My job can be moronically funny at times. I work for what I've heard my co-workers describe as "the biggest media company in the Bay Area," which to me is like saying that "Candlestick Park is the biggest stadium that isn't AT&T Park."
Wait, does that even make sense?
Nevermind. My job - as a Production Technician, if you please - consists of interpreting the often maddeningly vague (and usually totally wrong) line-item orders for various media clips sent to us from a gaggle of salespeople known as Account Executives, or AEs. We also know them as Idiots, Assholes, Fuckwads, and Evil Pricks.
Not that they're bad people, mind you. No, the AEs are simply salespeople. They are scattered around this country, in the various company offices. There's one in St. Louis, one in L.A., one in San Diego, one in New York, Chicago, Miami, Indianapolis... we're all connected by email, and despite the time difference, communication is usually not an issue.
Let's say that Shell Oil had one of their executives making some speech as some technology event somewhere, right? They know that the footage of this only exists on some obscure website, and since they lack the capacity, knowledge and patience to get that footage and convert it into their preferred format - usually a Windows Media video file, but we also get orders for Quicktime, Flash, AVIs, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, DVDs and even Betamax tapes - they call us.
Well, they call the AE linked to their particular account and the AE enters the order, and it comes back to us.
Now, these AEs clearly have no fucking idea what we editors do back here... we're cloistered on the other side of the building, well away from where the AEs are clustered together, trying to fleece their clients for as much as possible by evidently promising them the fucking moon. Which makes us look like lazy hacks when it proves utterly impossible to render a clip downloaded from some fuzzy DVR in, say, Wichita, Kansas in "crystal-clear HD," (as I've noticed many local news affiliates around the country now boast in their opening show graphics. Like it matters.)
So for the hard-to-find stuff, like CNN footage from 2005, which apparently no other company has any more (we get orders from The Daily Show on Comedy Central pretty regularly, usually for that night's program), it makes sense for the business to come here. Still, there are days when I truly feel like calling up someone from these companies and telling them how badly my company fucks them on a regular basis.
But that would be wrong... right? Right or wrong? It doesn't matter, because there's no way I'd do that - at least, not while I'm still working here.
The other day I had an order from Atlantic Records for two clips from those glossy, mindless staples of tabloid nonsense, Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight. Each clip concerned some pop singer who did some kind of awesome Prince impression at a BET awards show. Total cost - for roughly 40 seconds of video - $268.17.
Wow. Seriously, what is wrong with these people? I'm asking YOU, Hypothetical Reader. These companies are supposedly hemorrhaging money, laying off thousands of people, yet they blow what amounts to one person's daily salary on these bullshit clips? I could've shown someone how to rip this shit from a DVR in about ten minutes, for free.
I wish I had a point to make here. I don't. It's just horribly wasteful, and I disapprove.
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