The Pathetic State of Things at Georgia Public Broadcasting
I’ll try and keep this brief as I’m sure there’s plenty of work I could be doing. Oh wait, never mind. The current administration of Georgia Public Broadcasting has seen fit to ensure that I can’t do my work. Confused? Let’s explore this issue together.
In June 2009, Georgia Public Broadcasting cancelled the Apprentice Program, the program for which I worked. Despite the bad news, I carried on, since one of the projects I was working on, Georgia Women of Achievement, had an ongoing contract. This meant that even though the program was cancelled, I would be staying on to work on this project. Splendid. Job security in an otherwise insecure time.
Soon, interns were brought in to replace the Apprentice Program, working under a variety of departments to create whatever media they needed. I was a understandably upset watching jobs that had recently belonged to my friends get sourced out to untrained interns who worked for free, but still I soldiered on. As general morale around the network dropped, things continued to deteriorate.
Soon, I found the work station that I relied on was being shared with a number of these interns. I coped, calmly explaining to them that one needed to save their files onto an external hard drive rather than the desktop and no, you had to use your own, not mine. These things are merely small speed bumps on the road to workplace diplomacy. After all, the interns weren’t responsible for my friends being fired and if I could help guide them towards proper workplace procedure in a media editing environment, then I would be helping the entire organization out.
The real problem that arose from these changes is that Tina (my partner) and I have no say anymore when people look to use any of the equipment. Without an ongoing program, the equipment that once belonged to the Apprentice Program now gets loaned out regularly to other departments, such as radio. What someone in radio needs with a $40,000 HD camera, I’ll never know. As you can imagine, many of the people who are now using the equipment—equipment that Tina and I rely on to complete the work we have a contract to do—is no longer in working condition. The cameras come back to us with all their settings changed, meaning that instead of just turning it on and pushing record, we have to slog through dozens of different settings, just to make sure that the gain isn’t set too high or that the audio is recording at the right rate or that the iris isn’t going to change all by itself. Most of the wireless mics at our disposable have stopped working and, mysteriously, all but two camera batteries have disappeared from the checkout closet, despite the fact that there are still four cameras squared away.
Problematic? Indeed, as shoots are generally high-stress, fast-paced events that are only hurt by the time spent having to double-check the camera or test up to five mics before finding one that works properly. It would be as if you came in to work, only to find that someone had remapped your keyboard so that each button was now assigned to a different letter. Which brings me to my breaking point.
Since I am now a persona non grata, no one bothered to ask what software was needed on this work station. So when they went ahead and formatted it, they didn’t install Photoshop or Illustrator. These two pieces of software are not only extremely important to the work I have to do for Women of Achievement, they are a standard for any media-creating computer, and it is kind of an embarrassment to not have them. It would be like not installing Excel on an accountant’s computer. Additionally, it is a furlough day, meaning I can’t even get this problem resolved, even if I wanted. I don’t know whether we even renewed the license for these softwares and will now have to spend Monday trying to get this software installed so I can do the work I was supposed to do this morning.
Thank you, GPB. Thank you, Executive Director Teya Ryan. Your ineptitude knows no bounds.
