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October 18, 2004

Getting ready for elections

It's about that time ... when every American aged 18 years or older gets to do the one job that is expected of all Americans.

VOTE

I'm a huge believer in voting. I have voted in every single election since I was able to vote. I've never bothered with primaries however, as I never really considered them to be legit. Each party elects whomever they want in the primaries by throwing ungodly amounts of cash at their boy/girl. The people I would vote for in a primary never make it far ... with only a few exceptions that I can recall over the years.

Anyhow, I'm sick of elections. I never really put this much thought into elections until I started working at WHAS 2 years ago. Before then, I did research on the people that I liked and if they satisfied my ideal of a good political candidate, then I voted for them. These days, however, things have really changed. Working at a TV station and handling gazillions of elections every year, you see another side of things that most people don't get to see.

My favorite example of this thus far has been watching candidates record their spots for TV coverage. We've had many many many different political figures from both sides of the fence over a few weeks time come in and read their speeches and the like to get themselves elected. I've seen people edit their stuff on the fly to remove things like party affiliations from their script since they thought that aligning themselves either way may be a bad thing for them. It finally hit me after seeing this that it is truely all politics. Every single person trying to get elected says what they think the people want to hear ... regardless if they really feel that way or not. The most interesting thing is that this happens on both sides of the fence ... it's not just Democrats or Republicans that are doing it. One party is just as bad as the other.

Another way that I've been influenced over the past two years is the fact that I actually have to work election night. I work at a TV station and one of my primary duties during election time is to make sure that all of our election equpiment is working properly. This means making sure that the servers, clients, web interfaces, graphic interfaces, news wires, etc ... are all working properly. I know the dates of elections by heart months before anyone else is really thinking about them. I know where people are going to be and what job roles are going to be handled by any specific person. I also know that people are relying on us to deliver the best possible election coverage in Louisville. It's a pretty big job for anyone to handle. Thank goodness I have Kyle to back me up on it all.

Election night itself is a bit of a headache, due to the preparations required to get everything up and running properly. We need laptops, phones, monitors, cameras, mics, tables, networking equipment, etc etc etc ... and it takes forever to put up properly. It takes just as long to take the darn thing down too. Not to mention the people who're freaking out all day long, which only makes our job 10 times harder than what it has to be.

Keeping this in mind, I've been doing some preventive work this year to make sure everything goes as smoothly as humanly possible. I've created extention cables for phone lines. Kyle and I spent this afternoon rewiring the phone system in the studio and in the phone room. Tomorrow I will be setting up the studio for test run-throughs and Kyle will be concentrating on getting the graphic and wire clients in place for further testing. We're re-building and re-imaging laptops for election night. We're testing AP wires to make sure everything comes in correctly. We're testing graphics that the art department makes to ensure that everything looks good on the air. We're testing squeezebacks to ensure that everything squeezes properly on the air. We're testing phone connections to ensure that all of our rollover phones for the people who answer the lines work properly. We're making sure that the database for the election server is working properly and is accepting data correctly. Blah blah blah blah blah.

All this and two weeks left to go.

I want elections to be over so damn bad I can just taste it. It's like you're running a 10 mile marathon and you have only 1/2 mile left to go. You're worn out but you know you can make it to the finish line if you just keep up the pace and give it all you got.

Thank goodness I have a vacation coming up soon.

Posted by ed at October 18, 2004 09:41 PM

Comments

Posted by: Troy Overton at October 21, 2004 10:04 AM

Posted by: eengelking at October 29, 2004 03:07 PM

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