I will have a blogspot omelot and a side of bacon.

November 14, 2006

Welcome in everyone to my blog. It's a two drink minimum. But with the hours I work as the WHNT morning show executive producer, the two drinks can be coffee strong enough to eat through the bottom of a 82 Volvo, or orange juice with a Powerbar cut up in it, or enough diet sodas to float the Intrepid which is currently stuck in a harbor.

I'm getting older. And it surfaces everywhere. For example, "all the kids" call it a blog. Older folks like me call it a diary, or a journal, which just happens to be on a computer.

Back in the dotcom boom I took, temporarily, a job with a company that spent way too much
money worrying about the colors on their website and not enough time researching why people would never turn off their television completely for a computer. The job was too good to pass up at the time. The guy who interviewed me said "Greg, I need someone to be a smartaleck and write for my website."

Easy job. But I digress.

I called my mom and explained this job was not in television anymore but was instead with an Internet company. After going through the process of this explanation, my mother had one question.

"Greg, where is that on the cable."

"Mom, it's not on the cable. It's on the computer"

"You won't be on television anymore Greg?"

"No mom"

"Well then, I don't like that job, and I don't think you should take it."

My mom's advice proved to be prophetic. After working with the budding dotcom company, I took another television job and my parents were again happy that the kid they thought was 50-50 to get out of high school with a GED was a member of the royalty that is local TV anchorhood. There was one thing I did miss about the dotcom business. Everyone thinks that all those dotcom boom businesses busted because of bad financing, being over leveraged, or
didn't have their software right. The reason most went under was that the workday was something like this:

9:00am to 11:00am
Decide which color blue to put on a logo.

11:00am to 1:30pm
Lunch at place which served big glass bloody marys and soy glazed salmon. Charge it to the company.

1:30pm-3:00pm
Talk about Star Trek

3:00pm-4:00pm
Decide what logo needs to be what color the next day.

4:00pm-5:00pm
Tweak The Mission Statement.

5:00pm
Drinks.

I did 25 years in local television and decided to recharge my battery. The United Way of Madison County took me in as part of their "Send me your huddle masses" program of job
trainees. The experience was an epiphany. Being a local television anchor, I just THOUGHT
I had a handle on my community. Working in a non-profit for 15 months taught me I need to stay dialed into my community in a much stronger way. It taught me that most people don't plan to be poor and in need of help, and most importantly, it taught me that most people are closer to needing help than they realize.

But like Michael Corleone in the third Godfather movie....."Every time I get out, they pull me right back in"....I decided to jump back in the television wars. I met Denise Vickers in a previous television life. In one of those moments that make you wonder how karma exactly works, Denise found herself in a new job as the WHNT news director. She called. We talked.
And like a moth to a flame, I jumped back in as the Executive Producer of the WHNT morning show.

The hours are bad. The people are great. More tomorrow.