Breaking up is hard to do...

Oh, ain't it the truth, Neil.


On Thursday, our production director, my immediate supervisor, decided to give two weeks notice. Our general manager, as is her right, decided the two weeks weren't necessary.


What does that mean?


It means I'm now the interim production director, half trained, half aware, and half way out the door.


Which wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't almost eight months pregnant.


For those who don't know what a production director does, let me explain. The production director is responsible for producing and dubbing all the commercials that air on our stations. In this case, the production director is also responsible for a nasty little thing referred to as "continuity", and I hate it.


I can make commercials all day long. I love sitting in the studio in front of the board and my audio editing software. I love fiddling with little bits of audio, and making them fit in the right places. I love picking out music, tweaking scripts, doing voice overs and character voices. I've gotten to the point where I can read the visual representation of a wav file the way other people read heart beats on a monitor. I can tell where someone has taken a breath, where the percussion solo is in the music, and where I've spliced in the sound effects, just by looking at the wav form.


What I don't like is sitting in the office in front of my computer trying to figure out which spot is supposed to run at what time of day, how many times, and which sales order it's supposed to be associated with so that the billing is correct. That's continuity. Continuity is sorting through what we call "traffic", which is a piece of paper (or many pieces of paper) that describes which spot runs, when it runs, how many times it runs, as well as any times it is prohibited to run. And I get to keep track of it all on a piece of software that is ungainly and maddening, and not very user friendly. Add in our new internet streaming system, and I spend a lot of time in front of a very angry and petulant computer.


The worst thing about being the production director is that I don't seem to get to do much production! I was at work from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. last night, but I did take a one and a half hour break for dinner with my family. They came to rescue me. The funny thing is, I spent most of the day doing paper work, and trotting from one end of the building to another hunting down salespeople for production orders that hadn't been turned in, or were incomplete, or catching up with orders that had been placed, but didn't have traffic or instruction. I didn't actually start doing production (i.e. dubbing or audio mixing) until 2 p.m. Then we had a ton of orders that all came in at 5 p.m., just as we thought we were done putting stuff in to run for the day. We had at least four clients who had to be added to the broadcast logs at the last minute. Fridays are always bad since we're planning commercials schedules for the whole weekend, but this was probably one of the worst Fridays I've ever worked.


And this leads me to my next bombshell.


Because the hours of a production director are so long, my blogging will be severely curtailed. I may try to pop in now and again before my maternity leave, but you might want to just save yourselves the trouble of checking in here for the next seven weeks. The irony is, now that I've been promoted (at least temporarily), I'll probably have a hell of a lot more to write about!


So thanks to all who read and comment here regularly. I'll try to come see you as much as I can. For those who use Bloglines or Technorati or some such thing, you'll know when I post. I would encourage anyone who hasn't to read some of my older posts. They are much better than the drivel I've been spewing out recently.


But if I have to choose between seeing my kid before she falls asleep and talking to y'all...well, I'm sure you'll agree TFYO is cuter than you. Well, Willowtree might not agree, but I think he's delusional. He thinks dishwasher detergent talks.

I'll leave you with my favourite picture of me at work. Thanks y'all.