm not gonna make it," I said.

"What's the problem?" she asked.

"Can't talk about it now," I said, still trying to edit despite these two idiots distracting me. As I sit here now I'm convinced that I actually would have made it if they had just let me work. Both of them seemed to think that by standing there distracting me, I would somehow change my mind and tell them that everything was just hunky dory and I would be delivering the tape at any minute.

Wendy stood there for a second, then let out this huge sigh and left. Outside the room I could hear her say, "He won't tell me, either."

I finished just after the newscast started, but not before the first block turned into a wreck. I went back and looked at the aircheck tape to see just how bad it was. The anchor actually read the intro to our package, then said, "But, um, we'll have that story in just a minute." Then the wrong video was rolled for the next story, and she became visibly flustered on air. I ran my package to the playback booth in time to be the third story, but the prompter operator somehow got lost, so that the anchor had to read everything off her scripts for almost the rest of the first block.

At the time, however, I was letting out a huge sigh of relief after handing off the tape. When I turned back toward the newsroom, Sarah was standing there waiting for me, with her arms folded across her chest.

"You wanna tell me what happened?" she said.

"I didn't have enough time," I said. "You're gonna have to give me the package earlier."

"You had PLENTY of time," she said, "And now I'm gonna get shit because YOU fucked up."

"I don't think I fucked anything up," I said. "I didn't have enough time--"

"Don't give me that," she said. "Any photog here can edit a package in thirty minutes."

"You gave me the package at twenty minutes 'til."

"No, you got thirty minutes. I know because I looked at the clock when I finished writing."

"And I looked at the clock when you gave me the package. It was twenty minutes 'til," I said.

"What are you trying to do to me?" she asked.

"Huh?"

"I know you could have gotten that in on time."

That just hung there for a minute.

"Are you saying I missed slot on purpose?" I asked.

"The thought has crossed my mind," she said.

At this point I was enraged. I was shaking. I was about to explode into a kaleidoscopic display of obscenities. But I held it together.

"I wouldn't do that," I said.

"Hmmm," she said, sarcastically.

"We should talk about this later," I said.

"Oh, WE WILL," she threatened.

I went back to the edit room, shut the door and just sat there listening to the hum of machinery. I guess you could say I was hiding in there, because I did NOT want to come out and face either Sarah or Wendy. I suddenly realized I still needed to cut a video-only version of the story for the morning show, so I reluctantly put myself back to work.

I did run into Wendy after the show. She didn't say a word.

So now I can't sleep, thinking about what happened and obsessing over the fact that I have to work with Sarah. I don't know if I should launch a preemptive strike and go complain about her first thing tomorrow, or if I should wait to defend myself when the inevitable questions come from the ND. I know I need to get faster at editing, but I can't see how she can say the problem tonight was MY fault when she took three hours to write the story.

I'm really starting to worry about this job. It's been fun and interesting up to now, but the prospect of working directly with this woman three days per week for the foreseeable future does not sound pleasant at all.