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It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas

Posted February 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

Bit of a grab bag of topics this time out, but it’s a thematically connected grab bag. Inspired by President Bush’s call in his State of the Union Address for over a billion dollars in funding for research on hydrogen-powered cars, I’ve spent some time trolling the web looking for insights and information on fuel efficiency and other energy-saving endeavors. I don’t think I found any solid answers, but I do think there are several interesting launching points for further discussion.

First, I was disappointed but not terribly surprised to find that Bush’s billion dollar proposal isn’t as impressive as the sound bite might suggest. It actually represents a cut in the absolute funding for fuel-efficient automobiles. During the Clinton Administration, the government funded the Partnership for the Next Generation Vehicle (PNGV) to the tune of about $170 million dollars a year. This ten-year program was a partnership between the government and the Big Three American automakers, whose goal was to have 80 mpg family sedans in car showrooms by 2004, at a price comparable to more traditional cars. In order to make that deadline, PNGV focused on hybrid cars which use both a gas-powered and electric motor, much like the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic Hybrid that are available today. By shifting the focus to hydrogen-powered fuel cells, the Bush Administration has pushed forward the point at which the government/industry collaboration is expected to produce a more efficient car decades into the future. Setting a more ambitious goal and then cutting the funding earmarked to achieve it does not strike me as sound policy.

It’s also worth noting that, as I said, Japanese automakers already have hybrid cars out on the market. Granted, they serve a very small niche market right now, and they don’t get 80 mpg – more like 40 to 60, which is still nothing to sneeze at. But Toyota and Honda got their cars on the market despite being rebuffed in their attempts to join up with PNGV. There is a certain irony here – a program designed to increase the competitiveness of the American auto industry inspired America’s competitors to do a better job. Sam Roe of the Chicago Tribune argues that there wasn’t nearly enough coordination between the participants, which suggests that there are significant cultural roadblocks to public/private partnership that need to be overcome. Autoweek columnist Kevin Nelson says part of the problem might be the scale of the effort – the government wasn’t kicking in enough money under PNGV to overcome the additional bureaucracy, competition and inertia it created. And if the Clinton program didn’t do much to advance the cause of science, it’s likely that Bush would do even less. As Nelson says, “Federal funding at this level would appear to have no effect on hastening technological progress.â€? Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Public Policy

A Helpful Tension

Posted February 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

Continuing our discussion of the theoretical questions a democratic reformer in the Deweyan tradition would need to answer:

While reformers will find it a challenge to construct a sound logical case for their program, they may well deem it the least of their problems once they face the task of persuading a skeptical public. A strong argument will help, of course, but the plight of the ‘undiscovered public’ is that its members are ruled by ignorance and passions more than by rationality, so thus will often fail to recognize the wisdom of even the best-argued position. The reformer might be able to sidestep this problem with a rational appeal to a ruling elite, one which would hopefully be more receptive to such tactics and be willing to enforce the reform upon the reluctant public. Unfortunately for the Deweyan reformer, ruling elites enforcing policies from above is exactly what he is trying to prevent. Direct persuasion of the public is the goal, so that the public might create for itself the most beneficial social structure possible. Reformers have no alternative but to confront the would-be public’s resistance to change, especially when such change challenges popularly held beliefs about the justice, morality, and validity of the current society.
The reformers’ best tool in this effort may well be the very social image that is the target of reform. Society forms its beliefs about itself in haphazard, piecemeal fashion, and is often unable or unwilling to develop its new ideas through to a conclusion.
Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Philosophy

Just Desserts?

Posted January 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

The Bush Administration recently filed a brief with the Supreme Court stating its opposition to the University of Michigan’s affirmative action admissions policy. One of the rhetorical points quickly made by the administration’s critics is that Bush himself benefited from affirmative action in his academic applications, using his geographical location and status as a ‘legacy’ student to help him get into Andover and Yale. It’s a pretty effective debating technique, highlighting the fact that – especially when it comes to education – strict ‘merit’ rarely completely wins the day. What I’ve wondered more and more since the stories started hitting the press is, is that such a bad thing?

The idea of a meritocracy appeals to everyone’s innate sense of fairness, I think. We like to see other people get what they deserve, and we like to think that whatever we have, we have because we’ve earned it. In its idealized form, it’s a terrific guiding principle. But when you put it into practice, it becomes pretty mushy. Sticking with education, how do you determine academic merit? Grades? But different schools have different grading systems, not to mention different curricula and standards. Just an example – my high school worked on a 4.0-scale, and didn’t give extra weight to As from honors classes. The guy with the highest GPA in my graduating class didn’t take many – if any – honors math or English classes, while the guy right behind him did. (I am neither of the people in this example, for anyone who might think I’m bitter or anything.) Standardized test might help smooth out the comparisons – but studies have shown that they don’t nearly as good a job predicting future academic performance as our current reliance on them would suggest. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Public Policy

The Virtue of Patience

Posted January 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

One of Not News’ central tenets is that by providing a forum for discussion of current social problems, we can help build a truly democratic society. In that discussion, however, it’s sometimes easy to ignore the question of what a ‘truly democratic society’ is, or how we should go about building it. I’d like to use the next few Philosophy slots in the article rotation to discuss some of these issues, starting this time out with the question of how far into the future reformers can look in good conscience.

Even when a group of people agree that a system or society must change, the question of how fast it should change can be extremely divisive – as is the related but often overlooked question of how fast it can change. Some of this division can be traced to conflicting agendas, a lack of clearly articulated ideals, or a poor decision-making structure within a reform movement, but in and of itself the timing issue is contentious. Reformers often target those elements of the social order that pose an immediate threat to the physical and mental well-being of large segments of the population, many of which are rooted in longstanding traditions such that any delay in addressing them only compounds the injustice. However, while ‘When do we want it? Now!’ might be an effective rallying cry, and an expression of the optimal turn of events, a truly pragmatic reformer must inevitably accept compromise and look to the future, setting timeframes not in terms of months or even years, but in generations.
Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Philosophy

Why I Watch Them Play the Games

Posted November 2, 2002 By Dave Thomer

I’m starting this essay while waiting for the start of a Monday Night Football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the San Francisco 49ers. Since the Eagles’ franchise quarterback Donovan McNabb broke his ankle last week, there’s a very good chance that the Eagles will lose and I will be a sullen, morose individual by the time I’m finished. Because while intellectually I can accept that the odds are against my team, I still believe they can win, and I certainly hope that they do.

You may ask yourself at this point why I’m going to spend three to four hours absorbed in something that’s likely to disappoint me. Besides a healthy dose of masochism, there’s something uniquely compelling about sports, because you can’t help but be aware that no one really know what’s going to happen next. It’s one of the greatest proving grounds for the notion that truth can be stranger than fiction. Last night I watched a football game between the Indianapolis Colts and the Denver Broncos, played in Denver, in the snow. Indianapolis’ kicker, Mike Vanderjagt, had missed field goals attempts in each of his last three games, but he hit a 54-yarder in the final seconds to tie the game. Then he hit a 51-yarder into the wind to win the game. All of those late heroics were only possible, however, because Denver’s placekicker had missed an extra point earlier in the game – his first miss in over 300 attempts. You write that in a script, no one believes it. But to see it unfold live was exhilarating. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Special Order Speeches

Peirce Strings

Posted November 1, 2002 By Dave Thomer

While John Dewey is considered one of the classical pragmatists, ‘pragmatism’ is not a word he often used to describe his way of thinking. Rather, the term was popularized in the early 1900s by Harvard philosopher William James, who credited the term to an old friend of his named Charles Sanders Peirce. For a number of reasons, Peirce never attained the academic successes of Dewey and James, and he gradually developed a complex philosophical system that is beyond the scope of both my expertise and this article. However, in a series of articles published in popular magazines in the late 1800s, Peirce set forth in rather clear terms a number of the principles that James and Dewey later adopted and developed.

Peirce was deeply interested in what he called the fixation of belief. Belief by Peirce’s definition is the opposite of doubt – when we have a belief, we know how we should respond to a given situation, but when we are in doubt, we are momentarily unable to act. The doubt acts as an irritant, provoking us to do something to establish a belief and therefore regain our ability to act. Let’s take a somewhat trivial example to illustrate the point. If I want to go somewhere, I might have to decide whether to take the bus or walk. If I already have some established belief about which method of travel is better, I’ll choose that method without much of a thought, and go about my business. But let’s say I can’t decide. I am in doubt over the preferred method of travel, and so I neither walk nor take the bus. Instead I need to take some kind of action to resolve the doubt. I might check my pocket and realize I don’t have exact fare, at which point I believe that walking is the best course of action. Doubt resolved, course of action chosen, I can proceed.

According to Peirce, the human being doesn’t really care how the doubt gets resolved. It just wants the doubt gone. However, human history has revealed that some methods are ultimately more effective than others. Peirce defines ‘more effective’ according to the original goal of eliminating doubt – if a method generates a belief that generates a new doubt almost immediately, it’s not a very good method. Peirce identified four commonly used methods, and he wasn’t shy about pointing out his favorite.
Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Philosophy

How I Learned to Love Comics Continuity

Posted October 15, 2002 By Dave Thomer

So a few weeks ago Pattie and I were visiting my mother, and the premiere of Birds of Prey hit the screen. If you haven’t caught it, the basic premise is that three attractive female superheroes and one attractive male cop run around Gotham City fighting crime. With all the attractive people running around, the show certainly fits into The WB’s overall oeuvre, but that’s not why my family sat down to watch. Since the show is loosely based on the DC comic of the same name, we were there to observe – and where necessary, explain – where the show’s writers drew their inspiration.

And that’s the true genius of the show, from where I’m standing. It draws concepts from just about every interpretation of Batman over the last 25 years, and smooshes them all together with some attractive people and Top 40 hits. Pattie, my brother and I spent the night trying to explain it all to my mother.

“The therapist is a bad guy?”
“Yeah, she came from the animated series.”
“When did Catwoman have superpowers?”
“The Tim Burton movies.”
“The Joker shot Batgirl?”
“Yeah, Alan Moore wrote that in the mid-80s.”
“Wait a second, Batman has a daughter?”
“That’s from the seventies.”
“Who’s that in the Batman suit?”
“The guy from the OnStar commercials.”

Now, you may think that we’re freaks for keeping track of all this information. On the other hand, right now Fox is broadcasting the World Series and keeping track of the number of outs the Angels have made on ground balls. Every supermarket checkout lane includes multiple guides to the latest soap opera goings-on. And there are plenty of folks who know so many details about major military battles that they go out and re-enact the things. So obsessive attention to detail is not the sole purview of the superhero comics fan.

On the other hand, we do have some of our own little quirks, but I think the world would be a better place if those quirks became more widely accepted. Take the retcon, for example. Retcon is a shortened form of ‘retroactive continuity,’ which is what happens when one writer decides that some story that got written ten or twenty years didn’t actually happen the way the previous writer wrote it. For example, in 1985 Marv Wolfman and George Perez produced Crisis on Infinite Earths, which basically established that nothing DC Comics ever published actually happened, unless someone later decided to say that it did. (That this sort of revision happens often enough that comics fans not only came up with a technical term for it, but eventually needed a shortened slang version, should tell you something.) Sometimes this is necessary because the old story attempted to be current and topical, which is often a bad idea because time never really passes in comic books. Sometimes the new writer doesn’t like the old writer, and sticks in a retcon as a bit of a literary poke in the eye. And sometimes the writer is just trying to surprise people, with the old ‘Everything you knew is wrong!’ trick.

Either way, I think it would be fun to be able to employ the retcon in our everyday lives. It could work like instant replay in football, where each half the coach can throw a red flag on the ground and get the ref to look at instant replay to change a call.

BOSS: Those proposals you were supposed to send to the Los Angeles office never got there, and so we lost the big account! You’re fired!
DAVE: (throwing flag on the ground) That’s a terrible plot development. I demand a retcon.
BOSS: Great job getting those proposals done at the last second! The client’s so happy they’ve sent you this priceless collection of rare gems as a token of their appreciation, and we’re giving you that big promotion and the desk with the comfy chair!

Then there’s the ‘imaginary story.’ This occurs when the writer of a story wants to make clear that no one will ever acknowledge the events of the story again, and they will have absolutely no repercussions for any of the characters’ ongoing plotlines, and therefore should be distinguished from the non-imaginary stories of people who fly, run at the speed of light, and stick to walls. This supposedly gives the writer license to tell edgier, more outrageous, or more ridiculous stories, although it often results in ‘What if Superman’s rocket were found by Batman’s parents?’ On the other hand, imagine waking up and declaring that today is actually an imaginary story. Eat all the junk food you want. Rip off a mattress tag. It doesn’t matter – it’s an imaginary story! Of course, when it’s over, you may not remember that any of it happened, but hey, that might be a good thing too. Those mattress clerks can get really protective.

There is one potential drawback to this concept, as Birds of Prey the TV show aptly illustrates. No matter how many writers try to simplify things, no matter how many retcons they may employ, no piece of continuity ever really truly dies. There’s always the chance that the imaginary me who ripped off that mattress tag is gonna show up demanding a crossover, and those always end up in trouble. Plus there will undoubtedly be some guy on an Internet message board arguing passionately that my firing was a much better story than the rare gems. At least I can take comfort in the fact that no one pays any attention to people on the Internet.

Filed in Comics

What’s In That Glass?

Posted August 1, 2002 By Dave Thomer

The linguists and scientists among you will hopefully find this of interest and/or amusement.

One recurring topic in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, especially the analytic branches of those fields, is the question of what determines the meaning of the words a speaker uses. It should be a pretty uncontroversial assumption that a speaker can’t make words mean just anything. Otherwise we wouldn’t get to have fun correcting people on their use of ‘it’s’ and ‘its,’ ‘affect’ and ‘effect,’ and so on. So what’s the piece of linguistic magic that connects a particular utterance to a particular set of things or phenomena? Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam argued in the 1970s that what the speaker intends or thinks the word means has no bearing on the actual meaning, and came up with a thought experiment designed to prove his case. It goes something like this:

Imagine a world somewhere that is exactly identical to Earth, right down to the population and languages spoken; call it Twin Earth. The only difference is that the colorless, tasteless liquid that fills rivers and oceans, boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, freezes at 32 degrees, makes up the majority of the human body, and is called ‘water’ by the Twin Earth equivalent of English-speakers, does not have a chemical composition of two atoms of hydrogen plus one of oxygen. Instead it has some bizarrely complex structure that we will abbreviate as XYZ. There is a substance with a chemical composition of two atoms of hydrogen plus one of oxygen on Twin Earth, but it’s an incredibly rare substance that has a black color and a tar-like consistency.

Now imagine that you somehow manage to take a trip to Twin Earth, and you’re pretty thirsty from the long journey. You ask your host for a glass of water. What are you really asking for? According to Putnam, you’re asking for the tarry stuff. You come from the community of Earth-English speakers, and the words you say still mean what they would on Earth, not what they would on Twin Earth.

OK, you may say, fair enough, but how does that make me ask for the tarry stuff instead of the clear stuff? Especially since my hosts will give me a glass of the clear stuff and think nothing of it? According to Putnam, what ‘water’ really means is not ‘the colorless, tasteless liquid that fills rivers and oceans, boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, freezes at 32 degrees, makes up the majority of the human body, and so on.’ ‘Water’ means ‘the substance with a chemical composition of two atoms of hydrogen plus one of oxygen,’ and that’s all there is to it. The former definition is a colloquial, secondhand kind of thing, one that’s vague and somewhat problematic at the edges. Add salt and food coloring to a glass of water, and it’s not colorless and tasteless anymore – is it still water? What about heavy water? Mineral water? We need something more precise.

What’s the essence of water, then, the thing that makes it what it is? According to our current scientific understanding, that would be its chemical structure. Relatively few of us have extensively studied the chemical composition of the stuff that comes out of our tap, so we defer to the experts who have, and when they tell us that water is made up of two atoms of hydrogen for every atom of oxygen, we defer to their knowledge and let it determine the extension of the word. (The extension of a word is the set of all the things and phenomena in the world that can be correctly referred to by that word.) Now, even before we knew the chemical composition of water, it had that chemical composition – its essence was always fixed, and so according to Putnam the meaning of the word ‘water’ was always fixed, and it was the job of our experts to determine what that essence was, not decide it for themselves.

The net result is that if our experts were to analyze the glass of liquid your Twin Earth hosts gave to you, they would discover that it was XYZ and not H2O, and they would tell you that, in fact, it wasn’t water. You were speaking a different language from your hosts, and it was a happy accident that the resulting error in translation resulted in you getting the kind of beverage you wanted. The funny thing is, since there are not in fact any experts analyzing the glass, both you and your hosts are unaware that you were really asking for the tarry stuff. Whatever was going on in your head – images of a glass of clear liquid, swimming pools, whatever – had absolutely nothing to do with the actual meaning of what you actually said. What mattered was the external conditions – the structure of the natural world, and the judgment of the experts who analyze that world. Putnam’s position, therefore, came to be known as externalism, and folks are still arguing about it today, even as it’s been refined and expanded through subsequent thought experiments. It all starts on Twin Earth with that glass of liquid, though, so that’s where I figured we’d kick off the conversation.

So what do you think?

Filed in Philosophy

Something to Cry About

Posted August 1, 2002 By Dave Thomer

It’s been almost five months since our daughter was born, and it’s truly been a wonderful experience. One thing I’m quickly learning is that once you’re a parent, you need to come up with answers to a whole bunch of questions that were once easy to dismiss, and the process of finding those answers can be a painful one. We got a very sharp lesson in that reality earlier this week.

Alex is for the most part a very well-behaved child. She’s friendly, smiles a lot, and can attract a flock of grandmothers in a diner from ten feet away. The one slight hitch is her sleep schedule – as is little surprise given her genes, she has none. She tends to fall asleep late, and she absolutely hates her crib. What’s worse, even while asleep, she can sense the moment you put her in the crib, wake up and start telling you, loudly, what a bad idea this was. Her three favorite places to sleep are her baby carrier, in someone’s arms, and in the bed next to Pattie or me. Since only the latter is a safe place while both of us are asleep, this has usually meant that Pattie and Alex sleep in the bedroom at night, while I take a nap on the couch and wait for her to go to work, so I can catch a few hours in bed with the baby. Not exactly what you’d call conducive to ‘putting the baby on a schedule,’ which is the one piece of advice we seem to get from all corners. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Special Order Speeches

Once More – with FEELING!

Posted August 1, 2002 By Dave Thomer

1996
Yours truly was a humble editor of low-budget TV commercials at a low-power TV station in a low-ranking market. It was an interesting enough line of work, trying to find new and different ways to show used-car salesmen waving at the camera and bleating a hearty “come on down!�

There weren’t that many new and different ways to do this, mind you. And of course, our lovely account reps expected all of it to be done 15 minutes after they handed in the paperwork — regardless of whether or not the actual shoot for the commercial was scheduled for three days later. “Are you working on my spot yet?â€? they’d ask, poking their head into the somewhat cluttered production office repeatedly. And we laughed, oh, how we laughed. Until we realized they were dead serious. At that point, it became readily apparent that there weren’t nearly enough tape boxes and other heavy objects in the room to throw at them.

And into this arena stepped our youngest and most inexperienced salesperson, who had been tapped by someone to whom I will refer only as Agency Lady to produce a commercial for her newest client, a high-class restaurant in a city we’ll just call Fayetteville, Arkansas (to protect the innocent).

Agency Lady was essentially a one-woman advertising agency, or at least she liked to think so. She had no production facilities of her own, no one else working for her — just her trusty cell phone and an office on wheels. At best, she’s a broker; at worst, an overpaid consultant.

Agency Lady wanted us to come and meet her and her client to discuss a very fancy commercial. And after many a hearty “come on down,� I have to admit that the very prospect was intriguing. What we weren’t expecting was a group of people to whom I’ll refer, for the purposes of this article, as The Committee Of Clueless Individuals Who Should Never Have Had A Say In The Damn Thing. (Or TCOCIWSNHHASITDT for short.)

The Committee was comprised of the following Clueless Individuals.

  • Agency Lady.
  • The Chef, also part-owner of the new restaurant, who had an alarming and most disturbing habit of twisting the filters off of filtered cigarettes and chain-smoking them. As a result, the teeth of this man, who — by default, since he’s presumably preparing many meals a night — one would presume might wish to at least appear sanitary, were black as night.
  • The Chef’s Agent. (We don’t know why he’d need one either.)

Together, these Clueless Individuals were mapping out a grand plan for the newly opened restaurant, including an elaborate commercial beyond the usual expectations for this area. We didn’t mind that. What we did mind, however, was the fact that none of the three members of TCOCIWSNHHASITDT could agree on what, exactly, the commercial in question should be like.

For example, some think that doing the entire spot in black & white would be a powerful and classy statement. Other discussions center on whether there should be a spokesperson on screen, or simply a voice-over. And so on.

We go back a week later to shoot the spot. We spend all day there. Instead of The Chef feeding us some of his fine and likely nicotine-stained cuisine, we have to go foot our own bill for burgers. So much for gratitude.

Then we return home to edit the spot. Lots of dissolves and moody lighting – in color, I might add – and The Chef even graces our production studio to provide the voice-over himself. Everything looks good. Everyone likes it. Everyone seems to agree that this is one of the better productions we’ve turned in.

And then the Committee swings into action.

They decide it needs to be different somehow, with Agency Lady, The Chef and The Chef’s Agent all issuing completely different directives as to how to “improveâ€? the spot which, only a week ago, everyone thought was grand. The Chef’s Agent thinks it should be redone in black & white with spot color on things like candles and flames from the grill. Agency Lady wants it reshot on film. (Few TV stations, if any, use film anymore. Even the top market stations don’t bother — and why should they, when they can rent the equipment?)

And so on. In all, at least a dozen revisions are made and handed in. The Chef’s voice-over is replaced, the spot goes from black and white to color and back again (and again), the music is changed nearly every time, and people keep making suggestions.

And then the damn place goes out of business while revisions are still being made.

Maybe it was the fact that they couldn’t agree on the bloody TV commercial and never got around to putting it on the air more than once or twice.

The saga ends with Agency Lady contacting the station’s sales manager, blaming we, the production guys, for the whole folly, and demanding that the production — which went far above and beyond the typical “come on down!â€? spot — should be pro bono since it was such a fiasco. Numerous 80-mile trips between Fort Smith and Fayetteville, several long days on the clock, and countless hours of post production…and she doesn’t want us to bill her for it.

That incident made me decide to leave commercial production and focus more on promotions, something which always intrigued me anyway. I had, by this point, done numerous promos and found them interesting and entertaining to work on. And if I was entertained, there was a good chance that the viewers would be too. Plus…no Committee of Clueless Individuals. With promos, you’re working directly for the station.

Never again, I said. I started looking for a promo job and eventually got one. It was fun beyond my wildest dreams. And at long last, I forgot about Agency Lady and the TV commercial from hell that had driven me out of the lucrative field of TV commercial production.

Bliss.

2002
Having been to Green Bay and back, I’m now working news promotions at Fort Smith’s ABC station. Not quite as much fun, and very frequently frustrating, but also very challenging. I’ve been here for two and a half years now.

In June, a project from hell slowly begins to coalesce in our Fayetteville office, a project which will bring me back in contact with one of my arch-nemeses from the Committee. They’re still out there – and they’re secretly plotting my destruction. Or perhaps just trying to drive me insane.

The project is an awards presentation video for a homebuilders’ association, and the account rep contacted at our station is assured that this will be a quick edit, only about five minutes long, nothing to it. But there is something to it, something dark and sinister. For our account rep has been contacted by Agency Lady, still doing her one-woman show posing as an advertising agency. The plot thickens.

By the time the sales department contacts my boss in creative services, he already has misgivings about doing a presentation video. This is usually the sort of thing that the commercial production department does. The first time I catch a whiff of Agency Lady’s name in connection with this, I voice misgivings, and remind everyone of her involvement with the Chef’s doomed restaurant. Nobody listens.

(It’s worth a mention here that just once in my life, I’ve always wanted to stage-whisper the words “I tried to warn them…but they didn’t listen.� I just always expected those words to coincide with a tragic blimp accident or something similarly momentous, not a TV project.)

The project keeps getting pushed back because Agency Lady is having a hard time getting her crap together. Once there has been a great gathering of crap, in sufficient amounts to fuel the presentation video on pure fertilizer power alone, Agency Lady will appear and issue instructions. At least this is what they tell me will happen. The crap collection procedure continues until the Friday afternoon before the Wednesday night awards dinner.

Agency Lady arrives, waving a newspaper special supplement recently published to promote the event. In this supplement are no fewer than 44 houses which need to be included, one by one, in this video presentation. Each of these houses is represented not by a photo, but by a very fine-line architectural side-elevation drawing. The kind of very fine-line architectural side-elevation drawing which, when knocked down to TV resolution, results in eye-boggling moire patterns. There are also nearly two dozen sponsors, and at one point Agency Lady asks if the entire newspaper supplement page, which must measure all of 10 x 12 inches in irritatingly tiny type, can be compressed onto the screen.

I respond, truthfully, by telling her that it would look very, very bad — and would be completely illegible. To this, she replies, “Okay, never mind about putting the page on the screen then.â€?

This is a very important thing, as you’ll see later.

That night, after my other duties are finished (around 7:30pm), I set about the extremely arduous tack of copying down, from the newspaper circular, the address and builder of each house/subdivision. All 44 of these things are clustered six to a page in the circular, again in very small type, and I don’t even get all of these things typed up that night. Oh, and once the voice track for the presentation was edited and timed out, it was not five minutes. It was closer to twenty.

Over the weekend, I spend 24 hours getting the project to a point where it’s about 85% completed. I made it look as good as possible, and aside from all the moire patterns on those blasted line-art renderings, it almost did look presentable.

On Monday morning, the client — i.e. Agency Lady — wants to see the project, finished or not. She wants to see it now. Now, keeping in mind that this is Monday and we have our routine duties to perform once again, Agency Lady is politely told that she’ll be able to see it Monday night or Tuesday morning, because we won’t be able to get around to dubbing it off until then. The project is dubbed off that afternoon, and is prepared to be sent up to the Fayetteville office via our microwave link that night at around 7pm.

Tuesday morning I walk in, and discover that I’m being accused of gross incompetence. Apparently Agency Lady wanted all of the houses’ visuals to be nothing more than the newspaper pages. She wanted everything to be exactly as seen in the newspaper circular, in fact. She wanted the newspaper circular’s pages transferred to television in whole chunks.

But did she ever explicitly tell me this? No. Guess my gross incompetence is in the area of telepathy.

By Tuesday afternoon, the project has been taken away from our station, and the station has lost its sponsorship of the awards dinner (for which the presentation video was to be our contribution, in lieu of money). Given that I clocked in over 24 hours of time-and-a-half, I’m sure that in a few days accounting will be lamenting the fact that the sponsorship wasn’t just bought outright. Having me at the station all weekend on the clock will almost certainly prove to be more expensive.

And the capper to the situation? Agency Lady, in a huff, tells us that she’ll be going to a video production house in Fayetteville to get the presentation done right.

So let’s check the score at halfway through the fourth quarter here, shall we?

It took me over 24 hours — spread out over three days — to put together the now-rejected presentation. At the time Agency Lady called to tell us we were being dumped and she was going to “start from scratch,â€? about 27 hours remained before the awards dinner began.

And I learned later in the day that, being a busy production house, the place she had chosen to redo the entire presentation could only allot four hours of prep and edit time. It would’ve taken me about 90 minutes to bring the presentation, as I had edited it, to a state of completion — but she had now burned that bridge with the station’s management.

In short, she had four hours to replicate a project I had taken well over a full day to do.

I’m not a vengeful man, nor do I pride myself on such. Sometimes, however, I do get a little bit of satisfaction from a perfectly natural come-uppance in which I had to take no action.

As I put the finishing touches on this piece, I look at the clock and note that the awards dinner began about an hour ago, and so too, presumably, did the video. If, in fact, Agency Lady, my arch nemesis, got one done. I almost wish I could see what it looked like.

Bliss.

Filed in Life in Practice
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