I just got a call from one of the "big-three" TV s…
I just got a call from one of the “big-three” TV stations here. Actually a couple of calls. When I picked up the phone the first time and said “Wei?” I was met with nothing but the unmistakable sounds of a newsroom in the background. After a few moments and a couple of “Wei!”s later I hung up, assuming it was a wrong number. A minute later the phone rang again. It was the same background noise, but this time there was also a woman speaking to me.
“We’d like to interview you for our news program,” she told me.
“Ok.”
“We’d like you to go home, get some of your army pictures, let us film a bit, and then give us an interview.”
“I see.”
“We need to get everything done now so that the report can get on the 7 o’clock News.”
“What? You realize I’m at work, right? I can’t just take off. You need to give me some notice here,” I protested. She said she’d talk to boss and try to work something out.
Damn. How disorganized can you get, anyway? You can’t just call someone and tell them to take off work, run around the city and give an interview just because you couldn’t be arsed to plan ahead. This, of course, is typical Standard Operating Procedure for large TV stations here in Taiwan. Their exaggerated sense of self-importance tends to manifest itself by way of the assumption that everyone’s lives must revolve around them. TVBS didn’t start out that way, but it ended up being just as bad as the big-three, and that was one of the reasons I left. I told the reporter she’d damn well better talk to her boss and reschedule. In the meantime, I have to get home and clean up my room so that the DIY people can come over and take pictures of it and decide whether it’s salvagable or not. And tomorrow at lunch I have to meet with the people from that military magazine. Hopefully they’re just curious and not intent on making sure I don’t say anything bad about the army.
I watched the Maltese Falcon on DVD last night, since a theater director friend of mine mentioned that she was thinking of putting on a stage version of it on, and she had me in mind for the part of Sam Spade. I had originally thought that it would be a bit of a stretch for me, but the more I watched, the more I think Spade’s brand of humorous cynicism would be right up my dark, San Francisco alley. I even have the hat.
