A Saturday Night At CBC

I start my Saturday shift at CBC at 2:00 pm. I get to work on time. There's nothing going on. I literally do nothing for two hours.

A plane crashes in Gimli. There are no deaths, no injuries. There is no point in going to cover this in my opinion. I am told to drive out to Gimli and find where this plane crashed and get pictures anyway. I leave CBC at 4:00 pm. It takes just over an hour to get there. I spend 2 and a half fucking hours searching for this plane.

I crawled through poison ivy with a camera and tripod and rolled under a barbed wire fence and hopped over fresh cow patties in order to find this plane crash. When I found nothing but farming equipment, I went back into town and ordered a two piece chicken dinner from Chicken Delight and ate it in my van.

I do some more driving around and some more searching. Some local folks notice me and point me in the right direction. The plane has crashed on a dairy farm. I drive into the farm yard and some old man in a blue truck is just leaving the driveway. I ask him about the plane crash and if it's okay that I go see it. He tells me exactly how to get there.

I start driving down this makeshift road and through a farmers field. I find the plane. It's mangled in a clump of big trees. It does look pretty cool. My 2 and a half hour long search has finally been validated!

Just then I notice a farm truck driving wildly in my direction. A young man gets out and informs me I am trespassing on private property and that I am to leave immediately. Asshole. I explain that an older gentleman told me I could come in here. The farmer tells me that that man does not own this property. I am escorted off the farm. I did not get any footage of the plane.

The farmer was pretty mad, but I think he was taken aback by the fact that I was a female, and also that I was alone. I tried to look pretty to get my way, but I failed.

So, I left Gimli. I got back into Winnipeg at 8:30 and grabbed a raspberry cheesequake blizzard from DQ and nearly ran over some people loitering in the parking lot.

I walk back into the station and there's a note from one of the producers. She wants me to meet her on Main street where some young guy died in a bus shack.

When that wraps up I head back to station to retire. My shift is almost over and I just want to go home. I get a phone call from the sports anchor, Mitch. He wants me to book some over time and come shoot some post Bombers game interviews in the locker room with him because he can't do it tomorrow or Monday.

I concede. I meet him there and I'm early. I stand around with my camera and mono-pod and watch the end of the game from the sidelines. But then it starts to rain. I take off my sweater and cover my camera with it to keep the lens dry. It rains even harder. A bunch of us on the sidelines runs under some stairs to stay dry. That's fine, except now we can't see the game.

Then there's lightening. And fireworks. And more rain.

Finally we get inside the locker room. I am the only person there with a vagina. I saw naked men. I saw bare asses and dark, curly pubic hair. At first I thought, oh God, I've died and gone to heaven. Then I remembered that I was there representing the CBC and so I stared at the ground in order to appear professional and not gape or drool.

But because it was so hot in the locker room and my camera was so cold from being outside in the rain, my lens and view finder where all fogged up. And I didn't have a headset with me and it was loud in the locker room and the players were dancing to hip hop and singing and yelling and being so very sexy and naked and omg avert your eyes! Avert your eyes damnit!!!

I don't want to leave the locker room because of obvious reasons, but at the same time, I really want to leave the locker room and just go home and rest!

Several more eye-fulls later, we leave. Mitch walks me to my van. Everything's cool. I drive back to the CBC. I drive my van right up to the compound where I'm supposed to park it and get out to unlock the gate.

I encounter my first problem. I fail to put my vehicle into the "Park" position. My van is now rolling forward very slowly with the driver's side door wide open. I realize my error and jump in quickly so that I can slam down on the break. Here's where I encounter my second problem. I am sitting in the van sideways, half hanging out of the door and when I go to slam down on the break, I really slam down on the accelerator and ram the company vehicle into the locked gate.

I park the van. I get out of the van. I curse at the van. I run to get the security guard.

I explain to the nice security guard what I did and he comes out to help me. We're able to bend the gate in such a way that one side is fixed. The other side is not fixed. It's stuck. Now we can't close the gate to properly lock it up.

We go inside the garage and find a light chain to lock the gate up with temporarily and then the guard fills out a report about what happened and I go and email my bosses to tell them how stupid of an employee I am.

The security guard checks the recorded surveillance footage to see if the actual act of me ramming the gate has been saved. It hasn't. The camera cut at just the right moment so you can see the before and you can see the after. Not the during. Too bad.

I finally get my shit together and leave work. I get to my apartment complex and have to park my car about two blocks away from where I live because the streets are all filled up.

The perfect end to a perfect night. At least I'm getting paid for two hours over time.