Whinging Wednesdays

I'm actually not really in the mood to complain today because of the holidays. Actually, I had a post that I was planning to write about how I'd been Scrooged by the people at my job, but they're actually slowing coming through for me slowly but surely. Granted, I'm not getting an envelope full of cash like years past, but a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.com is nothing to sneeze at.

So really the only thing I have to complain about is the second job. For those of you who are regular readers of my blog, you know that I also work for a market research firm where I watch TV shows, and then write pithy questions for a web-site that viewers can access called Reward TV.com where you can all win valuable prizes (although don't email me asking for the answers to any of the questions!). Sounds like a dream job, and in many ways it is, but there are nights like last night and last Friday, when I wonder if the extra money is worth it.

See part of the job is tracking product placements in the shows to see how well the consumer (that would be you) actually takes notice of these things. Normally, if TPTB think a show is going to be particularly IPP heavy, assign two writers as well as a logger to record the IPP (product placements). Well on both Friday and last night, it was just me and the logger, and guess what? Both nights, the shows were heavy on the IPP. Who knew that a show about marriage proposals (the show I watched on Friday) could be so product heavy. And it wasn't like I was tracking the things that you would expect, I was tracking Sea World (which was mentioned three or four times), Chevrolet (3 times, and it's a client so I had to write questions).



Now the way it works at my job is this, if a client is shown or mentioned, we have to write a question. If a product is mentioned, but not shown - no question, unless it's mentioned more than once. Also if a product is shown but not mentioned, it gets a question. So instead of having to write 12 questions for a show, I ended up having to write 16 on Friday, and 15 last night.

But last night took the cake. First of all, the show I was assigned to write was a show on Discovery called 'Dirty Jobs' which is pretty self-explanatory. The host, Mike Rowe, hangs out wtih people who do jobs that no one else really wants to do or would think about doing. Like harvesting worm poop. Or being an exterminator (I won't tell you how large the rat was they caught but it was the size of a chihuahua). Or the trailer that was literally covered in German cockroaches. I get itchy just thinking about it. But the best was the cave that had a floor covered in bat guano also known as bat poop. This stuff was so thick that Mike Rowe got his boot caught in it and couldn't get it unstuck. This stuff was like quicksand. I have no idea what they do with bat guano, nor do I want to know but there's a cave in Texas called Bracken Cave that's covered in it.

So I write up my log and I go to show it the coordinator and it turns out that the logger isn't ready. So I wait and I start writing my questions. The show ended at ten o'clock and finally around say 11:30, I'm told that hey, guess what? The logger who was supposed to do the show couldn't and they forget to assign a new one. So I had to wit for like another hour for the other logger to finish, and she had like twice the number of products I had, so I had to basically write all my questions from scratch, which meant I didn't get home until almost 2:30 in the morning.

I'm functioning write now on about 4 hours of sleep since I didn't wake up until 6:30 this morning (Oops!) and I had to be at work by eight.

Thank god, I'm used to quick changes from being an actress otherwise I would never had made it on time.

So, as anyone had a day that seemed to start out okay and then rapidly hit the skids?