WTF... f**king prompter...

(Originally written many, many moons ago.) 

F**king prompter.

Notice I ended that sentence with a period (.) and not an exclamation point (!) (As if I had to illustrate those tools of the English language... but one never knows.) An exclamation point would denote some sort of surprise or shock or a sense that it was unexpected of the prompter to somehow fail. 

But no, no exclamation point.

I will say this, however: the recovery and on air presentation of the newscast still came off clean. Not necessarily in the order or manner in which it was planned, but still... small victories. I'll take them when they come.

You'll also kindly notice the header of this blog entry... that's usually the reaction we (directors, producers, cam ops, whomever...) have, sometimes mild, sometimes not (mostly not), to such ordeals.

Ahh... the lack of control.

The one constant in television newscasts: as much as we'd like to pretend we're in control, we're just merely riding a mostly well timed wave of small chaotic events. Sometimes there is a burp... a big nasty, stinky burp and not one of those "small, no-one-heard-that-in-polite- company burps" that disrupts the hell out of a show. The important aspect, and probably my best metric of any person in distress during a show, is how well they can respond and recover from that "belch from hell."

For the most part I think that I've surrounded myself with a good crew that can handle most if not all emergencies with ease and grace. But boy, oh boy, there are some nights... thankfully tonight wasn't one of those.

On the bright side is this: no one has died due to a bad show.

Well, I take that back, someone once did... but that was a long time ago and I don't care to talk about it.

Notice I made that period very large. It means, "Don't ask!"

For now I'll just accept that it will happen again (the bad show part and not the dying part... whew, glad I cleared that up...) and hope to great googly moogly our (my) recovery will be just what was needed. Cooler heads will always prevail...

...hopefully.

Now I'll leave you with a joke: Two nuns were sitting on a bench in a park when a man in a trench coat came by and flashed them. One nun had a stroke...

The other one missed.

Damnit. I was going to type my disclaimer here but I've forgotten what I typed. And no, CTRL C, CTRL V won't save me this time... just too damned lazy.