News Goobs Ahead

Bright lime-green ain’t exactly my color, but I’ll gladly work it into my next ensemble if it’ll help me get home at night. While not everyone’s convinced it will, I’m err on the side of safety and embrace the use of reflective yellow and shiny piping on the evening news. See, a new Federal Highway Administration regulation goes into effect in November (November?) requiring all ‘workers on or near public highways to wear high-visibility safety clothes’. ‘Workers’ now includes media crews -ya know, those poor saps dispatched to the edge of some screaming interstate so they can set up lights and camera and warn everyone watching at home about distracted driving? It’s a thoroughly asinine practice, but long ago image consultants convinced station owners that LIVE(!) meant good. Over-coiffed news readers have been manning crumbling road shoulders and pitch black holes every since. Until the very last live truck is replaced by a shiny, floating laptop, this ill-advised tactic will no doubt continue.

A-HEM. Sorry if I sound bitter, but I simply cannot count the number of times I’ve been assigned a some perilous remote by some twenty-something who bitches when the break room drink machine runs out of Fresca. Was a time I’d park a live truck in the middle of an off-ramp if you let me - but that was back when I was young, immortal and rockin’ the mullet. These days my hair’s thinner and my perspective longer. I’m still dedicated to state of the art newsgathering but sorry - I’m not risking my life so you can open your show with live pictures of semi’s whizzing by a guy who’d stab his old driver’s-ed teacher in the throat if only that would score him the coveted weekend anchor gig. So take that quad-box and shove it up your ass, for I’ll play your game and feign urgency, but only in a reasonable manner. If that means suiting up like a Chernobyl janitor, bring it on. I’ll try and make it work with wrinkled tourist look - if it will make a single housecat consider the risk of some useless roadside live shot. Besides, as I told Whitey just the other day…

“If I perish in the line of duty, I’m haunting every one of you bastards.”