It's official

I'm a director now.

Yep, months of underpaid part-time insurance-free work as a "technical director," or "switcher" as we say in the biz, has officially paid off. A few months ago, co-worker Mike, the weekend director, got a job in Seattle; now his replacement, co-named Andrew, is moving to Nashville to work as a grip on Spike TV's "Power Block," which I'm told is four shows about trucks, or something. And it should tell you something that working as a grip on the Power Block is paying co-Andrew much, much, much more than what he made in Eugene directing the weekend news.

I started out switching the morning shows, a stint that slowly depleted my savings and held the tantalizing danger that I might get injured or sick and deplete other peoples' savings as well. The worst part of switching the morning show was not that I had to be awake and alert from 4:30am to 7:30am, nor was it that I also had to be back in the afternoons from 4:00pm to 7:00pm to do audio and chyrons for the afternoon shows, nor was it the fact that I only got one day (Sunday) off per week, nor the fact that I often didn't get that day off either and received only regular pay and not overtime pay for extra work because I wasn't working 40 hours a week. It was more a combination of all those things. Also awful: you come home from work in the morning, you go to bed, wake up in the afternoon, and go straight back to work.

Luckily for my sanity, after about eight months Mike got the Seattle gig, which meant co-promotions for co-Andrew and myself. At last I was full time, with benefits and the ability to get overtime and everything. But I was still in a kind of limbo territory -- being a technical director for a long time doesn't look all that great on a resum?, I imagine. I mean, I'm sure you could get a fine job with that experience alone, but I'm also sure you could do a lot better if you could just drop that pesky "Technical" from the title. Co-Andrew, however, said he was in it for the long haul...

Until a scant two months later, when suddenly he found a job in his dream city, Nashville, doing his dream thing, which was a show about souping up trucks I guess. He's very excited. And now I get his old spot directing. It's a totally different job from what I was doing before, and requires an entirely different training process, which I've just started. (A technical director "switches" the show, pressing buttons that correspond to cameras and tape decks and the like to manipulate what shows up on your TV screen; the director tells the technical director exactly what to press and when, while simultaneously instructing the sound guy, the floor crew, and sometimes the anchor. It's mostly about timing.)

So that's the latest from me. More on my saga as it unfolds.