Slow Days

Even though being a TV Photog can be a blazing fast, action packed, travel filled, non-stop adventure that can leave you out of breath, beat down and miseralbly tired, there are days (VERY RARE DAYS) when the name of the game is hurry up and wait...and wait....and wait.

One recent day for example (YESTERDAY) I found myself in a cemetary with my distinguished female colleauge Caron Myers. We were summoned to this city of the dead at the request of an eagle eye viewer who had found discarded headstones that she thought were wrongly disposed of.

We went to the end of a gravel trail where we found pile after pile of used and discarded headstones that seemed eerily out of place. We waited there for a lady to arrive who's last name was on one of the stones. As we waited for her to arrive 10 minutes became and hour became nearly two. And as I waited in the front seat of my news unit I napped. Listening to the birds sing and the wind blow made my eyes become heavy and I sawed some logs.

The woman who we had only talked to by phone never showed up, and when we were finally able to get in touch with a representative of the cemetary, they were quickly able to quash our little story. The headstones were dicards allright, but most of them were old displays from an old monument company. Even though they were even fully engraved with birth and death dates they were fakes, just for sales purpopes. That is apparantly a commom practice. The headstone of the lady we never met was discarded because a vault truck delivering a neighboring cript for a fresh burial had knocked over her headstone. The vault company replace the stone and the cemetary gets to crush the old one for gravel. That's the protocol for all discarded headstones. They become road gravel and fill for the cemetary.

So at nearly 2 o'clock we had to find another story. We are dispatched to Alamance C0unty. We had a nearly hour drive in front of us for a story about a high schooler who wasn't being allowed to go to the prom because he had a run in with the law several years back. It didn't matter to the principal that he had repaid his debt to society, he was on the NO list for the prom.

But this story quickly died when the boy told his mom and the eager NAACP representitive that he'd rather not put himself in that spotlight.

On to story number three. Luckily, it too was in Alamance county. By now it was 3 o'clock. We headed to a courtroom for the highly publicized April Greer murder trial for what was to be the last day of jury selection ironically on the 2 year anniversary of the discovery of her body.

While my reporter went into the courtroom to hear the proceedings I stayed in the truck and read the local newspaper and napped....Again. The excitement of the local paper and the afternoon sun must have been too much for me to take. This sitting still for too long stuff isn't for me.

Not too long into this afternoon powernap we had to swap into a live truck, send back a reporter track to be paired up with some file video of the 2 year old murder scene and then I actually had to get off my duff and shoot a live shot at 6.

I got home at 7:30. What a day. Good thing I got those naps in. Good things these kind of days are rare.