It wasn’t that the shaking was so bad, but it was the unknown that had me worried. At the time I had no way of knowing if it was going to get any worse. I was thinking to myself that there was absolutely nothing I could do other than stand in that doorway. Could the building actually collapse if the shaking got significantly worse? (They don’t have earthquakes building codes in DC.)

Once the shaking ended I heard “What the heck was that!?” from down the hall, immediately followed by calls for everybody to get out of the building. I grabbed my backpack and sneakers and headed for the office doors. Within 30 seconds everybody in the office was in the stairwell headed downstairs, quickly. Then we gathered out on the street and just waited with hundreds of others. Everybody in the city was out on the streets.

I tried calling and texting repeatedly but nothing could get out. Phone service  didn’t work for a while but somehow people were able to connect to Facebook to get information. After a while I was able to get one call out to Patty’s voice mail and that was it for hours.

At 3:00 p.m. I decided to take the Metro home. I knew it would be a nightmare but so was street traffic throughout the city. Trains were running at a maximum speed of 15 miles per hour. And we were packed in like sardines. The air conditioner was on but it just couldn’t compensate for all the body heat. A woman in my subway car passed out from heat exhaustion and was helped off the train at Fort Totten. Then two stations later a man in the same car collapsed from heat before Silver Spring. My train finally arrived at the Forest Glen station around 5:00 p.m.

It was a lot of fun and the weather was perfect. We ate lunch by the side of the river, halfway through. I got to see a Bald Eagle in the wild for the first time, and the trip ended near a waterfall too.

This trip to West Virginia marked the 35th U.S. state (including DC) I’ve been to. Sadly, it was my first new state in over 20 years.

After rafting, I left to go straight from West Virginia to Charlotte, NC to spend Saturday with my family. I first took a five minute detour through historic Harpers Ferry. I definitely would have stopped, gotten out, walked through downtown, and bought a souvenir, but sadly there’s no convenient parking anywhere near downtown. Then I headed south into Virginia. Seven hours and 400 miles later I was in Charlotte (via Fort Mill, SC).

It was great to spend Saturday with the family. I was in Charlotte last weekend but I only got to spend one hour with Patty and Darah the whole time Maegan wasn’t even there last time but she was home this time. I even got to meet Peach. The next time I’m in Charlotte I’ll get three entire days with Patty and the kids.

My original plans for this past weekend was to be in Charlotte to for the Panthers game on Saturday. But open-heart surgery for my mom changed those plans.

On Thursday Amy and I took a bus up to New York. At 5:00 a.m. on Friday we were bringing my mom in to the hospital, along with my aunt. The whole morning was just waiting and waiting. Then around noon we got word to come in to talk with the surgeon. This was earlier than we were expecting so we were worried at first. But the doctor explained that the surgery went as well as possible. They were able to repair a valve rather than replace it. This is great because a replacement would need to be replaced again in the future. So this was all great news. We saw my mom a couple of times after the surgery but she wouldn’t remember any of it.

With everything having gone well in New York, and other family still up there, I took a flight down to Charlotte at the crack of dawn Saturday morning. Patty picked me up at the airport and I had just enough time to have lunch with her and Darah (Maegan was in the mountains). Then it was off to the stadium for the next ten straight hours.

I don’t discuss what happens at the stadium, but it was definitely anything but dull.

Getting home after midnight, I had time to have breakfast with Patty and Darah Sunday morning and then it was already time to drop me off at the bus to take an 8 hour ride back to Washington, DC. That final bus trip was the only part of my birthday weekend that went as originally planned.

I had to do some testing at a workplace that shall not be mentioned. I tried to do it last weekend when I was in town anyway but I was told that they didn’t have enough security guards working over the holiday weekend to watch over me. Since I didn’t have a bus ticket bought in advance, I had to get up at 4:30am on Saturday and drive 450 miles (one way) to get to the unnamed location by 1:00pm. I spent the rest of the day there and then had to head back to Washington first thing the next morning.

What pissed me off was that no security guards were with me for even one minute of the 6 hours I was there, so there was really no reason I couldn’t take care of this over the Independence Day weekend. Instead, I lost a whole weekend, had to drive 900 miles solo, and spent $150 on gas for no reason.

This had got me thinking about how drastically my life has changed in the past year. One year ago today, sitting in Charlotte without a job, who would have predicted that I would soon…

• work in Washington, DC.
  (I’ve worked in many states but never in a major metropolitan area before.)
• not work in the field of broadcast television.
  (16 years in broadcast television. No other industry, full-time.)
• work in the field of government policy.
  (A non-profit policy organization would never have crossed my mind before, even as a possibility.)
• work in a place where I’m the only one with video production or graphics skills.
  (It’s an added difficulty when nobody knows what I’m even talking about.)
• have “Webmaster” as (part of) my job title.
  (I’ve been a freelance webmaster for well over a decade but it’s never been an official part of my full-time job before.)
• have a job that actually combined  both my video production skills and my webmaster experience.
  (This is a truly rare combination and I’m very lucky to be able to do both together.)
• regularly produce and direct online video webinars.
  (I’ve directed live productions before but never webinars and never on a regular basis.)
• commute to work by subway.
  (I’ve never previously commuted to work via any mass-transit.)
• walk two miles per day just to get back and forth from the metro station.
  (Way more daily walking than ever before. An hour per day.)
• live^* in Washington DC (for a few months).
• live^* in Maryland (for the second time).
• live^* with my sister.
• live^* in an apartment in the heart of a major city.
• live^* in a basement.
• have to travel 16 hours on a bus just to spend one full day with my wife and kids every other week.

^{*I’m still a legal resident of North Carolina but I’ve been staying with my sister in the DC area.}

A year of unexpected firsts. Who’d a thunk any of it?

Nearly a year ago, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Board of Education voted to eliminate my entire department as part of  a recession-based Reduction In Force that included more than 500 teachers layoffs too.  Our last day was more than eight months ago, back in June 2010. Today I accepted a new job offer and will soon, finally return to the workforce. My new job is in Washington, DC, just a half-mile from the White House. But I’ll be moving to DC alone. Patty and the the kids will remain in Charlotte until Patty graduates from nursing school, which should be in December 2012 – almost two years from now. This will be incredibly difficult for all of us, but especially for Patty. Patty will need to raise the girls alone, while still going through nursing school, and also maintaining the household too. It’s not going to be easy at all, but I wouldn’t have taken the job in DC unless we both thought that it should be the best decision for all of us in the long run. Of course, I’ll be traveling back to Charlotte (an 8 hour drive each way) to see my family as often as possible.

Now more about my new job. My new employer is a non-profit organization that advocates for national educational policies that help improve high school graduation rates. I will be the Website and Video Production Manager, so this job will combine my 17 years of professional broadcast television experience with over a decade of experience I have creating and maintaining websites. Plus it builds off of my previous employer’s role in education-oriented digital communications. It’s seriously almost like this job was meant just for me.

While I’m in Washington I’ll be lucky enough to be able to stay with my sister who’s had a small apartment in the city for years (very small). Without her help I really wouldn’t have been able to make it in DC while Patty and the kids were still back in Charlotte. Sharing a small apartment will be cramped at first but she was already looking to buy a house in the Maryland suburbs before this offer even came up.

I worked at CMS-TV for the past two and a half years.  It was a very  different experience in many ways.  Facility-wise it was much like being back in college at PSTV.  The station operated out of an old school and half the equipment was donated from other stations long ago.  (Although, one thing PSTV had that CMS-TV didn’t was indoor plumbing. )  But it’s not the equipment that matters as much as what you do with it.  That little station with only a few employees produced a tremendous amount of media content, both for the public via cable channel 3 and internally for various school departments too.  And the quality of our work was way above what you’d expect from your typical PEG channel.   But the biggest difference was the people.  I remember my first day of work there, Stephanie told me that everybody there was like a family.  At the time I internally scoffed at that notion.  No matter how big or how small a workplace is, anybody can give the typical “we’re like a family” line.  But Stephanie was right.  I’ve had plenty of co-workers at other jobs who were good friends but this tight-knit group really was more like a family.

Most of the final day was surreal.  For one thing, even though some were still cleaning up their belongings, we still had actual work to do.  And we also had a parade of former colleagues stop by to wish us all well.  In some ways it felt like the final episode of Seinfeld, when all the past characters came back for one final appearance.  But at other times it felt a bit like a funeral because nobody quite knows what to say is in this situation.

For lunch we all went together for a last meal at our collectively favorite restaurant, Big Daddy’s Burger Bar on East Boulevard.  (Seriously the best burgers in town and crazy-awesome sweet potato fries.)  After lunch we were still working right up to the final moments, but we still took a moment to take this group crew photo in the studio.

In addition to everybody losing their jobs today, another co-worker, Elizabeth, lost her job last year due to 2009′s RIF (Reduction In Force).  After Elizabeth was terminated we left her name on the schedule board.  We set the dot to “out” and wrote “Santa Fe” next to her name as that’s where she ended up moving to.  That’s how it remained for the past year and before locking up today for the final time, Donald set all of our remaining names to “out” too, along with the different locations we were heading.  (Click the image to see it larger.)

Then after a long bizarre day came the final few moments.  Unlike when it’s one person’s last day at work, this was the last day at work for everyone, and the last day for the station itself (although it will broadcast existing content on auto-pilot for a while).   We turned off all the lights and most of the equipment, secured the building and set the alarm, and then locked her up for the last time.

Then we said our last goodbyes hoping that we’d eventually see each other again somewhere at sometime, and we all rode off into the proverbial sunset.  The end.

Here’s a few more photos from the last year or two at CMS-TV.  (Click on the first thumbnail to see a larger version and then click the “Next” link to flip through them all.  Or you can click here to view the originals on Picasa.)

So my theory is this:

• In the television industry, a demo reel is at least as important as a paper resume (probably more so) in getting an interview.  Since the paper resume isn’t the most important element, the “rules” about them probably aren’t as strictly conservative as in more business-like industries.  This notion of being less strict with paper resumes is also supported by the wider variety of creatively designed resumes you’ll find in the TV industry.
• In other “more business” industries, the paper resume is absolutely the most important, if not only element for an employer to initially judge a candidate, and as such an employer won’t be as lenient with what’s been historically acceptable for resume standards.

It’s just a theory, but something was definitely going on with the TV vs. non-TV opinions on this topic.