You Could Not Pay Me Enough

That's a TV tower. It's like 2 billion feet tall or something like that. (Just an estimate) It sits in the back parking lot of the station where I work and it allows for technical stuff like sending and receiving satellite and microwave feeds so we can do live television. Basically, it's like magic. Yes, there is a scientific explanation for how TV works, but it hurts my brain to think about it. (The fact that images and sound can be captured in a camera, travel through the sky, be compressed into cables and stuff and then come across your TV basically instantaneously is mind boggling.) I write the words and tell stories -- I don't mess with all that technical stuff.

Another thing that my mind cannot fathom is having to climb that tv tower to paint it! That's exactly what some very brave and/or crazy people are doing this week. Therefore all of the station employees are having to park way across the street. Here is our empty parking lot:
The high school across the street is letting us use their parking lots:
We have to park far away so that we don't get red polka dots on our cars. As illustrated in this picture, our parking lot is still splattered with red paint from the last tower painting about a decade ago.
But can you imagine climbing this sucker??!!!?? You can't even see them because it's so far up there, but there are a couple of guys at the very top of the tower in this picture:

They crew has this crazy pulley system to get the paint cans up the tower. A van drives forward and pulls a cable down one side of the tower, so that the cable comes up the other side of the tower with the paint cans:The other side of the cable is stretched all the way across the parking lot. You can see in this picture the cable with the paint cans attached. (They are about 3/4 the way up on the left -- they look like balloons or something.) I could never be persuaded to do such a task. Never. It is total insanity.

On a side note, the parking situation added to the chaos at the station today. The Avid system crashed several days ago and the engineers haven't been able to fix it. (That's the non-linear system we use to edit all of our video.) We got rid of our tape-to-tape editing decks several years ago, so the only tape-to-tape editing systems are in our live trucks. So with Avid down, our editors and photographers were running back and forth across the street to the trucks all day to edit the newscasts. Good times.

Nicole has a video clip on her blog that very much illustrates our plight. Check it out by clicking here.