Essential Duties that Interrupt Sleep

Journalism is by no means a 9 to 5 job. Television Photojournalism is a step further from the daily bank hour grind. So I am awfully grateful that I've been lucky enough to have been a dayside photographer for 9 or so years now.

But I still get pleny of nightime and early morning assignments. You see, that's when the action is. The typical daytime, middle of the day stories are not as riveting on the surface. It generally takes a little more work to make daytime stories pop.

A lot of times I get my nightime action throught the on call system. It can be a blessing and a curse. It's an easy way to acrue a bit of O-T but it also can lead to sleep deprivation.

Just yesterday I got called out to yet another Greensboro shooting (2 in a week for me alone) at 4AM. The problem was in the fact that I was already planning a short sleep session having hit the sack at 2, only 2 hours prior to my callout.



The shooting was a robbery where the victim chased down the suspects, the suspects shot the victim and THEN when they fled they crashed into a brick wall.



It was easy stuff, I was done by 5 and I probably could have went back home and slept some more but I needed to finish some editing so I spent the next 3 hours editing. Finishing that around 8 I walked into my next assignment by visiting our assignment desk. They were about to call the other on-call guy when I spoke up to head that way.



A man fell asleep at the wheel and his pickup truck crashed head on into a church group headed to a beach retreat.



A woman from the church group was killed and 2 teens were seriously injured.



I wrapped up that shoot in about 45 minutes and handed off the video to another crew and headed towared home.

With only 2 hours sleep I was done and headed home. Unfortunatley I had a bunch of things to do around the house and I didn't get to bed until midnight. It was something like 36 hours with 2 hours of sleep.